You don’t need a publisher
We will take your words and your artwork and turn them into a professional picture book — a classic picture-book layout, with your illustration on each left-hand page and your words on each right-hand page — ready for both print and ebook upload to your own Amazon KDP account. KDP stands for Kindle Direct Publishing — Amazon’s free self-publishing service: it prints each book only when someone orders it, pays you a royalty on every sale, and costs nothing to set up. We’ll provide you with step-by-step guidance on how to answer all of the questions and fill in all of the data that KDP needs in order to get your book into print. The whole upload takes less than an hour — and as soon as your files are in, you can order your first author copies. Within about a day, anyone in the world will be able to order your book through Amazon. And Amazon lets you buy as many authors’ copies as you want for little more than the cost of paper.
Here’s how it works
We provide you with a list of everything you’ll need: your images, your text, your author bio, and any additional credits you want to include.
You upload your images and text and we’ll check them. Aim for the artwork sizes on the Gather Your Materials page — larger files are fine, and if yours are smaller we can still work with them (we’ll tell you before we start if print quality would suffer)
You receive your complete upload package: interior PDF, cover PDF, EPUB, recommended categories and keywords, and step-by-step upload guidance — including how to have author copies drop-shipped straight to friends and reviewers, at author pricing, without filling your garage with sample copies.
Your work stays yours
Everything you upload goes to a private, secure upload area. Your copyright stays yours — you own your words and your artwork from the moment you create them. We claim no rights to your work, and we never reuse, share, or sell it. We format what you send us; that’s all we do — and when the job is done, every file is yours. We keep your files for several months, in case updates are needed — and then everything is erased from our servers, for your security.
Wraparound cover included
You supply the front cover art. We build every wrap.
The paperback cover and the hardcover cover are different files with different spine widths — a tricky calculation most authors get wrong. That part is our job, not yours. Your cover art only has to hit one set of dimensions for your book’s size; we do the rest.
Front, spine, and back — delivered as finished, print-ready artwork.
Look inside
Every page is professionally typeset — your illustration on each left-hand page, your words on each right-hand page.
More than formatting
The files are only part of what you get.
An e-book that works everywhere
Making an illustrated e-book that looks right on every device is much harder than it looks. Pages have to be locked so art and text stay together; images have to keep their proportions through Amazon’s conversion; fonts have to travel inside the file. Most do-it-yourself exports get this quietly wrong — the book looks fine on your own screen and broken on your reader’s. We build fixed-layout e-books the way professional publishers do, and we verify them before they ship.
Pricing and royalty advice that pays for itself
Amazon’s royalty options have traps that quietly cost authors real money. Example: the 70% e-book plan deducts a delivery fee of 15 cents per megabyte — on a typical illustrated e-book that fee can swallow most of the royalty, and the 35% plan pays more. Almost nobody learns that until it has cost them a year of sales. You get straight pricing and royalty guidance calculated for your actual book — print and e-book — plus help choosing the right categories, so your book shows up where readers are browsing.
A correct upload, the first time
You get exact KDP settings for your book: trim size, bleed, and the right ink type (the default prints children’s illustrations in black and white — an easy and expensive mistake), with your cover delivered as finished print-ready artwork, step by step.
What it costs
Illustrated books: interior, wraparound cover, Kindle, and hardcover files, with step-by-step upload instructions, pricing guidance, and category suggestions.
Compare that to the “children’s book publishers” who charge thousands for the same KDP upload — and often keep a share of your royalties, or the rights to your book. This is a formatting service. You publish on your own KDP account. You own everything. You keep every royalty.
Basic typo correction is included. Revisions to our work are always free; revisions to what you submitted are $100 per round.
Click here to get started!
It has been a wonderful experience working with Steve. I am a bit of a perfectionist and Steve’s patience was greatly appreciated. He was always very responsive as I worked through the publication process. I really could not have made it to the end without him. It was so important for me to publish this book as a tribute to my dad and my granddaughter. It meant more to me than anyone knows, except Steve. He was with me every step of the way.
Donna Cusano-Sutherland, M.S. Communications ManagementI have a question
Not sure which service fits your book, or anything else on your mind — ask away.