Publishing Your Children’s Book on Amazon KDP

I recommend Amazon KDP to students who want to get their books in print. These days, the publishing industry is a mess and doesn’t do the marketing for you anyway, so you’re better off being in control of your own fate.

Amazon KDP is free, and it’s straightforward to get your book published. I teach a class in the nuances of that, including how to assign your categories and keywords in order to optimize your sales. The trickiest part is formatting the internal part of the book, but if you’re experienced with your word processor, such as Word, that’s not too hard. Cover creation can be as easy or as complex as you feel you can deal with. You can either design your own cover using a graphics program, or you can get Amazon’s help in combining type and their stock art and colors to create something that looks fairly professional, with no artistic skills required.

But publishing children’s books is a different matter. They’re artwork-intensive, and the formatting of the interior is complex because it needs to combine artwork and text on every spread.

I’ve been working on an automated pipeline for formatting picture storybooks. This allows me to offer the service to students at a reasonable price so that they can avoid the dangers of vanity presses or so-called “publishers” who are really just trying to charge them a lot of money to do what they can do themselves through KDP with a little help.

We recently tried this pipeline out on a new children’s book sent to me by one of my students. We learned a lot about what to ask up front and how easy we can make the process with a few tweaks.

The student sent me her manuscript: text in a Word file, painted illustrations as scans embedded in the file. It would have been impossible to publish that book using that combination, because the image resolution was too low, and there was no way that Word was going to be able to do the complex interior formatting without someone having a nervous breakdown.

The trickiest part about the process was that she didn’t have original scans at high enough resolution. We had to regenerate her illustrations, which meant several rounds of going back and forth to get the nuances just right. We learned that we don’t want to do that in the future. Submitted illustrations need to be at 300 dpi.

We also forgot to ask a few questions up front about whether she wanted an author photo, and we realized we needed to provide her with recommended categories and keywords/phrases.

Now that that is all baked into the pipeline, it works beautifully. We were able to provide her everything she needs to upload the interior of her book, the cover, and the EPUB file for her Kindle version. In just a few minutes, she was able to get her book into print.

We even provided her tips on how to economically send the book to friends and reviewers without having to fill her garage up with sample copies.

Our pipeline is now available to anyone who wants to get their picture book in print quickly and easily. We send you a questionnaire to fill out a list of what we need, and you email it to us and receive a complete package for getting your book into print on KDP. Here’s a link to check it out.