Reviewed by Barbara Fanson for Readers' Favorite

How to Make a Children’s Book for Kindle is not a how to write a children’s book guide. It will not teach you how to write or illustrate a children’s book. Instead, this book focuses on how to take your completed manuscript and illustrations and create a book to be viewed on Kindle. Author Mark Watson has written a step-by-step guide to uploading your story to Kindle Direct Publishing. There are lots of pictures detailing every step including resizing images, applying style sheets, and uploading your book to Kindle Direct Publishing. He provides advice from his own experience and supplies images to help us better understand the process. The images are crisp and clean so that any novice will be creating Kindle books quickly. If you want to reduce images, but don’t have Adobe Photoshop, he shows you step-by-step with screen images how to use GIMP, a free app for manipulating images.

He also demonstrates how he uses GIMP to create text pages. In his example of a text page, he uses a 36 pt font called Dr Soos Bold, a fun, creative font, which resembles a font used for Dr. Seuss books. Once all the images and text pages are complete, the book demonstrates how to use Kindle Kids’ Book Creator to upload the images to Kindle Direct Publishing. It’s a free tool from Amazon. It saves your file as a mobi file that can be uploaded to KDP, Kindle Direct Publishing. Mark Watson explains why he creates a book cover that is 2500x2500 pixels … because it displays better on the Amazon product page! Mark Watson offers so many valuable tips in How to Make a Children’s Book for Kindle that every author and illustrator will benefit from reading it—novice or experienced! This book also provides ideas for book titles, keywords, and subtitles.

Mark Watson is a specialist at creating Kindle books. He explains right at the beginning how children’s books have a fixed layout—the text does not reflow onto other pages like a novel. His easy-to-understand explanations will help people understand how to choose a page size and to make all illustrations fit into that size. He recommends putting the text on one page and the illustration on another page, and to use the page layout of 640x1024 pixels, either portrait or landscape. Since most children’s picture books are about 40 pages with less than 1,000 words, you might want 20 pages of text and 20 pages of illustrations. That means you would have about 50 words per page. I highly recommend How to Make a Children’s Book for Kindle because the easy-to-understand steps and artwork will have you producing your own books quickly and professionally.