Spectacular pencil drawings may be lousy candidates for book covers. What looks good on a wall can be a pain to transform into a decent cover that stands out in the Amazon catalog. There are several good reasons why you should think very hard about using a drawing as a cover or featured illustration. So […]
Kindle Inside Cover Still Mandatory
I just grabbed the latest version of Kindle Previewer (2.7) and a fresh copy of the Kindle Publishing Guidelines (2012.5) to see if cover image documentation had sorted out an apparent contradiction between the Guidelines and KDP Self-Publishing Help. Nope: It’s still necessary to include an inside cover image, according to the Guidelines, and the […]
Amazon KDP discards inside cover
Forget what used to be the conventional wisdom about the Kindle inside cover image. A 600×800 pixel image still works best with eInk Kindles, but the newer Kindles and higher resolution eReader devices are rapidly coalescing around an emerging standard of 2500 pixels on the long side and a new aspect ratio of 1.6 (tall […]
Kindle Catalog Cover Update
As you probably know, Kindle cover images for the Amazon product catalog can be much larger in both dimensions and file-size than the cover that appears inside the book. The latest Kindle Publishing Guidelines spell it out. Interestingly, verbiage about the “shortest side” (formerly a minimum of 500px) has been dropped in favor of simplified […]
Book Covers with Kindlegen 2.4
Important! Cover image production has changed since this post was written. Amazon now uses the large product image for the inside cover. The parts about how Kindlegen crunches large and/or high quality interior images still apply, but meticulous production of an inside cover is no longer unnecessary. Kindlegen 1.1 (released June 30, 2010) doubled the Kindle […]
Kindle Format 8
Kindle Format 8 with support for HTML5 and CSS3 is very, very BIG news. Finally, the primitive Mobi7 format with its bizarre and convoluted formatting workarounds will be a thing of the past in a few months. Amazon’s announcement explains the changes. Their FAQ (at the bottom of the announcement) says that it won’t be […]
Kindle book cover size
A Kindle book has two cover images that serve different purposes and cause a lot of confusion: The cover image that displays on your Kindle or Kindle reading app The cover image in the amazon.com product catalog Numerous questions posted on the Amazon Digital Text Platform (DTP) Support Forums are about the dimensions and file […]