Tuesday, September 18, 2018

CreateSpace is Closing and All Books are Moving to Kindle Direct Publishing



This is the big news that we have been waiting for. We have been watching the signs for a while. Kindle has been adding services and support around their new print side. This September Amazon announced the closing of Createspace.com and the moving of all books KDP.Amazon.com.

You can either do this process yourself when you get the notice or CreateSpace will move your books for you if you do nothing. This is being rolled out across their customers, so watch for your notice. I got my notices a while back and today I moved my books over to Kindle. It was seamless and took about 5 minutes, start to finish. The only thing that doesn't move are covers that you made using CreateSpace Cover creator. You will need to remake them with the Kindle Cover Creator.

Once the books are ported over you will need to match your print book up with your ebook if you have versions of both. It is pretty easy to do. If you didn't have a KDP account, Kindle will create one for you and you will have to enter your bank and tax information in order to get paid. The other thing that is different are the sales reports and they actually are a little better I think. We have an historical report now that is pretty cool.

I am excited to see what kinds of services they will adding. Already they have some pretty good support videos on how to use their site. Here is a quick video I put together on how to move your books from CreateSpace to Kindle.
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Wednesday, September 12, 2018

How to Block Out Your Children’s Text and Picture Book Illustrations


I had a great training session this morning with an author on how to block out her children's book with text and illustrations. This exercise gives you a quick idea of what the parts are and how they work together. I think this is a vital step in planning your book. 

We did this in Google Docs using the Table feature, INSERT > TABLE and then expanded the table to the size of the intended drawing. She was very gracious in allowing me to record the session



How to Block out Your Children's Text and Picture Book from Bruce Jones on Vimeo.