Tuesday, November 3, 2020

A Dinosaur Made Me Sneeze #1 New Release!

This morning I have an exciting announcement:

The Kindle version of A Dinosaur Made Me Sneeze is a #1 New Release book on Amazon!!!



Check out that little banner under my name!! I am SUPER excited!!!

While I'm talking about A Dinosaur Made Me Sneeze, here's a little update:

I sent out digital versions of the book to all my backers on Kickstarter about a month ago. The hardcovers should be arriving in a few weeks, and I'll list them on Amazon as well. In the meantime, I decided that now is the perfect time to make digital versions available for everyone! You can buy a Kindle version on Amazon, a PDF or Powerpoint version on Turtle Trails Publishing, and you can pre-order the hardcovers on Turtle Trails Publishing.

I will leave you with a few things I learned about "making" a Kindle book:

1- Kindle Kids Book Creator is super user friendly! Before you start, you want to have completed illustrations and text for every page. You can't change the order of the pages after you add them, so just add everything in the right order, and make your text popups as you go. You can actually go back through and edit the popups in any order, but you can't rearrange the pages.
2- The cover that displays on Amazon is the cover I uploaded when I went to the Kindle Bookshelf and added my book to Kindle, not the one I uploaded in Kindle Kids Book Creator. (Which is totally fine, I just wondered before I did it, so now I know. 🙂 )
3- According to my research (which included several "expert" blog posts and interviews), the keywords will be mixed and matched by Amazon. So if I put "Dinosaur Books" for one keyword and "Children's Story" for another keyword, my book should show up (when it gets a little rank juice, lol!) in searches for "Dinosaur Story." Those are obviously super competitive terms, so I'm not holding my breath for them...I do think I show up pretty quickly if you search for "A Dinosaur Made Me Sneeze." 😉
4- It's important to make the age and grade ranges line up with each other. So, in case you're wondering, 1st grade is generally 6-7 years old. 🙂
5- The fees that Amazon collects for your book are based on your book file's size. The good news is that Amazon seems to compress this when you upload it. So, when I saved my mobi file in Kindle Book Kids Creator, the file was 10 mb. When I uploaded it into Kindle, it was compressed to 4.9 mb.
6- Because of #5 I thought that I could cleverly save space by reducing my image sizes. Apparently, my technical skills were not good enough for this. 😉 I shrunk each image from about 3500 pixels wide down to 1280 pixels (a "high" resolution "web image"). This was too small, and made a white "border" appear around each page. This frustrated me so much that I went back to the full size, and moved on with life. 🙂
I have been conflicted about KDP Select. At the moment, I'm not using it because I would need *at least* 113 people to read all the way through the book on KU to make the same amount as one person buying it on my website. I hesitate to encourage people not to use it, though, because our family has KU and quite enjoy reading books for "free." 😉