How to Upload Books Larger Than 50 Mb to Kindle
As an indie publisher, I format picture books for Kindle (mobi) and ePub3 ebooks for Apple, Kobo, PublishDrive, Follett, Mackin and Permabound. I distribute directly to every market that I can.
Amazon'southward Kindle is a major market, and I'thousand glad to take books there. But there's a large problem: my profit is being eaten up with Amazon's commitment fees.
In a contempo calendar month, I calculated about xx-25% of the gross receipts for my ebooks went to delivery fees, leaving me only 45-l% profit. Amazon, of grade, took the other 30% .
20-25% in delivery fees! That'southward outrageous! The culprit is the file size of a children's full color illustrated picture book. Those colour illustrations take extra file space. But surely there were ways to reduce the file size. I searched and found aught.
I've always known this is a problem, but there were so many other things to worry about that I've put this off. With ii new picture show books coming out in the spring, though, I decided to look at the issue closely then I can maximize profits. This volition be a detailed wait at dealing with an children'due south book indie publishing problem!
Biggest Problem: Amazon'southward Download Fees
Amazon is the only ebook provider who charges download fees. For novels, information technology's minimal because rarely does a novel file attain over ane MB. But for full-colour illustrated picture books, it'southward a huge problem considering information technology's not unusual to have an 8MB file. Amazon gives you two choices of royalty profits, either 35% with no download fees, or lxx% with download fees.
I want 70% royalties, of course, to maximize my profits. But that ways I must control those download fees. Amazon will take 30%. How much goes dorsum to Amazon in download fees? It depends on the file size, and varies by country. For at present, I'll concentrate on US fees of $0.fifteen/MB. Here's a table of what that means for different file sizes and at different price points.
| File size | Delivery Cost@$0.fifteen/MB | @2.99 Download fees | @3.99 Download fees | @four.99 Download fees | |
| 8MB | $1.20 | xl% | 30% | 24% | |
| 7MB | $1.05 | 35% | 26% | 21% | |
| 6MB | $0.90 | 30% | 22.5% | 18% | |
| 5MB | $0.75 | 25% | 18.eight% | fifteen% | |
| 4MB | $0.60 | 20% | 15% | 12% | |
| 3MB | $0.45 | xv% | 11.3% | 9% | |
| 2MB | $0.30 | 10% | vii.5% | 6% | |
| 1MB | $0.15 | 5% | 3.75% | 3% |
If your ebook file size is 8MB and you lot price at $2.99, Amazon gets 30%, download fees are 40%, and that leaves you with 30% profit. Yous should accept the 35% royalty because you lot'll make 5% more!
As the file size goes down, the percentage of profits ascension, only the download fees are still hefty. What if I could reformat my 6-8MB files, and become them closer to 2MB?
For a 2MB ebook at $2.99, download fees are 10%, Amazon takes thirty%, and that leaves 60% profit. That's double the profit than for an 8MB ebook.
A 2nd problem: Keeping the children's picture book stock-still format ebook high quality.
The reason the files are so big, presumably, is that you need a high-quality paradigm. I took a deep dive into prototype quality in this process and promise I can explain some of it for yous.
Kindle Guidelines for Images
The Amazon Kindle publishing Guidelines, version 2018.1 has recommendations for images:
1) Image resolution.
You should ever employ a 300dpi resolution.
Nevertheless, dpi is dots per inch, a measurement for impress simply; ppi is pixels per inch, a measurement for screens only.
Really? You lot should e'er employ 300 dpi?
In his volume, Pictures on Kindle, Aaron Shepard correctly point out,
". . . the Kindle cares naught nigh a motion picture's resolution. The Kindle cares only about pixel dimension. (This is despite Amazon's own disruptive recommendation to brand pictures 300 dpi to "hereafter-proof" them. What Amazon meant to say was that a motion picture should have enough pixels to brandish at the desired size on a hypothetical future screen with a resolution of 300 ppi.)"
In other words, the dpi measurement is useless for online displays. Instead, you should care about the overall pixel size. In other words, if you have an image that is 100px x 100 px, information technology could stretch to 1000px x 1000px, but then the pixels would exist large and stretched out. Those big pixels show up every bit yous view information technology creating a blurry epitome.
Detect, pixels per inch (ppi) isn't the same affair every bit file size. MB means a million bytes of information. MP (Megapixel) ways how many millions of pixels are in the file. They measure dissimilar things!
A Kindle fire's largest screen is 1600 ten 2560 pixels or about 4MPixels. That'south the maximum size needed.
All the same, the Amazon guidelines also tell u.s.a. how many MP are required for a full size image (afterwards you take out the margins, page numbers and so on), which they say is 4″ 10 six″. It should measure 1200px x 1800px for 2.16MPixels. You become that number past multiplying the width past the acme, and it has zilch to do with 300 dpi!
My get-go hint on lowering file sizes is to ignore the dpi of your images and focus on the full MPixels.
Lest y'all get worried, their guidelines say, "Amazon strongly recommends images meet a minimum of 300 ppi. Any images below 72 ppi will crusade the book to fail conversion." In other words, the range of acceptable is 72-300ppi.
two) Photo Quality. A 2d variable to discuss is paradigm quality.
When you export from Indesign, or use Photoshop to resize an image, you can usually choose a quality setting. Adobe software had four pre-fix choices: depression, med, high, max.
Depression – quality score of 10Q
Med – quality score of 30Q
Loftier – quality score of 60Q
Max – quality score of 100Q
Old KDP guidelines recommend a quality score of 40, so the presets didn't fit, forcing you to choose between Medium and High quality. Fortunately, in Photoshop, you tin can set this manually (more later). The 2018 Kindle standards recommend a loftier quality score. What they are actually asking for is images that volition display well on the newer loftier-definition screens.
What does the quality score hateful?
The quality score ways that an algorithm is used to sample adjacent pixels to decide what color to evidence in whatsoever given pixel. When it samples fewer pixels, the quality score goes downwards. When it samples more pixels, the quality score goes upwards. Depression quality images volition often show pixelation, which means you'll run into the square pixels and the epitome is fuzzy.
Quality changes drastically affect file sizes.
If I have an original file at 300 dpi that is 6.4MB at Max Quality, then what happens to file size as the quality score changes? (Remember, this is file size, not MP. I'm worried almost this because Amazon charges download fees based on file size.)
High – 2MB
Med – 652 KB
Depression – 196 KB
This means at that place are two variables that can assist us go to the correct size epitome: pixel dimensions and quality score. By using these two, nosotros can reduce the file sizes drastically, while keeping an eye on quality.
Kindle Software – KindleGen Rules
At that place's a final variable, that I didn't consider at first. I've used R.Scot John'south amazing ebook tutorials for a long time to format ebooks. eBooks that I've hand-coded with his methods work well for ibook, Nook and generic ebooks to be used anywhere. If you lot're ane of those people who want to know everything the behind-the-scenes, and then his tutorials are fantastic and volition give you a deep look at the construction of ebooks. I highly recommend them. Please become read them because yous'll learn so much about creating an ebook.
Even so, when I created a Kindle ebook using his methods, the files didn't expect quite right. (Information technology'southward probably my mistake, not Scot's!) The existent problem is getting the landscape ebooks with double-folio spreads to display correctly. I couldn't get information technology correct.
I turned to Amazon's Kindle Kids Book Creator (KKBC) program. It'southward a gratis download and is designed to easily create Kindle compliant ebooks in the landscape double-folio spread format. I've used information technology for several years, just some of my biggest file size ebooks came out of KKBC. I didn't call back I'd apply it in this search for small file size/high quality ebooks.
Merely I'm game. I tried everything from manus-coding with Scot's templates to the KKBC.
Remember when I said that KindleGen ever resizes images. The KKBC incorporates the KindleGen processor to turn the files into Kindles. The KKBC output files include the raw files, which I had ignored up to now. However, I decided to look within and encounter what the KindleGen was doing when it resized my images. Inside the HTML folder, I was surprised to see a Scaled-Images binder had been added. Each image was reprocessed equally a "thumb" paradigm. When I looked at those images, they were all 1000 px wide, at 72 dpi.
I believe the scaled images are what Kindle actually delivers to a Kindle to display. Amazon wants the source files, though, at high quality so information technology can reformat ebooks to a higher quality when needed in the future. They are future-proofing their ebook business by requiring larger files.
Only I can't afford to assistance them future proof the business organization when they charge $0.15/MB download fees! If I was right and the scaled images were all that was needed, could I match the sizes of those images and thus control my file size?
That meant that instead of 1280 px wide, I might as well format my own images at 1000px wide (considering KindleGen rules: information technology WILL process the images whether I like it or not – nothing gets on the Kindle store unless it'south gone through a KindleGen processing), and control the quality at the same time.
This combination works amazingly well. I exported from Indesign at 300 dpi/Max quality considering Indesign's controls don't let you do it with whatsoever better control. Then, in Photoshop, I converted the images to 1000px loftier at 40Quality. The file sizes were tiny. To reduce them fifty-fifty farther, I used ImageOptim, which strips out any extra metadata stored in the epitome and results in virtually 10-20% reduction in file size.
What would happen when I used those images in the KKBC plan?
The KindleGen still generated the scaled "pollex" images, just they were exactly the size of my images. I had gotten information technology right.
My 34-folio picture volume (why is it 34 pages?) with correctly sized images came in at 3.6MB, far less than the 7.8MB of previous versions of this championship.
Tip: Check the file size of the binder that holds your ebook images. Your ebook will be about that size because the images are the largest files in the ebook. Compared to them, the rest is zero!
Information technology seems that Kindle keeps the larger images equally source images in the files, along with the smaller images that are really delivered to the Kindle. By matching what the KindleGen would exercise anyway, information technology meant those duplicate files didn't need to be included in the terminal ebook. That file reduction would save me lots of coin!
But I fabricated ane more than attempt at even smaller file sizes. My 34-pages were laid out as double page spreads. The KKBC uses CSS (Cascading Mode Sheets) to force a Kindle to display the book with side-past-side images in landscape orientation. What if I created the landscape images by pre-combining the two images? Then, there would only be 17 images, instead of 34. I'd all the same procedure them for 1000px high, and a 40 Quality.
I went dorsum to Indesign, regenerated the images as spreads instead of pages, and processed them in Photoshop.
The resulting ebook is just 1.46MB. At $0.xv download fees, delivery fees dropped from $1.18/volume to only $0.36/volume (well-nigh 12% of overall price at $ii.99), a savings of $0.82/book sold (28% increase in profits). That money would go to me, instead of Amazon!
In other words, I disagree with Amazon'south proffer to always provide the highest quality images. The KindleGen will reformat to standards that they need, but it will keep the originals at the expense of file size. It's costing me too much money to do that! Instead, I'll keep an eye on the new Kindles when they go available. When higher definition screens go bachelor, I'll consider reformatting at a higher pixel size. Only until then, I'll format exactly the same as the KindleGen and save file size – and make more than money!
Objections:
1) Quality. Some people don't like the 40Q because it appears pixelated. I find that information technology varies widely. If your paradigm quality is poor, process the individual files at a higher level until you notice the quality that you're comfortable with. (Ever start reprocessing with the original file!) Exist aware that the quality shown on the display in KKBC is Non what you'll go on the final Kindle version. The KKBC display isn't an accurate depiction of quality.
ii) Jpgs. Some people format their books with png because they want transparencies and don't want to flatten to a jpg format. Unfortunately, KindleGen rules. It will catechumen your files to jpgs whether yous like it or not. You might too do the conversion yourself so y'all have command over it. Even if yous consign as an ePub3, and then run the file through KindleGen, information technology will however catechumen the files to jpegs; but it might have bug doing it. You can't avoid the jpgs. So control them.
3) Preview. To preview what a Kindle ebook looks similar, KDP recommends using their costless programme, Kindle Previewer. Withal, some people like to side-load the ebook onto their ipad and check it at that place. Unfortunately, that's an iffy thing to rely on because Kindle doesn't keep its Mac-app updated. A side-loaded K8 file (the file type exported by KKBC) will not display correctly. The best manner to brand sure your files are compatible is to upload information technology to Kindle and so bank check the book's description page. The prototype beneath shows which devices of my eBook is uniform with.
Format Motion picture Books for Kindle: Fixed Format
Complicated? Figuring it out was complicated, yes. But the workflow is pretty uncomplicated.
Alarm: I'll be talking about using professional software, including Adobe Indesign for layout of books, and Adobe Photoshop for processing images. I do not employ Word, online programs such as Canva, or other programs because they do not let you control the images. If you hire someone to practice your layout/design and ebook conversion, you might want to refer them to this post to make sure you get the almost professional ebooks at the lowest file size.
I format my books in Adobe Indesign, and they are mostly meant for an 8.5" ten 8.v" print book. Printers require pdf files; ebooks require jpgs.
1) Click on File/Export. At the bottom of the screen, utilize the dropdown carte to choose Jpegs. I will convert the files in Photoshop for better command, and then I export at Maximum Quality, merely I accept out the colour contour because it only adds to the size. Y'all can either export at 300 dpi and change information technology to 72 dpi in Photoshop, or do information technology now. It doesn't thing which you lot choose. You'll demand to create a folder for the images. I just name it the volume title (rowdy) and it numbers the pages in order as it exports.
2) Convert the images in Photoshop Elements. Cull File/Process Mulitple files.
Here's the settings I use. I overwrite the files (I can always generate them later if needed) so I leave the source file and destination files the same.
At the bottom, I choose resize images to 1000 px wide and 72 dpi with a JPEG MediumQuality. If you procedure private files, yous can choose exact quality; the procedure multiple files only lets you lot choose the standard settings of Low, Medium, High, Maximum.
three) Use the ImageOptim programme to farther optimize the images.
4) Open the Kindle Kids Creator Program and create the ebook using the processed images. If you lot want, add the text popups. Generate the Kindle Files to upload!
That's it. We controlled the paradigm size and quality to create fixed format moving picture books. They will likely be under 2MB in file size, or at to the lowest degree much smaller than you started with.
Format Picture Books for ePub3: Stock-still Format eBook Kobo, Apple, GooglePlay and Other Distributors
The problem, of form, is that Kindle is a proprietary format and you can't upload Kindle files to other platforms such as Kobo, Apple, or Googleplay. For that, yous need an ePub3.
I generatethese past using the processed images and following R.Scot John's amazing ebook tutorials that I mentioned earlier. Information technology works well. Yet, it means you've got to look within the ebook and be careful near the coding. When I created epubs this way, I would always pay for a month on ebookflightdeck to validate files. The program volition identify any validation problems and tell you exactly which file-name/line-number has a problem. By specifying the exact location, information technology allows me to correct errors in v-x minutes.
Since creating new Kindle and ePub files past controlling image size and quality, my profits take increased because I'g not giving up twenty-25% of my income for download fees. When I view the files on Kindle and ebook reader devices, they expect groovy. I've not sacrificed quality and I've saved by reducing expenses.
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Source: https://www.darcypattison.com/publishing/format-picture-books-kindle/
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