It’s time for Twitter’s Sample Sunday, so here is a sample from Anyone Can Make a Kindle Book…
CHAPTER 6: ADDING GRAPHICS
Are you a real graphics person? Do you know the difference
between d.p.i., p.p.i., and absolute pixel size? Do you know what the term
“resolution” truly means? Do you know
why it’s O.K. to scale a graphic down but not up? If you cannot answer these
questions, get some professional psychiatric help because you want to try to
be a writer help with any graphics that you may want to include within the
pages of your book.
If you do know the
answers to all of those questions, then I need to tell you only a few things
about the graphics in a typical Kindle book. The most important one: they are
all what’s known as “inline.” The best way to think of an inline graphic is to
treat it as if it’s a separate paragraph. Inline graphics move up and down the
page as text is added and deleted above them. In a standard Kindle book none of
the images are stationary on the page with text that flows (that is, that
“wraps”) around them. Those are known as “floating” graphics and the standard
Kindle code doesn’t support them.
An inline graphic can be aligned just like a paragraph, too:
left, right, and center, but, unless you know what you’re doing and have a good
design reason to do otherwise (as I did with the graphic ornaments that were
used in this book for the chapter- and section headings), make all of your
graphics centered on the page, just like a centered paragraph. They look better
that way. All of the screen captures in this book—more than 100 of them—are
centered like that.
All of your graphics should be in JPEG format. You may read
various places that Amazon allows a few other formats for images, but which
formats are allowed where—on the cover or the inside pages—can get confusing
because they’re not all the same. JPEG is the one format that can be used both
places. Don’t complicate things unnecessarily. Keep it simple. Amazon prefers
your cover to be JPEG, so keep everything JPEG. And make sure that they’re uncompressed (more about that in Section 7.1: Size Matters).
That section speaks specifically about the cover of your
book, but those same guidelines also pertain to any images that you add within
the pages of your book, where you have the added choice of being able to shrink
those images down to the size that you want them to be. Images can be added
(using either the Insert > Picture ▶ menu or the
drag-and-drop method) right into your manuscript, and, prior to conversion to
HTML, shrunk to almost any smaller size on the page that you choose. This is
one of the best reasons to check your Kindle book with the “Kindle Previewer”
or an actual Kindle device, to make sure that the graphics show up at an
acceptable size on the Kindle screen: not bigger than you want and not too
small to be seen clearly.
