My Book is Number 1

My free book, MEMOGRAMS, is today #1 in Amazon Kindle Store >…> Spelling
and #3 in Amazon Kindle Store >…> Writing Skills

My Books

My MEMOGRAMS book finally went free today on Amazon. So, to summarize which of my books are where for how much:

Anyone Can Make a Kindle Book (my how-to book, $3.99 on Amazon)

MEMOGRAMS: Easy Anagrams of Hard-to-Spell Words (free on Amazon)

The Adventures of Dough Girl (free on iTunes/iBooks)

MEMOGRAMS: Easy Anagrams of Hard-to-Spell Words (free on iTunes/iBooks)

Using the MOBI UNPACK utility that I mentioned earlier, you can “unzip” a MOBI file, whatever was used to create it, as long as it’s unencrypted and regardless of whether or not the MOBI file includes its source file.

When I open April Hamilton’s book, From Concept to Community, which I purchased from Amazon in March, 2011, I get a folder named mobi7 inside of which is:

B001TOC9X2_EBOK.html
B001TOC9X2_EBOK.ncx
B001TOC9X2_EBOK.opf
images (folder)

There is no source file.


When I open one of my own books, Anyone Can Make a Kindle Book, which was created using Calibre, I get the mobi7 folder again, inside of which is:

Anyone.html
Anyone.ncx
Anyone.opf
images (folder)

Again, there is no source file.


However, when I open another of my own books, MEMOGRAMS, which was created from an EPUB file using the latest Kindlegen, I get two folders, mobi7 and mobi8, and a file named:

kindlegensrc.zip

There’s the source file, which I can further unzip if I want, and I get:

kindlegensrc (folder) in which are the files:

META-INF (folder)
mimetype
OEBPS (folder)

But I still have the two “mobi” folders to look at:

In the mobi7 folder I get:

MEMOGRAMS.html
MEMOGRAMS.ncx
MEMOGRAMS.opf
images (folder)

In the mobi8 folder I get:

MEMOGRAMS.epub
META-INF (folder)
mimetype
OEBPS (folder)


All this is to say that it is possible to “unzip” a MOBI file. It doesn’t need to include a source file to do so, and it can be done even with MOBI files created with Calibre.

Book Review: “Om Sapphire” by Charlotte O’Neil

Charlotte O’Neil has done what no other author has done: made me want to read her book on no other device but a black-and-white Kindle, in my case my Kindle Keyboard. I say “read” advisedly because there’s nothing to read—it’s a picture book—once you get past the publishing text at the beginning… and past the instructions.

Ah, yes, the instructions. “Turn device sideways” she says, with a big looping arrow. Why? Because the entire book is a collection of pictures—75 of them, plus the cover, drawn with pen and India ink—that are all sized to exactly fit the screen of an e-ink Kindle, but they’re all done in horizontal format (in the graphics realm it’s called “landscape” format) so how do you view them? You turn the device sideways! What else?

And, you know what? It works. The black-ink-on-white-paper technique is perfect for the black-and-white screen that the majority of Kindle devices out there have. And the landscape format is great. It fills the screen with a single image and makes for one picture per page turn. I suspect that the way that her format ratio fits the Kindle screen may have been a little bit of serendipity (she says in her introduction that she used at various times A3, A4, and letter-sized sheets for the drawings) but I don’t care if it was that or if it was carefully planned. It just all fits together.

There is a con to all of these pro’s… the coding of the book is imperfect, which means that every other page turn is quite slow, but that’s a minor problem that could be easily fixed. (She should contact me.)

Her drawing style is interesting, and seems somehow more and more familiar the longer you look at it. Then it strikes you: these look like very elaborate versions of the stream-of-consciousness drawings that one makes when sitting in the back of a very boring class in school—one pen, one line width, one sheet of paper, many disparate images poring out onto the page—except these look like they were made by someone who is a better artist than the average high school or college student (she is, in fact, a mature woman with three children), and, as she says in her introduction, each drawing took about three weeks to complete.

It matters not if you like her drawings or her technique. Every budding picture-book author should get this book and study it. (It’s free, for today at least!) This is an important example of the true potential of a picture book specifically designed for the black-and-white Kindle platform. It could, in fact, be close to a perfect Kindle picture book.

Sample Sunday

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.

I Love Libraries

In honor of National Library Week, April 8–14, here is a video of my children at the library.
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And I Mean… Anyone!

I’ve finally gotten my latest book finished and up at Amazon. It’s called Anyone Can Make a Kindle Book and, if you are one of those—and there seem to be many—who have had endless trouble getting their own e-books to format correctly, this book is for you.

I mean that. It was written directly for you.

I found out myself that it took a lot of work to format my last book, Memograms. Too much work. Way too much work. I succeeded, eventually—it’s up and for sale and all that—but I knew that there had to be an easier way. I’m the best programmer I know and even I didn’t want to go through that again.

So I looked for an easier way. I checked the Kindle boards to see what other people said. What I found was that most people were saying, “HELP!” Further, the ones who wrote in to help them said stuff like, “HTML” and “regular expressions” and “code,” and I knew that most people couldn’t do that.

It’s not that most people are stupid. I knew that. I had been a corporate-level computer teacher in the past and I knew that most people could learn to do all that. It’s just that most people don’t want to have to. Most people have so much other stuff going on in their lives that they don’t have the time or the desire to learn programming, not even a little.

I mean… they’re lucky that they found the time to even get their book written, for goodness sake—now they have to learn programming just to put it up for sale? No way!

So, Anyone Can Make a Kindle Book is for you. You learned to use your word processor. You typed up your manuscript. That’s good enough. If you can do that, then you can format your book using the instructions in my book.

Don’t believe it? You’ve heard all this before and you think that I'm full of… nonsense?

Go to Amazon right now and download the free sample. It has enough pages to show you what can easily be done—what you can do.

I think that you’ll be excited. You’ll see that, indeed, anyone can make a Kindle book… even you.