How to Prepare Graphics for a Kindle Book

There’s more to preparing graphics on Kindle books than optimizing the graphical files and uploading them to your free Kindle account. Learning to format a document containing graphics is as important as optimizing the images. Perhaps you have a book or document in mind, and you need to place drawings, schematics, charts, or photographs in your document. Implementing your graphics into a word processing document or a portable document format will save you time with uploading numerous jpg, gif, and bmp files.

Difficulty:

Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Microsoft Word
• MS Paint

Prepare documentation for graphics

1. Open My Documents on your computer. Double click on My Pictures. Right-click the mouse button anywhere in My Pictures, and then select New > Folder. Name the folder “Kindle Graphics”. You will prepare all of your graphics for Kindle in this folder.

2. Open the document type you want to use to place your graphics in. This is the document that you will want to prepare your graphics in for your Kindle book. For now, open a word document in Microsoft Word or Corel Word Perfect. Click File, then Save as. Name the file “Graphics”. This will give the file extension as .doc for document.

3. Download Cute Writer from the internet. If you have the professional version of Adobe Writer, then you can use this. Otherwise, you need the free converter, Cute Writer, for converting your documents to PDF. If you wish to have your final graphics displayed in a Word document, then skip to Step 4.

4. Click on File in the Word document, Graphics.doc. Click on Print. In the Location bar, select “Cute Writer”. Click OK. Save as Test. Go to your desktop and double-click the file labeled “Test”. A PDF file will open. This is how you convert your book of graphics into a PDF format. You can also select Preferences in the print session to optimize the graphics for a PDF file. Many ebooks are finally delivered to customers in a PDF format.

5. Use Cute Writer to convert flow charts. In Visio, if you are creating a flow chart document, click on File, then Print. Select Cute Writer from the location bar.

Prepare and optimize graphic files without Photoshop

1. Open a graphic file, such as a photograph and use your graphics editor. Otherwise you can use MS Paint that comes with Windows.

2. Select the image, then click on Image menu at the top of the screen. Select Sketch/Skew.

3. 

   Click in the text box labeled Horizontal, located under the label Stretch. Retype over the value to the desired percentage of resizing to the original image. In this case, for Kindle, we want to make the graphic small. For pictures 5 inches or less, just type 50. Type the same value in the Vertical text box. Click OK.

4. Click File, then Save. If you want to keep the original image for backup, click Save As instead of Save, and change the file name to “original name.Rev1”. Rev stands for revision. Ensure that you save this file in Kindle Graphic folder under My Pictures, located with in My Documents.

Finalize graphical documentation for a Kindle book

1. Open Word or Visio. You will prepare your pictures to place in this document.

2. Point the mouse at the front of a paragraph in your document. Click the left mouse button. This sets the focus of the cursor in front of the text. Click on the Insert menu in Word or Visio. Select Picture.

3. Click on the location list box, and select My Pictures. Find your graphics folder, labeled “Kindle Graphics”.

4. Thomas Walton, PDA technical support

   Click on the graphical file, image or photograph, that is appropriate to the paragraph in your Word or Visio document. Click OK to insert the picture into the document. You will notice that the picture is scaled small enough to fit in the document above your paragraph because you edited the picture before pasting it into the document.

5. Continue to add pictures into your Word document or other word processing software, until you have all your pictures in place. Change the alignment of pictures by left-clicking one time on the picture to select it, and then click on the ruler and drag the guide marks to the appropriate position.

6. Wrap text around the picture or photograph by selecting the picture or image, then right-click to bring up the side-out men. Select Format picture. Click on Layout, and then adjust the way you want the text and picture to layout on the document. With practice, you can make professional looking books or magazine for Kindle using this simple procedure.

7. Click File, then click Save. Close the word processing program. Open your web browser, and log in to your free.kindle.com account. Upload the document to have it converted. You may also use the process from Section 1 for changing your Word document into a PDF file, giving it the look of a professional ebook that will not be rewritable by other people. That is all there is to preparing graphics for your Kindle book.

Tips & Warnings

• Removing features like color may help reduce the distortion of pictures you display on your Kindle book. Keep images small and file size relatively smaller than 38K.

• Send your files to the free email account with Kindle. Otherwise they charge a fee for transferring the converted files back to you.

Resources

• Cute Writer