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New: Comic Book Ebook Design for Kindle

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Cover for comic book ebook design for KindleLooseleaf now offers comic book ebook design for Kindle! The first two projects we’ve helped produce are Book 1 and Book 2 of Children of Eldair, a full-color portal fantasy comic by Jemma M. Young. (Looseleaf also copyedited and proofread Book 2.) You can buy both the ebooks and the gorgeously printed paperbacks on Amazon (Book 1 is available now; Book 2 is forthcoming), and when you’ve finished those off, you can see the latest pages on a regular basis at Eldair.com.

File Formats for Comic Book Ebook Design

Ebooks aren’t usually the first option for comics. Most ebooks are reflowable, which means the text can shift around to let readers adjust the size and other aspects to suit their reading choices. Comics, with their rich, dense illustration and specifically placed text, don’t do well in a reflowable book. But if you want to publish a portable, electronic version of your ebook, don’t settle for a static PDF. The Kindle format is your best bet. Amazon has created a platform that readily integrates panel magnification in a way that keeps file sizes low while making it easy for readers to zoom in on intricate artwork, dialogue text, and more. EPUB format (which Nooks, iBooks, Kobo devices, and more use) can do similar things, but the code is more complex, and the files can become large, especially with detailed or lush artwork (like Jemma’s work with Children of Eldair). EPUB files need to be compatible with many different platforms and devices, while Kindle files wrangle only with different devices.

But even with a ready-to-run format, the time spent building an ebook is time you aren’t writing, drawing, inking, lettering, and/or coloring your comic. If you want a Kindle-ready version of your comic, trust Looseleaf with your story. We’ll get it reader ready. Need more information? Get a quote on your comic book ebook design.

Not a comic book writer? We’ve got you covered with standard print and ebook design pricing.

Weekly Roundup: 10/22–10/28

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Guido Henkel: Amazon Introduced New Kindle eBook Format with a Major Misstep

Guido Henkel points out that Amazon’s new Kindle format isn’t supported on older Kindle devices. Amazon certainly isn’t the first to roll and update like this, but that doesn’t make it ideal. I know it’s not exactly the same situation, but when Sony updated its bookstore so all books came in ePub format, Sony paid for my ereader to be shipped to their shop and given and upgrade so the new format would work on my clunky, archaic device. I really appreciated that. It’s a bit annoying when you pay a company for a piece of their hardware and then that company releases updates that can’t apply to your device.

Christopher Priest: Are You Watching Carefully?

Christopher Priest writes an article about the genesis of The Prestige for Fantasy Magazine. I greatly enjoyed The Prestige, so it was fun to read this bit of background on the novel.

Intelligent Editing: Consistency Mistakes

Intelligent Editing shows the most common consistency mistakes that writers make in their manuscripts. Consistency helps your reader understand you meaning; when you switch between hyphenating or capitalizing a phrase or not, you signal a change in meaning to your reader. If you don’t actually intend a different meaning, you end up confusing your reader. Being aware of common inconsistencies helps you avoid them yourself.

Mike Shatzkin: Can Big Publishers Actually Do Tech and Make Books at the Same Time?

Mike Shatzkin discusses some changes rumbling through the big publishers: they’ve started to get into the tech game. But his article’s title raises an interesting question: can and should publishers be splitting their attention between books and technology? This applies as much to Amazon as it does to traditional publishing houses. Can you have core competencies in both stellar technology and stellar content?