At long last!  The third and FINAL part to our Kindle Tutorial Trilogy of Terror! (no, seriously, try it, it’s terrifying…*shiver*…)

You can read PART 1: OPTIMIZING THE IMAGES by CLICKING HERE

You can read PART 2: THE HTML DOC by CLICKING HERE

So now you’ve put together your images, your text, and wrapped it all up in a nice HTML bow.  Time to put this puppy up and online for Amazon shoppers everywhere to buy it!  How best to go about it?  Are there any tips you should know about?  And, heck, how exactly does publishing content on the Kindle store work?

Digital Text Platform

You’ll need to sign up for a “DTP” account – the DIGITAL TEXT PLATFORM is Amazon’s special platform for publishers (independent or otherwise).

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UPDATE: We’ve updated the info below to better reflect the current Amazon/Kindle marketplace.

LAST UPDATED 10/28/09

Time for Part 2 (of 3) of our vundubar CREATING COMICS FOR THE KINDLE tutorial series!

You can read PART 1: OPTIMIZING THE IMAGES by CLICKING HERE.

You’ve got your images all squared away. It’s yea many pages in length and they’re all lined up in the proper reading order. Not that they have to be, but I recommend making the next part easy on yourself and make sure to call all the images something simple and obvious, like “page1.png”, “page2.png”, etc.

What next? Next it’s time to create the dreaded HTML Document that acts as the actual layout for your Kindle comic. All you need to do is have all your images in a single folder on your computer, then add an HTML doc titled “index.html”. So long as the images and HTML doc are all within the same folder, the link to the images can be relative and so all you need to use are the image files’ names.

For those unfamiliar with HTML, here’s a sample:

<img src=”page1.png”><img src=”page2.png”><img src=”page3.png”>, etc, etc. This puts all the images in the proper order when read on the Kindle when you upload the folder as a single ZIP file.
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UPDATE: We’ve updated the info below to better reflect the current Amazon/Kindle marketplace.

LAST UPDATED 10/26/09

Time for a handy-dandy tutorial on adapting comics for the Kindle!

The Lowdown

Anyone can sign up to publish books on the Kindle. Just register an account at Amazon’s Digital Text Platform site, and then you’re ready to begin uploading your finished Kindle-adapted product!

Er…whoops, how does someone adapt a comic for the Kindle? Just resize some pages and submit?

Wouldn’t that be nice. No, alas, there’s lots to know, and a plethora of misinformation bread-crumbed across the internet to confuse the issue as much as it possibly could be. But here’s the full skinny as it currently stands with optimizing for the Kindle 2 device, and we’ll additionally touch upon the possibilities of adapting for the DX and First Generation devices as we go.

Zip file with HTML

The final file for uploading to Amazon should be a ZIP file, containing all the images/pages of the comic, alongside an HTML document included inside the zip, informing Amazon the order and style in which the contents will be displayed.

We’ll go over the HTML in detail in part 2 of this tutorial series, but for now, let’s focus on optimizing the images.

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Droid Comic Viewer -our comic reader for Android mobiles- supports CBZ comics. If you are unfamiliar with the CBZ file format, continue reading for a brief introduction.
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Droid Comic Viewer, our CBZ comic viewer for Android mobiles, can be used to enjoy traditional comics in a different way. Through CBZ support, Droid Comic Viewer allows you to read any comic that’s freely available.

Below is a partial list of free CBZ and CBR comics ready to download from the web. We will publish a tutorial about CBR to CBZ conversion shortly. If you don’t know what’s a CBZ or CBR file, please check this brief introduction first.

Publishers

• FlashBack Universe (download page)
• Oni Press (download page)

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This is the first article in a series about adapting traditional comics into mobile comics, in which Robot Comics creators explain the decisions they made to adapt their own titles.

In this installment, Hermes Pique, writer of Misery Depot, provides a step by step tutorial on adapting a page of the original version of Misery Depot into various screens of its mobile version.

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The iPhone^TM and most Android^TM powered mobiles have a screen resolution of 480 x 320 pixels, a 3:2 ratio. As there is a standard size and ratio for print comics, this resolution is quickly becoming the standard of mobile comics. If you are willing to submit a proposal to us, your screens should have these dimensions.

In this tutorial we will offer some guidelines and materials for creating 480 x 320 screens of mobile comics. Bear in mind that mobile comics are a brand new world of possibilities, so we invite you to challenge everything we state in this tutorial and to experiment at your own leisure.

Setting up your document

You can work at any resolution than you like as long as it is equal or higher than 480 x 320 pixels (if your document includes bitmaps) and it maintains a 3:2 ratio (meaning that one of the dimensions is 50% larger than the other). Some common pixel configurations:

• 480 x 320
• 720 x 480
• 960 x 640
• 1200 x 800
• 1440 x 960
• 1680 x 1120
• 1920 x 1280

Only the last one begins to be good enough for print.

Landscape

Landscape screens are such when the width is larger than the height. Below is an example of a landscape screen. The black borders indicate the edge of the screen.

You can use the following Adobe Illustrator template to create landscape screens.

landscape screen.ait.zip

Portrait

Portrait screens are screens where the height is larger than the width. Below is an example of a portrait screen.

You can use the following Adobe Illustrator template to create portrait screens.

portrait screen.ait.zip

Although there is no set rule against using both landscape and portrait screens on the same mobile comic, it has to be very clear to the reader that, after navigating to a screen with a different orientation, he or she has to change the orientation of the phone.

Margins

As shown in the examples above, we recommend using margins of 25 pixels for differentiated elements and dialogue. While the background can take up the whole screen, other elements too close to the edges might be distracting unless there is a particular reason for the element to be there (for example, to imply an entrance) .

Exporting your screen

Android^TM supports PNG, JPEG, GIF and BMP image format, yet PNG and JPEG are preferred (in that order). Export your screen in PNG format, making sure the export measures 480 x 320 or 320 x 480 pixels.

We hope you found this tutorial helpful. Let us know what you think about it and feel free to ask any questions by leaving a comment below.