September 17, 2019

Self-publishing a Print-On-Demand color photo book with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing

Recently, I published a new book through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). It is a Print-On-Demand color photo book titled “Croix de Savoie” (Crosses of Savoie). Here are the product pages on Amazon: US, FR, UK, DE, JP.

The book is nominally in French, however, apart from the title, there is no text in French in the book: The content is basically only photos, along with the geographic coordinates of where it was taken. I kept it simple since I was mostly interested in checking out how a Print-On-Demand color book would turn out and also test if Reportlab / Python could be used as a suitable replacement for Latex (which I used in my previous books) for the book layout. I am planning some other book projects I care about more and this allowed me to see if it was worth it putting in the effort.

Edit September 2020: Since writing this, I have published 3 more books: Instead of using Python code and Reportlab to format the book like mentioned here, I used Scribus, an open source desktop publishing software (version 1.4 for the first book and version 1.5 for the second ; Version 1.5 is still in beta and is a bit buggy but has better handling for font embedding, useful for the print replica). It is kind of like Adobe InDesign (but free) and it is quite easy to develop extensions in Python to automate parts of the workflow (I have written some for my second book here). I actually would recommend that over Python + Reportlab for anything a little complex to layout. Someone in the comments also mentioned Affinity Publisher as a cheap alternative for desktop publishing that may be easier to use than Scribus.

Here is the full PDF of the paperback version of the book as uploaded to Amazon KDP:

Here is the code that was used to generate it (I had put a link in the comments after it was requested; this is the same):

Python code

Here are some additional images of the interior, back cover and spine.

I think the result came out OK enough, especially for the price and printed on demand, although it is obviously not Taschen-level quality.

Color Paperback

Here are some details about the book and the publishing process:

In contrast with my previous books, which were in B&W, this one was in color. I also used the glossy cover finish, instead of matte. It still a soft cover (only choice offered by Amazon KDP). The book is square with a size of 8.5 inch x 8.5 inch.

Update July 2022: Since last year, publishing hardcover books has also become possible. It is quite a bit pricier than softcover though. I haven’t tested it yet so I am not sure of the quality.

The length of the book is 104 pages for the content and KDP added an additional 4 pages, all empty apart from the last one which had some internal barcode and a “Printed in Great Britain by Amazon” footer.

The PDF I sent included a margin for bleed, although in the end I ended up not making use of it.
KDP only allows text on the spine for books with at least 100 pages. The space available is still quite tiny.
When I got the book, the coating of the glossy back cover was scratched in a few places. Also the front (soft) cover and the first few pages were dog-eared. This probably happened in transport: These days, Amazon uses soft bubble-wrapped envelopes instead of rigid cardboard.

The trim is very irregular. I was quite surprised by this. It seems the printing on the page is not very precise and the end result is that margins can vary wildly between each pages. It is all the more visible since the photos in the book are aligned with the borders of the safe zone (the zone on the page that should contain all the important content). For example:

Above, these are supposed to be the exact same margins. Also, on the right page, the shape of the photo on the next page can be seen bleeding through, even though the 2 margins should have been identical.

On top of that, when the outside margin becomes small, some internal print markings appear in the gutter:

However, it must be said that none of the pictures or texts, which were all in the safe zone, have been cut. Still, it makes the book look a bit shoddy.

Edit September 2020: Since writing this, I have published 2 other color books through Amazon (see here and here, with pictures of the actual printed books) but I didn’t see the same issue on the multiple copies I received for those books. Some were printed in England (like this book) and some in Poland and the margins were OK: Not perfect still but I think not really noticeable unless you are specifically looking for it. So probably the issue here seems like a one-off mistake.

The paper is matte and has some grain which can appear when looking a bit closely, or maybe it is just caused by the printing process:

However, I found the color vibrant and pretty much accurate compared with the original picture.

The back cover contains a a few thumbnails of pictures. However, there appeared to be black lines on their borders, which were not in the cover PDF I sent to KDP. Not sure of the cause. I have updated the manuscript since then in order to explicitly add a small border around the pictures.

After submitting the manuscript on the KDP website, it took just one round and on the order of 24h for validation. The book appeared on the Amazon web sites pretty quickly, although it took an additional couple of days to be able to order the book from the French Amazon store (marked as unavailable at first, then available in 1 or 2 days). In the end, from submission to getting a copy of the book in my hands, it took ~1 week. When I updated the cover or the content PDFs, it took again around 24h to process. The changes of the details of the book such as description, keywords or categories were processed in a few hours.
The publisher appears as “Independently published” (in English on all Amazon sites)
It costs $8.13 to print the 104-page color book. Because of the royalties Amazon takes for itself (40% of the list price), the minimum selling price on the Amazon US store is $13.55, since printing costs come out of the 60% share that goes to the author. Compared to how much it would have cost using Blurb, a Flickr partner and another Print-On-Demand provider that allows selling on Amazon, KDP is quite a bit cheaper: With a similar (smaller) paper size, a soft cover and the cheapest paper, on-demand printing costs with Blurb is $31.79. Additional fees mean it would cost a minimum of $39 to sell on Amazon. Admittedly, the quality of the end result is supposed to be much better. Also, Blurb offers discounts for advance volume printing (not offered by KDP), but, in that case, it is likely additional fees would be incurred for warehousing.

Edit January 2022: I had missed the announcement in June 2021 but there is now a second color printing option for KDP: The Standard Color Ink, as opposed to the single one there was before (and the one I used for this book), now referred to as Premium. Essentially, it is half-price: 0.36 $/page instead of 0.70 $/page (lower-quality paper + different printing technique). I haven’t used it yet so I am not sure of the quality. Unfortunately, it is not possible to switch paper type once the book has already been published.

I didn’t choose Expanded Distribution (which makes the book available to distributors so booksellers and libraries can find it and order it). The reason is that there is no way to set a different price for selling on Amazon and Expanded Distribution: With ED, the author’s royalties are only 40% of the list price, from which the printing costs need to be subtracted. For my book, this would have meant a minimum selling price (both on Amazon and ED) of $20.35, which I thought was a bit much.

I must say I was a bit disappointed with the result, especially with the irregular trim, as well as the paper used for color printing, which for some reason I assumed would be glossy like a magazine. Therefore I probably would not recommend KDP for a high-end photobook / coffee table book. However, I intend to keep using it for future projects, especially if they need color printing for some photos but are more text oriented.

Reportlab vs Latex

For the typesetting of this book, compared with the previous ones, I replaced Latex with Reportlab and Python. I was familiar with Latex since my days at university: It produces really good results with minimal work spent doing page layout and is great for writing math expressions. However, achieving a custom layout can be harder than it should and it has accumulated a lot of cruft in its few decades of existence. Therefore, for this book, I decided to experiment with Reportlab: It is a package for the Python language that makes it really easy to layout texts or images and output a PDF. I used it in the past to generate reports at my day job. It also offers some higher level page layout features with the Platypus library, although I did not use it for the book.

I was pretty satisfied with Reportlab. It allows very precise formatting, which is necessary to comply with the Amazon guidelines, even though I had to write more code and at a lower level than Latex. With a bit of foresight, it also makes it quite easy to change the layout with minimum effort. In the end, I used Reportlab to generate the PDFs for both the book interior and cover.

The only downside was that it does not support kerning when writing texts (Latex does out the box). It is not such a big deal for writing normal text but it can stand out with large titles, like on the cover:

Above, the space between the V and e is too large. I did not do any correction at first and submitted the PDF like that. However, I ended up writing some code to integrate the HarfBuzz library with Reportlab in order to process the kerning information contained inside the font. After doing that, I updated the cover PDF and now this is the result:

Kindle eBook / Print Replica

In addition to the printed version of the book, I looked into what it would take to distribute an eBook for Kindle. In fact, it was not that difficult: For fixed layout eBooks, Amazon KDP offers the possibility of distributing what they call a “Print Replica”. It is basically a PDF in another format and can be useful for books with complex formatting such as textbooks. The other side of the coin is that they are not great eBooks since the content does not reflow to adapt to the eReader with regards to, for example, font size or screen format.

Above, scrolling is needed in landscape mode.

The eBook is available on the various Amazon stores: US, FR, UK, DE, JP.

The process is as follows :

Download and install the Kindle Create application.
Import the interior PDF. I did not use the exact same PDF as for the printed book: I removed the bleed and centered the content on the page.
Export a KPF file from Kindle Create. This file can be then uploaded to KDP.
Create a JPEG for the cover. KDP requests an image with 1.6:1 ratio between height and width. Since my original printed book was square, I had to do some adaptation, although, since the illustration was drawn in a procedural way, it did not take too much time. Then I used Poppler and Pdf2Image to output a JPEG from the PDF.
Creating a Kindle eBook version of a printed book from the KDP dashboard is then very easy: Most of the fields are already filled so it is just a matter of uploading the files and fixing a price. It took less than 24h to have it available on the Amazon stores, along with the Look Inside the Book feature.

I also looked into Apple Books and the iBooks Author tool but it would have involved significantly more effort so I did not bother.