Artistic Adventures with Victoria

You might have noticed a pattern with the first two books in my series: I launched both the paperback and Kindle eBook versions almost simultaneously. The same goes for the 4th book, for which I just received notification from Amazon that it’s out now! Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for the third book.

Does Size Matter?

The file sizes for the paperback books are quite large, with the first book at 147 MB and the newest at 292 MB. These sizes are far too large for an eBook. I had hoped that converting them to Kindle books would reduce the file size, but that turned out to be a fool’s hope.

So, I employed some tricks by lowering the resolution for the first book, and the final PDF converted to a Kindle book was about 2 MB. However, the second one, using a different method, ended up around 14 MB. While manageable, it’s already quite large. Regardless of the method I used, the process also necessitated a complete redo of the layout.

Burn It, I Do Not Care

By the time I finished the final edits for the third book, I was completely fed up with the story and the layout issues. It didn’t convert to a manageable 10 MB size, so I considered skipping the eBook version altogether. In the back of my mind, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there must be a reason why the file size behaved this way. But this was something I could tackle another time.

Just a piece of advice—if you’re working on something and you’re not sure if it’s finished or needs more work, polish it just a bit more. If you start feeling like you’d rather burn the book than edit it one more day, it’s done. At least, that’s how I know. Of course, I care deeply; I would never actually harm my little book.

Next Stop: Flamingo Lake

Time passed, I wrote and edited the new book, and finally, it was done and published. That old nagging feeling of an unfinished eBook returned. I thought I might give it another go. Even if it came to nothing, that was okay. This time, I took a different approach; I wanted to keep the text as it was. Editing text is a nightmare in the program I use for text and image integration, and I was not willing to battle it out. That’s where I drew the line. So, this time, I started with image conversions. A different image format turned out to be much more suitable for an eBook. After making this adjustment and importing the images back into my program, the file size for the final document dropped from 220 MB to about 150 MB—a slight disappointment.

Last, Best Hope for Answers

Then I did what anyone would do: I googled my problem. There it was—the answer. It was due to the way the images were packed. With the image processing program I use, there was nothing I could do. Did I mention I was a bit disappointed earlier? After this discovery, my frustration only grew.

After brooding over my computer for a few days, I wondered if there might be a better program for laying out the book. The images were already converted to the new format and just waiting to be used. I needed something that could handle both text and images well. It didn’t need to edit images—I have a program for that. But text—imagine if I could use styles, and they just worked. And the program could also manage images without shifting their position or losing them to some random page. After dreaming about such a program for a moment, I did a bit more googling. And there it was, my new toy capable of doing just that. As a result, the two latest books are now available on Amazon.

Alexia, Phoebe and the Unicorn of the North: Mystery of the Northern Lights

Alexia, Phoebe, and the Pink Flamingos: Adventures of a Girl and a Unicorn in Africa

So, if you or someone you know loves to travel the world with a unicorn named Phoebe, grab the books and dive into their newest adventures!

Happy Reading!