I Printed My Art Book with Kindle Direct Publishing (Review)

Good afternoon everyone. Hope you're doing well. I'm very excited. The book is finally complete. So I'm very excited to share this with you today and also talk a bit about the print quality for if you want to print a book with Kindle Direct Publishing as well. But firstly, if you don't know, this book was created with a agent skill that I've made and then combining it with an agent to create this book by giving it my entire story, my entire art journey and then piece by piece we filled it in um populated the book. So, it was really an exciting journey to take on. There's also a video on that um story architect skill that you can check out. But finally, the book is done. Now the reason why I made this book was for two main reasons. The first one is every time I meet someone and they ask me what type of art I do, I kind of stumble and I have to tell them it looks a bit abstract. I also do digital art. I'm a software engineer so I involve software to make art and then get into NFTTS and it is a lot of explaining and so this book captures everything. It captures 16 years of my life uh as an artist and that can explain the style more accurately every time. So that's number one. Number two is for exhibitions and for family, right? So I would love for my family to uh my kids to be able to see you know what I have been building and these are the reasons I have for making this book and to have it printed. Now why did I choose Kindle Direct Publishing? Well, Kindle Direct Publishing is an amazing service uh which allows you to create uh ebooks and and uh paperbacks and also a hard cover which this book is and the experience is extremely straightforward. If you go onto Kindle Direct Publishing here, you can see this is the book over here, but you can just simply click on create a new title. Of course, creating an account first and then it's a simple step-by-step process. So you'll go and select which cover, hard cover or paperback, and then you'll just fill in the details. Now, when it comes to the point where you need to add your book, the actual content, you'll need a manuscript. And my recommendation is actually to go and fill in all these details, go to the next step, and grab the manuscript template because there's a certain format and size that um Kindle Direct Publishing allows you to print at. And then lastly is a book cover. And they also have a template for that and even a calculator that you can work out the thickness of what the spine of the book should be based on the thickness of the paper. So that's all worked out and you can then download that template. So it's very easy to publish a book. Now apart from the ease of use of Kindle direct publishing is the fact that firstly once you have published with Kindle direct h you can now have your book on Amazon right and it can be global and people can order your book and secondly it's the cost. So, if I were to print this book locally, the cost would be so much, especially because 99% of this book is fully colored pages because of the artworks. And so, I find that this is just amazing. And the price that you can print it at is really good as well. Now, that being said, uh the price it's selling at right now, it's not the cheapest book, but it is because it is a lot of color pages in there, and it's an art book. So, it's for really the avid collector who wants this book as part of their collection and showing off some of their artworks. For everyone else who wants to just read the book, I'm going to try and get the ebook available free somehow on my website. I'm just trying to figure out how I do that because the book is quite big as a PDF and also with an ebook published on Kindle Direct Publishing, they don't really support uh full page or color pages on the Kindle. So, um it's difficult. You can't really publish an art book like that on a Kindle, or at least I don't know if you can. So, I'm going to still try and figure that one out. Now, let me talk a little bit about the quality of this book. This book, when it came to me, I was really excited. It is a proper hard coverver book. You can see the spine and nicely printed. Again, that calculator made sure that I can position the wording precisely. So, flipping through the pages, you can see the amount of color that's been printed into this book. And each piece, I must say, for the quality of image that I gave it, they did a phenomenal job. It's high quality. Um, it's well printed. Some of the colors are a bit off because my artworks, they are RGB. And, uh, when you print, you print in C YMK. As you can see here, the color is a little bit off. This pink should be a little bit more red. Uh, the one on the left is fine. So, it just depends on kind of what tone or what color that artwork is and what colors have been used and what can be printed. But all in all, the pages feel great. It is a bit see-through, but it's the highest quality paper I could select for this. So, it does have a little bit of a see-through effect. That's still okay. And the only critique I can really give about this book is honestly um that when it came in the paper as you squish the book together, you can see the pages buckle a little bit. And I was not sure if that's to do with the color, the amount of color pages that I have in pulling the pages uh in all different directions, but I did do some research and apparently it's to do with how um the printing facilities store the paper and then the humidity if it hits it, it kind of buckles a little bit. Now, I've had the book here at home uh for a good couple of days and I must say it is starting to flatten out a bit. But just expect something like this if you decide to get um this book that it might have some buckling. Now, I did order a few more copies, the ones that does not have the not for sale sticker on it. So, I'm also going to see how that turns out, but that's the only thing I can critique this book on. Other than that, it is well printed. It feels great. The sharpness is there depending on what images you provide it. And of course taking into consideration some of the images are 16 years old so they're not going to look the sharpest but the digital artworks they look perfect they look pristine little bit off color. Yeah. So that's that. I just wanted to come and share the excitement I have of this book with you. And um yeah let me know in the comments maybe if you are going to print a book of your own or if you want to see the full process let me know as well. But I hope you enjoy the video and I'll see you in the next one. This one out.