Kindle ebooks from Your Children's Book - 2025 Update
The easiest way to make Kindle fixed format books.
You have a great print version of your children’s book, but you want it published as an ebook also. This is the 2025 update on the issues and techniques for creating that ebook.
First, most ebooks are reflowable ebooks. That is, if you increase or decrease the text size (as allowed by most ebook readers), the reflows smoothly to the next page. This is appropriate for most novels, including young adult novel, middle grade novels, and short chapter novels. For these ebooks, I recommend Vellum (Mac) or Atticus (PC).
Picture books, however, don’t have reflowable text. Instead, the text is embedded into the image, and indeed a particular text must be next to a certain image for the story to be understood properly. They really aren’t made for the ebook format. However, we’ve found ways to make it work by creating fixed format ebooks.
The first attempt to create fixed format ebooks requires a slight explanation of an ebook. It’s actually just a webpage—html coding—that is zipped into an .epub extension. There are required files that work together to pull the book together to show the book on any given reader. That means the first attempts to create fixed format used CSS, cascading style sheets, which are used for formatting webpages. It should work. And it does work—on some ebook readers. The problem is that there are over 100+ ebook readers, each programmed to show ebooks in slightly different ways. When I tried this technique, there was no consistency across different ereaders. On would work well, the next would be wonky. It’s not reliable.
The second attempt to create fixed format ebooks is to export images, with text embedded, and create ebooks with those images. This is in fact the method that works best.
However, when you publish on KDP, they add a download fee. Here’s what KDP says about current download fees:
Delivery Costs are equal to the number of megabytes we determine your Digital Book file contains, multiplied by the Delivery Cost rate listed below.
Amazon.com: US $0.15/MB
Amazon.ca: CAD $0.15/MB
Amazon.com.br: R$0.30/MB
Amazon.co.uk: UK £0.10/MB
Amazon.de: €0,12/MB
Amazon.fr: €0,12/MB
Amazon.es: €0,12/MB
Amazon.in: INR ₹7/MB
Amazon.it: €0,12/MB
Amazon.nl: €0,12/MB
Amazon.co.jp: ¥1/MB
Amazon.com.mx: MXN $1/MB
Amazon.com.au: AUD $0.15/MB
Once you upload your ebook, you can see the official file size on the pricing page:
If you choose the 70% royalty rate, distribution fees apply. If you choose the 35% royalty rate, there are no distribution fees. Here’s a handy chart to calculate the fees.
If your ebook is over 8MB in size, then you should opt for the 35% royalty rate or you’ll lose money.
New File Format for 2025
I’ve written about this before, so what has changed for 2025? A couple years ago, Amazon started accepting only epub formats for reflowable ebook. This year, they will change and only accept epub for fixed format, as well. We’ve been delivering .mobi files, which were conveniently created by the free Kindle Kids Book Creator program. That is now deprecated and they suggest you use the Kindle Create program.
So, what’s the recommended work flow to create a fixed format epub with low file size? That’s what we’ll discuss next.