You have prepared your manuscript and are ready to e-publish. Now you need to know how to prepare your book images and upload your Kindle acim cover to the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing system. There are two covers you will need: the Product Cover and the Internal eBook Cover. The best file format is JPG, which is acceptable for publishing both the product and internal cover image.
Kindle Direct Publishing will convert your images and text for upload to the Amazon Kindle Store as well as display on Kindles and other supported devices. Kindle Direct Publishing can process your book covers in the following formats:
The best formats to use for the internal Kindle e-book cover is a JPG or GIF image, 127 KB* size at 300 dpi. This will provide enough clarity for images, particularly for large images, or content with gradient patterns. But you also don’t want the e-book file size to become too large.
*Amazon recommends a 127K size for book covers. “The largest element of almost any Kindle book will be the image content. Inside your book file, the Kindle book format supports JPEG and GIF images up to 127KB in size. Images that are in other formats supported for upload to KDP (such as BMP or PNG), or that exceed this file size requirement, will be automatically recompressed as JPEG files during the conversion process. Optimizing your images to fit these requirements before uploading to KDP will help decrease the size of your uploaded file. It will also reduce the chance of encountering difficulties in conversion due to large file size.” HOWEVER once the reader has purchased your e-book, the Internal eBook cover is a moot point — they may go and look at your e-book cover, but most do not.
If you choose to upload your Word (.doc) file, and you have embedded images in your content, Kindle Direct Publishing automatically extracts images from the content and replaces them with an HTML img tag. This process converts each image to a separate image file, which becomes a part of your content’s publication package (MOBI)
Note: Images do not display accurately when you preview an uploaded file. For instance, larger images may resize or rotate when previewed. If your book has a lot of images, it can be viewed in color by the Kindle Fire or by readers using our free Kindle apps for PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android, and Windows 7 devices. Otherwise, remember that images on Kindle (with the exception of the Fire) are displayed in 16 shades of gray for great contrast and clarity.
