INSERT A URL HYPERLINK WITH THE KINDLE KIDS BOOK CREATOR

The Kindle Kids’ Book Creator (KKBC) is Amazon KDP’s free self-publishing tool for creating illustrated children’s books from a PDF or from jpeg images.

The KKBC is easy to use, convenient, and is both PDF and JPEG friendly. It results in a fixed-format Kindle e-book, designed for picture friendly devices (and so the published e-book may not be available across all devices, but it will work on most devices for which it would be convenient to read an illustrated children’s book).

One of the main issues is how to add a clickable url hyperlink that will take the customer directly to an external website (such as your author page or blog).

There is a way to do it, but it may not seem obvious. The steps below will show you how.

HOW TO ADD A CLICKABLE URL HYPERLINK TO AN EXTERNAL WEBSITE WITH THE KKBC

Step 1. Add the text for the URL by inserting a textbox. Click the button on the toolbar called Add Text. Then type the text as you want it to show.

In my example, I typed the following text (see the picture of text below). This is the url for my Amazon author page, which shows all of my books.

(If you wish to do the same, login to Author Central, click the Author Page tab at the top, and read the instructions where it says Author Page URL.)

Step 2. Disable the pop-up feature for the textbox. Right-click in the textbox area and click the option to Delete Pop-up. This option preserves the text, but removes the pop-up feature that would otherwise be associated with the text that you added.

The pop-up feature needs to be disabled before you can make the hyperlink url clickable.

(If you run into trouble where you aren’t able to edit your text or you don’t see anything when you right-click, try closing the KKBC and restarting the computer. When you restart your computer and reopen the KKBC, try not opening other programs along with it.)

Step 3. Open a web browser and visit the webpage that you wish to link to. Copy/paste the full web address shown in your browser. When you do this, the copy/paste option should automatically include the http:// part that you need. Paste this url into a simple text editor like Notepad.

You can see the full url for my author page in the picture of text below. Compare it to the picture above. Notice how it automatically added the http:// part.

(Fancy text editors like Word sometimes include other stuff when you later need to copy/paste from Word, so it’s desirable to work with Notepad.)

Step 4. Prepare a simple line of HTML to paste into the KKBC. You don’t need to know anything about HTML. You just need to be able to follow these directions.

On a new line in Notepad (simply press Enter to begin a new line of text), type a line of HTML similar to my example in the picture of text below, except for using your own website url.

• first type a less than symbol <
• next write a href=”
• (the quotation marks should be straight, not curly)
• next copy/paste the full website URL for your webpage, including the http part (the same text from Step 3)
• next close the quotation marks ” (straight, not curly)
• next type a greater than symbol >
• next type the URL text as you want it to look (the same text from Step 1)
• next type a less than symbol <
• next type /a
• next type a greater than symbol >
• when you’re finished, the text should look just like my example above, except for using your own website URL instead of my author page URL
• it has the following structure

Step 5. In the KKBC, click the View tab and select HTML View.

Step 6. Click the HTML tab in the KKBC. It’s right next to the Design tab, just below the toolbar and above the view of your book’s content.

(You can only see the HTML tab after you’ve enabled HTML View in Step 5.)

Step 7. Find the text that you typed in Step 1 in the HTML code that you see. This is like the book, Where’s Waldo. You have to hunt for it.

It’s probably in a div id tag, and it’s probably towards the bottom. (If you’re about to give up, try copying and pasting the HTML text into a text editor and using the Find button to help figure out where that text is. Once you know where it is, you should be able to go back to the KKBC and find it in the HTML View.)

In the picture below, I used a RED ellipse to show where I found my text from Step 1.

(Make sure that you have the right page selected before you click the HTML tab. If not, you never would find it.)

Step 8. Once you find the text in Step 7 (identical to what you typed in Step 1), highlight exactly that text, no less and no more.

It’s very important that you highlight it perfectly. Don’t include the < or > signs, and don’t miss any characters from the text.

Step 9. Then copy/paste the text from Step 4 (the one line of HTML code that we made) to overwrite the text from Step 8.

That’s it. Except now you should make sure it works right. See Step 10.

If you’re able to zoom in on my picture below and if you’re able to find and read the text, it shows how my example looks after Step 9. (Note that I didn’t actually publish this book with the KKBC. I just used the KKBC to create a test file and to illustrate how to use this feature of the KKBC. I actually published this book with the Kindle Textbook Creator instead, and it doesn’t include any clickable links. But that’s another story. The test file that I created with my KKBC still works.)

Step 10. Click Book Preview and Create Book Preview. This may take a minute.

When it finishes, it should open the Kindle Previewer (which you need to install before you do Step 10, if you don’t already have this valuable tool installed — you can find Kindle Previewer v3 and other valuable tools at Amazon KDP right here: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/A3IWA2TQYMZ5J6).

Find the page where you added the clickable hyperlink. Place your cursor over the hyperlink. The symbol of the cursor won’t change shape (it will be an arrow, not a hand), but that doesn’t matter.

When your cursor is over the clickable hyperlink, left-click your mouse once.

You can see how my example looks in the preview window below.

When I did this, my web browser opened my Amazon author page successfully.

You can see the webpage that opened below.

Chris McMullen

Author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers

• Volume 1 on formatting and publishing
• Volume 2 on marketability and marketing
• 4-in-1 Boxed set includes both volumes and more
• Kindle Formatting Magic (now available)