Kea, The Third Way Children fiction.

In Kea, The 3rd Way, two friends are thrown into a fast paced adventure that leads them into another world. Only then they realize that our planet, the Earth, is threatened by a massive life extinction similar to the one that wiped out all dinosaurs, 65 million years ago: the Holocene extinction. But this time it is us, humans, who are endangering the delicate balance of nature.

Under an adventure brimming with action, friendship, and emotion, Alki Nea introduces us to a contemporary problem that will keep us thinking even after closing the book.

By the end of the story, the two teenagers discover the limitless nature of true friendship and the real meaning of destiny.

Kea, The Third Way ~ by Alki Nea.
Ages 9-13. Adventure, action, and environmental awareness.

Released: July 12, 2012.
ISBN: 978-0-985-31980-9


For this book, the author wanted a reading experience as close as possible to the paperback version.
We first formatted the book in PDF for CreateSpace:



We selected a font for the headings that matched the theme of the story (fairies). We then added illuminated dropcaps with the same font. We also added flourishings on the page numbers. We made sure that all the margins followed CreateSpace's rules, especially the inner gutter, which depends on the number of pages. We also changed the page numbers, so they start on the first chapter (not the first page). Well all this and many more details that made the paperback version of the book look really professional.

We then converted the manuscript to mobi, the kindle format for Amazon.



The author wanted a reading experience as close as possible to the paperback version. This meant including the font for the headings and the dropcaps. We couldn't legally embed the font in the ebook, so we wrote a tool to automatically convert all the chapter titles to pictures that could be added in the ebook. We had to pay extra care to the dropcaps to make sure they would be displayed on all different kindles, old and new, in the best possible way. We also added a fully linked table of contents that allows the reader to navigate from one chapter to the next (we have tools to do that automatically.) We also tuned many details like margins, indentation, text alignment and many more details that made the ebook shine.

Then we also converted the book to the ePub format, to publish at Barnes & Noble and Apple.



We worked on the same issues as for the kindle version: fonts, dropcaps, etc. We carefully checked the ebook on different devices, especially iPad and nook.

The author was extremely pleased with the result. He was able to upload the ebooks on the three different platforms (iTunes, Pubit and KDP) without a single issue.
He received one 5 star review on the quality of the formatting.

We finally created a book trailer:



We used Photoshop, Irfanview, Inkscape, and MyPaint for the pictures.
For the video we used Wax from DebugMode for some special effects (like the flying bird and the waterfall), iMovie to combine all the sequences, and finally VirtualDub to convert, filter and compress the movie.
We composed a simple music using energyXT, the Blue Stone plugin for the piano, the SFX plugin with soundfonts for the violins and the choirs, and the Sylfid plugin for the strings.







coming soon
Humor and awareness.

An Uproaring Smile ~ by Cellie Cilani

She has trained all her life. She knows she's the best. She can throw her smile farther than any other person on the planet.
She's confident she'll win tomorrow.
Until she hears about Clonk.
She forgot that the contest is opened to all forms of life; animals included, like Clonk, the chimpanzee.

Coming soon: January 2014.


Review by A.J.
After reading your book, I was about to give you a rating of one star, because you can't give zero, until my wife entered in my office and said: "Writing a review for this book? Glad you're done. Your hysterical bursts of laughter after midnight were even more annoying than your snoring." This is when I decided to give you five stars, just because the rating doesn't go any higher.




Copyright © Swirl Books 2012