I'm Becoming an X-Ray Technician!

Not really. I mean, I won't be x-raying people. But Amazon's KDP platform now offers the ability to create ae edit X-Ray files for Kindle books. X-Ray is a cool feature in Kindle books that lets you find out about characters and terms (places, organizations, etc) used in the story. It's handy especially for books with a huge cast of characters.

I blogged about X-Ray before, when Amazon created the file necessary to create that feature for my first book The Sixth Discipline. That method relied on my having created the set-up in Shelfari, but I don't think that site even exists anymore. It was absorbed by GoodReads. Now, however, I don't need to rely on Amazon creating X-Ray for me, because KDP has given me the tools to do it myself. I've already created and published files for several books.

KDP has a pretty good write-up on what to do in their help section. The only thing that wasn't clear to me is that you need to click the "Item Reviewed" link for every character or term you edit and are ready to publish. I really do like that you don't have to have done all the characters to publish. And the program that creates the list that you work from is pretty good. It captures pretty much all the characters names; if anything it errs on the side of too much rather than too little, at least when it comes to terms.

I'm excite to think that when Alien Bonds comes out, it will have X-Ray from the get-go!