The ability to create professional looking covers is an absolute must if you
plan on generating any meaningful income on KDP with your low content books.
Now, one great way to produce professional looking results without being a
professional designer yourself is by using seamless patterns that you find on a
reputable stock image website as your background artwork for the covers of your
low content books.
So today I'm going to show you how you can find and manipulate seamless patterns
using affinity designer so that you can create beautiful and professional
looking covers for your low content books. If you're new here.
My name is Rachel Harrison-Sund and I help people to generate passive income
selling journals, planners, notebooks,
and more on the Kindle direct publishing platform. If that's got you interested,
be sure to subscribe to my channel and hit the bell so that you can be notified
every time I post one of these videos, which is every single Monday.
The first thing you're going to need is a high quality seamless pattern.
There are lots of places you can get these from.
My personal favorite right now is Creative Fabrica.
They've got an excellent selection of really high quality,
seamless patterns as well as all sorts of other types of illustrations and
graphics.
So I've already gone ahead and downloaded this floral seamless pattern
collection.
You can see they've got multiple different styles within this one collection
here,
so I've downloaded that already so I'm going to go and open that now these are
all the different seamless patterns that I was able to download just from that
one file.
Now one of the reasons I love Creative Fabrica so much is because they've got an
excellent license specifically for low content publishing.
Now just a quick note, wherever you download your seamless patterns from,
you want to make sure that you read the license for whatever image it is that
you're downloading.
Every website that you download these patterns from is going to have its own
licenses and its own set of rules as to how you can use these seamless patterns,
particularly in a commercial setting.
So you want to make sure that the first thing you do before you decide on any
pattern is read the license and ensure that you can use it for commercial use.
All right. Once we've got our pattern,
I'm going to download a KDP cover template.
You can download this straight from their website.
All you need to do is Google KDP cover template and you'll find the address.
You're going to choose your size. I'm doing six by nine so we'll keep that.
You can add in your page count. I've just chosen 150 for this example,
paper color. I always choose white.
I find that the cream isn't really suited for these types of projects.
Then you're just going to click download cover template.
I've already gone ahead and done that, so I'm going to open that now,
so I'm just going to right click on my cover and I'm going to open it with
affinity designer. For DPI I'm going to choose 300,
CMYK for the color space and I will click open. Now,
I just want to point out here that because we opened it the way we did,
affinity has already incorporated the bleed into this document.
So normally if you were just going to create your document from scratch,
you'd have to enter the dimensions of your document and then add the bleed in.
But because we did the right click and just open it directly with affinity,
it has just opened at the exact dimensions of the cover template and it has
assumed a 0.125 inch bleed.
You can see if I drag the corner and here you can see the rest of the template,
that dotted line,
that is the trim size of this cover template and the red beyond that is our
bleed. So I can see that that's been incorporated. If you want to double check,
you can just go to file documents set up,
you can click on dimensions,
make sure you're in most likely inches is what you're going to be using and just
make sure that the dimensions are correct. So for a six by nine template,
the width is going to be your cover,
which is six inches plus your back cover,
which is also six inches and whatever your spine with is,
and that should add it up. Create this number here,
and then nine that is the height of our cover, so that's good.
Then you'll go over to bleed and you'll see a 0.125 inch bleed all the way
around, so we know that that's correct. Now that that's in there,
I'm just going to go ahead and turn it off for a second. First,
I'll just lock it so that we can't move it around by accident and then I'll just
click that checkbox so that it gets it out of our way for now.
First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to import that seamless pattern that we
downloaded.
So we'll go to file place and I'm going to work with this floral blue one EPS
and I'm just going to open that
and I'm going to line that up with our bleed.
Remember you want any imagery that you're using that goes straight to the edge
of the page.
You want to drag that all the way to the very edge of the bleed that's going to
ensure that when your cover is trimmed,
you're not going to have any awkward white space anywhere.
So I can see I'm getting these,
these crosshairs and this yellow circle here that's telling me that I'm right at
the edge of the bleed. So I'm just going to go ahead and drag that out.
Now it's good to kind of eyeball it at this point,
how big you want that pattern. You know,
do you want it relatively small or larger?
Just kind of drag it out to where you're happy with the size of the pattern.
So I'm just gonna drag it to about here for now.
Now we're going to use a function called the power duplicate and that is going
to help us fill up all this white space with our seamless pattern.
You want to make sure that you have this snapping enabled.
So go ahead and click and just make sure there's a tick mark here in enabled
snapping.
There's a bunch of other configurations and options down here that you can
choose from. We're not going to worry about any of them for now.
We'll get out of there and the first thing I'm going to do is duplicate this
layer so you can just do command J if you're on a Mac or control J I believe
it's if it's a PC and I'll just go ahead over and take a look.
Take a look at our layers pallet. You can see that that's been duplicated,
so the duplicate is just sitting directly on top of the original pattern tile.
Now I'm going to hold down the shift key while I drag that over,
holding down the shift key is just going to make sure that I'm dragging it in a
completely straight line and you can see when I bring it close to the,
to the left hand tile, it's just snapping into place. That's what we want.
That's going to ensure that we're not going to have any awkward white space in
between the two tiles and this is where the power duplicate function comes in.
I'm simply going to hit control J again and what that's going to do is it's
going to create another copy and position it exactly the same way that we just
positioned our last tile.
So we initially copied and pasted that tile directly to the right of the first
tile. So the power duplicate is going to do that the same as again,
it's going to duplicate that tile directly to the right and that again that's
going to ensure that we're not having any awkward white seams in between the
tiles.
So we've still got some space on the bottom to cover so you can hit command a or
control a depending on if you're on a Mac or on a PC.
And we're going to repeat that going down. So press shift,
so command or control J to do, to make the duplicates
shift to hold things in a straight line and drag while you're holding the shift
key.
And we're going to allow that to snap into place.
So that's filled up our entire page.
If you want it to make your pattern a lot smaller and you still have more space
on the bottom,
you would just hit command or control J again and it would populate the next row
underneath.
Now I do want to show you one more really cool feature that you can use in
affinity designer specifically when you're working with these seamless patterns.
So what you can do is create what's called a symbol with your seamless pattern
tile.
And what that will enable you to do is make some edits to your seamless pattern
and then it will populate everywhere you've got that tile.
So my symbols pallet is already open. Yours probably won't be.
So what you're just going to go to view studio
symbols. Click on that and you'll get this dialog box here.
Now click one of your pattern tiles and then just hit create.
Now we've created a symbol with this pattern tile and I'll show you the beauty
of this right now, right? Let's just zoom in.
Let's say I wanted to change this blue flower to a different color.
You just go ahead and click into that.
You can see I've double-clicked and it's opened up just this one particular
tile.
So I'll zoom into this flower here and I'll go ahead and click in there.
So this is has selected one of the shapes and I'll just give you an idea of what
this can do.
So you can see I've clicked the red here and that has,
that's gone ahead and changed that to a red.
So basically you can just make whatever changes in here that you want.
I could click another piece over here,
I could turn that whatever random color I wanted.
Let's just do it pink for now just for the sake of it.
So obviously this is just to show you,
these are kind of loud colors that don't really work with this color palette.
And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back over to my cover template,
which I've got right here, zoom out.
Now you can see that the adjustments that I've made just in that one tile have
shown up in the other tiles.
So this basically just allows you to make global changes to a seamless pattern
that you've downloaded or created yourself and it will just apply to your entire
document. So that is really, really cool.
So I'm going to go back over to my symbol here.
I'm just going to undo those changes
cause those are a bit loud and aren't very appealing. All right,
so I've done that. I'll go back over to my document.
Now this pattern is a little bit too small and cramped for my liking.
So I'm just gonna go ahead and delete a few of these and then I'm just gonna
select them both and just click them out
and just drag them out and
make sure the properly lined up with my bleed and that's going to be good
enough. I'm going to go ahead and lock these layers so that they can't move.
And I'm going to bring up my
template layer to the top.
Click that back on and I'll just set the opacity at whatever like 50% or 75%
just so I can see what's going on underneath.
And at this point you've got your background for your book cover and let's just
go ahead and finish off the book cover really quickly just so you can get a
proper sense of what, what something might look like.
Now the final thing you're going to want to do is just go ahead and enable your
template. Again, make sure everything's lined up the way you want it,
make sure there's nothing that's not inside that safe area.
So that's everything on the inside of these red lines.
And then if you're happy with everything,
you can go ahead and turn off your template layer again.
So once you're done all your tweaking, the only thing left to do is export.
So you'll go to file, export,
choose PDF, you'll want to choose PDF for print or PDF x-1a..
Make sure you've got your rastor DPI at 300 and ensure that you include bleed.
If you don't include the bleed,
your document will export at the wrong size and it will get rejected by KDP.
Also, make sure you've got whole documents selected and then hit export.
All right, so we'll open that up and we'll take a look at our cover.
So as you can see,
seamless patterns really do help to create professional looking covers.
Even if you're not a designer.
Obviously if you can create these seamless patterns on your own,
that is fantastic, but for most that are not professional designers,
this is a fantastic option to get really high quality professional results.
Well, there you have it. Thanks for watching.
And if you'd like to find out more about how you can generate passive income
selling journals, notebooks, planners,
and more on the Kindle direct publishing platform,
then be sure to download my free guide,
three steps to publishing your first low content book in less than a day by
clicking on the link in the description below. Also in the description below,
you can find a link to my free Facebook group, low content profits,
and this is where other like-minded, low content publishers hangout,
support each other and get their questions answered.
So be sure to join that group as well.
Check out these videos maxed for more low content publishing design tutorials
using the affinity suite. And if you like this video,
be sure to hit the like button and subscribe and share this video with your
friends. Thanks for watching.