Hey everyone and welcome to today's video by the end of which you'll be able to
create your very own KDP lined notebook or journal,
which will be ready to upload via the KDP platform to Amazon and
you then to be able to hit that published button and become an online publisher.
Now, if you are already publishing and creating your own books,
you may find some tips and tricks here to streamline and speed up
the process. Now, the way I'm going to show you is quick.
It's condensed down into relatively simple steps and best of all, it's free.
Now combine that with the fact that it's free to upload these books to Amazon
and free to store them on Amazon.
It makes the perfect online business to get started with.
Now, if you do decide then to take things further,
it's a great way of building a second income o.r like I've done,
and many viewers on this channel have done build a full-time income.
And in fact,
this business allowed me to quit my job back in 2020.
Now I did do a similar video to this about a year ago,
but things have changed on KDP and on Canva,
which is a software platform we're going to be using today.
So this is an update to that video and things have actually become a lot easier
or I think they have anyway. Now,
the reason we're going to be using Canva is that it is a web based platform,
it's free to use and it's relatively straightforward to use as well.
The learning curve is quite short. So, we're going to create this book.
It's going to be a six by nine inch book with 120 pages.
Now you may ask why?
Well that's because most of the lined journals on Amazon are six by nine inch
is with 120 pages. So step one,
we have to create our cover. And for this,
we're going to need to download a template from KDP.
Now this template includes the area for the back cover,
the front cover and the bit down the middle, which is a spine. So first of all,
when need to go to the KDP platform.
Now it is free and relatively easy to create an account there.
Now in the top menu, click on help. On the help page left hand side menu,
click on format, your paperback. Just scroll down where it says,
download a cover template, just click on the link there.
It will then take you to this page where we need to enter some information.
So binding type, paperback, interior type, black and white, paper type,
white paper, page turn direction, left to right,
measurement uni,t inches, interior trim size. As I mentioned,
this is a six by nine inch book. So that's what we're going to click on.
And page count. As we mentioned, 120.
Then hit calculate dimensions. And next,
what you want to do is click on download template.
And this will obviously download the template to your computer,
which when you open will look like this. Now,
the important numbers we want are these here,
where it says the overall dimensions. And you want to make a note of that,
which is 12.52 by 9.25.
Next we go to the Canva homepage. Again,
it's free to open a free basic account here,
and I'll leave a link to Canva in the description below.
So you can either click on, create a design and then click on custom size.
Or you can just click on custom size. Now this is very important,
and a lot of people do make a mistake here.
What you want to do is click on this box here and change the unit to inches.
If you don't do that, the template won't come out, right?
And when you try to upload it to KDP, it will look odd.
And then we put in those numbers for, from the template,
which was 12.52 by 9.25. Click on create new design.
Now, what we want to do is drag our template that we've downloaded into Canva.
So in the left hand side menu, click on uploads.
Wherever you downloaded those templates to,
just drag the .png version of the template into the
upload box. May take a few seconds, but once it's uploaded,
just drag it into the white box that we've created.
And then just drag that to the top left hand corner.
It will click into place and then just drag down into the bottom right hand
corner, and then just click on the lock symbol in the top right.
Next, left hand side, click on the elements then where it says lines and shapes,
just drag the square over into our book.
Now this is pink at the moment. Don't worry about that.
But what I want you do is just drag that to the top left hand corner and drag
down to the bottom margin of the book and then just drag across.
And what we want to do is drag across to that second dotted line.
So we may need to increase the size of our image just to get this in the right
spot. So you can see here, we're just dragging across to that dotted line.
Then we can change the color of this box and we're going to change it to black
because the back cover of our book is going to be black.
You can choose whatever color you want.
Now I want to make this rectangle that we've just created transparent for the
moment. So top right, click on the transparency button.
And then just adjust that down to around about 30.
Just lock that layer as well. So just click on that lock icon.
So next we want to create the front of our book cover.
So in the elements tab on the left,
you have many choices here of images and graphics.
And also you're not limited to the graphics here on Canva.
You can go to sites like Creative Fabrica or Vecteezy,
which are the two sites that I commonly use,
but you've got many different sites like Envato elements, design cuts,
designbundles.net,
and you can use images and graphics from those sites and drag them across to
the upload box here on Canva and use them on the front cover of your book.
Today I'm going to be using images from Canva itself, and these are free images.
I did a search for stamps,
becasuse I want to create a stamp type themed notebook. Again,
you can create whatever type of notebook you want.
Now when using images on Canva,
you'll notice some of them have this little gold crown with the words pro
written next to it.
Now you can use those If you do of a paid for pro
account. What I'm going to show today,
you can use the images from the free section. Now,
if you do have a free account, but you are desperate to use those pro images,
you can pay for them individually, or you can open a subscription with Canva.
Now, when you do find an image you like you'll notice if you just hover over it,
you've got these three little dots here. If you click on that,
it will give you some information about the image.
But this section here is related to the license of the image.
And you can click on this for more information.
And it will take you to the simple dialogue box,
which tells you about the licensing of images on cCanva.
What I recommend doing is then clicking on this link,
which will take you to the licensing page.
It'll tell you the differences between the free and the pro images.
Here it says what's allowed.
It says here you can use our content for a wide range of personal and commercial
uses. And this one here,
can I sell products on merchandise with my design on it? It says, yes,
all of our photos fonts and graphics can be used to create designs for printing
on products like t-shirts, mugs,
books and other merchandise.
So how I interpret this is that I can use these images on my
books. However, I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
You need to make yourself familiar with the licensing agreement as well and make
yourself satisfied that it's okay to use the images that you are going to use.
And that really applies to any images you use off any stock
photograph websites or sites, like I mentioned, Creative Fabrica.
So I'm going to use these stamps images. They're bright, they're colorful,
and I think they'll make a good design.
So I'm just going to take these and drag each one over to our cover.
You can enlarge them, make them smaller and also adjust the rotation.
And I'm going to use these images just to fill the cover of our book.
Now don't worry if your image goes over the edge of the book or goes over that
transparent black rectangle, we created.
Do bear in mind that if you do go over those aspects of the images will be cut
off. I'm just going to do this, drag them.
Now this one I want under the orange stamp.
So what I'm going to do is click on position and just move this image backwards.
Imagine this image is on a layer and we're just going to move this image under
the other stamp layer. And we're going to continue like so,
just enlarging these, adjusting the angle, moving them into position.
And I'm going to cover my front book cover with these images.
So I'll speed this up a little bit. So here you can see,
I filled the front cover with these images.
Now the transparent rectangle we created, we just want to click on that.
We want to click on the unlock icon,
then click on the transparency button and just increase the transparency
back to 100. Click on position and click on to front. Next,
we want to put a title on our book and we're going to go for something very
adventurous and call our journal a notebook.
So first of all,
we need a rectangle on which we can place our text so that it stands out
from these images of the stamps.
We want to click on the square image and just drag that across,
just dragging upwards. You can adjust the width if you want.
And then just move that around.
And you'll see actually that Canva will center it in this rectangle
of stamp images, which is very useful.
Now I tend to place text on books around a quarter to a
third of the way down which makes it more aesthetically pleasing.
Now in terms of the color of this rectangle, Canva has a very useful feature.
So if we click on the color box here in the top left, we can see here,
it gives us a selection of colors related to the colors
that are already on our image.
So you can create something that's congruent with the colors that are already
there. And I'm going to go for a green color.
Now in order to make this rectangle stand out a bit,
I'm going to click on duplicate, top right hand corner here,
which will give us another rectangle and going to change the color of this.
And we're going to go for yellowy cream color.
Now I want this under the green rectangle that I've just created.
So I'm gonna click on position and click on backward.
This will send it down one layer,
and I'm going to click on that rectangle and using the arrow keys,
just move this up and across.
Now next we need our text on top of the green box. So left hand side,
click on text.
Now there are lots of free fonts you can use here.
For this I want something that matches the type of theme of this cover.
And also you can see that the text that's already used is a type of hand drawn
font. So what I'm going to go for is this one here, where it says Kwanzaa.
So I'm just going to click on that and that will send it across to our cover.
Now I'm just going to position that and then double click where it says,
have a happy and just hit delete. Now,
obviously this says Kwanzaa but we want it to read notebook.
And that's what we're going to type. Now, this is a bit large.
So just double clicking to highlight our text, go to the top here,
where we can decrease or increase the size of our font.
And we're just going to click on the minus button to decrease the size.
And that is already positioned around the center of our box. If it isn't,
you can move it around and adjust it. So that is our front cover. Now,
next we're going to delete that KDP template. So the way to do this,
just left click on your mouse and drag a box around the cover
that we've created. Then at the top, click on group,
then click on position and then click on backwards.
Now this template we had locked.
So just click on the unlock icon and then just hit delete.
The next step now is to download this book cover in PDF format,
which will be ready to upload to the KDP platform. So top right, hit share,
then hit download. And then in the dropdown menu,
click PDF print.
And then just click on download and it will download our book cover to the
computer. So that's the first step done, creating our book cover.
Now we come onto the second step, which is creating the interior.
Now I said that the interior of the book or the book itself is going to be six
by nine inches.
So one would assume that the size of the pages are going to be six by nine
inches, but that's not quite true. And this is the reason why.
Here you can see an interior that I've created before.
And what you notice is that the lines go from one side of the page,
right to the other, which means this page has something called bleed.
So we need to make our page size actually slightly larger than six
by nine inches. Now, during the manufacturing of the book,
the pages will actually be trimmed down to the correct size.
So the correct size of the page we're going to create is actually going to be
6.125 inches by 9.25 inches.
Now I've actually done a video which goes into this and the reasons why in more
depth, which I'll leave a link to down below in the description.
So back to Canva, click on top left where it says home. Now, again,
click on custom size, make sure it says inches and enter
6.125 by 9.25. Okay,
so now we've got our blank page and we need to create our lines.
So left hand side, click on elements.
In the lines and shapes box just click on the line.
Then what we need to do is drag the line it's created over onto our document
and over to the left side. You'll see it just clicks nicely into place.
And then just drag over to the right hand side.
Now this line is quite thick and it's quite dark.
So at the top click on line style.
And I usually turn this down to a weight of two or three,
and then we've got the color of the line.
Now you could have black lines in your notebook if that's what you wanted,
but you'll find that in most lined notebooks and journals,
the lines tend to be gray. So just pick one of these shades of gray.
Now we need to create all our lines. So just click on the line and select it.
If it's not already selected now holding down option, if you're on a Mac,
or alt, if you're on Windows, just left,
click on the line and just drag downwards,
then click on command or control D and you'll find that it
duplicates this line and moves it down
the same amount space that we dragged it down initially. Now we need 23 lines.
So just repeat this 23 times,
you can create more lines if you wish or less lines,
depending on what width you want between the lines. Now, this is quite cool.
Just click on the top line and you can drag that.
Now I would leave a distance of a margin to the top and then click on
the bottom line or the last line and just drag that down. And again,
I wouldn't drag it right down to the bottom.
I would just leave a slight margin there to take into account the
page is going to be trimmed. Now this is a cool feature.
Just drag a box and highlight all these lines,
click on position, then click on vertically,
underneath where it says space evenly. So here we have our first page.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, our interior is going to be 120 pages.
So what you need to do here at the top of the page,
there is a button that says duplicate page. So if you click on that,
it will add another page. So you just keep going through this process,
clicking on duplicate page. Yes, it's a bit tedious,
but you do that until you have your file of 120 pages.
So now we need to download this as a PDF file. Now,
one of the beauties of creating your own interiors is that you are
able to modify it. So after creating lined notebooks,
you can take things a step further and you could delete some of these lines,
add in text, create a prompt journal. You could create boxes on your page,
create logbooks, all different types of books.
And I'll go through that in more detail in another video.
But for the moment we've got our 120 page lined interior.
So top right, click on share, then click on download, drop down menu,
click on PDF print, and then just hit the download button.
And that will download the 120 page PDF file to your
computer. So that's our cover created and that's our interior created.
And these are both ready to upload to Amazon via the KDP platform.
And I'm going to show you how to do that in the follow up video to this,
which will be my next video. And I'll go through entering the title, subtitles,
seven keyword boxes, et cetera, when it comes to the upload process.
And I'm going to leave the link to that video right here. Now,
if I've not created that video quite yet,
then it'll be my older video on uploading to Amazon.
Thank you very much for your time. It is very much appreciated.
Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and until next time, goodbye.