In this video,
I'm going to tell you why I switched to Affinity Designer to
create my no content and low content books. And why,
if you're serious about this business of self publishing and creating notebooks,
journals, book covers and interiors,
you should too if you want your books to stand out,
make sales conversions,
and ultimately make money publishing your books on Amazon. Now,
if you've not been here before then welcome to my channel.
My name is Paul Marles, and I do videos on how to make it, keep it and grow it.
And that's your money I'm talking about. And if you do like videos like that,
then please do give it a thumbs up,
hit the subscribe button and smash that notification bell to receive
notification of when I produce more videos like this. Now,
before we look at this piece of software,
I just want you to know that this is not a sponsored video and nor am I an
affiliate for it.
It's just a great piece of software that I've recently started using that has
some really good features that I'll show you in a moment.
And they are running what I consider an incredible deal on it at the moment,
which again, I'll tell you about later. So,
most of my books I've created using Adobe Illustrator.
It's got a big learning curve, but I do love using it.
And it's got loads of features. In fact,
probably way more than what I actually need and probably what you'd need to
create books also.
I've also done videos on where I've created interiors and covers using free
software, such as Canva, Inkscape and Gravit Designer,
although to unlock all the features on Gravit Designer you do have to pay.
You can use them all to create good covers and interiors and even use something
like PowerPoint or Keynote if you really want to.
But using fully featured dedicated software could not only speed up the
process,
but also give you some extra features that that can add an edge to the
design of your books and help you get those sales.
So I first came across Affinity Designer when I was watching some YouTube videos
on creating YouTube thumbnails.
And I was so impressed at how easy it seemed to be to use and how
quickly you could create stunning designs. So I went ahead and bought it.
Created quite a few YouTube thumbnails with it,
and then started using it to create book covers and interiors.
And I absolutely love it. It's easy to use.
And the learning curve is actually pretty small.
Now I'm not an expert with Affinity Designer.
I've only started using it myself and I'm no expert in using other sort of
graphic design software in general,
but I know the features I want and need to create good covers and
interiors. So here's why I like it and think you will too.
And I'll also tell you about one feature that's missing.
That may be important to you, but if that's the case,
I'll show you a quick work around. So first of all,
it's like a cross between Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop in
that it will handle vector images and pixel images or raster images.
I prefer using vector images because they are scalable and have infinite
resolution.
Now basically what that means is that you can enlarge them like
this without the image deteriorating and
becoming pixelated like this.
They are also easily manipulated like this.
So you can easily change their shapes and create sort of new images
if you like. If we look here in the top left hand corner,
you can switch between designer persona as it's called with features
optimized for handling vectors and the pixel
persona with features optimized for handling pixel
images, or as I've just said, raster images.
So it's like two pieces of software in one that you can quickly switch between.
You can see here as I switched between them,
the menu of tools on the left.
Changes. Now most of the.
Functions I need to create books are found in the actual designer
persona.
That is the vector editing part of the piece of
software. Now it's also called cross platform,
which means you can not only use it on Mac or Windows, but also on the iPad,
which I know a lot of you guys use to create your books and have been looking
for software that you can use on a tablet that's got lots of features.
Now it's easy to apply effects to your text and images with this simple menu
here.
The most common ones I use are outer shadow and outer
glow. And when you click on them,
you're not faced with loads of different settings. As you can see here,
it looks pretty straightforward.
For creating a text shadow you've just got these five parameters,
which are easily understandable. Same goes for outer glow,
just select the color, opacity and radius.
It all seems pretty simple. I find with other software,
there are lots of other parameters available,
which just complicates matters and are probably not actually needed by
most designers. Now,
you've also got these styles here that you can quickly apply to
text and then alter the parameters to create something
unique and stunning. So we could create something like this,
a black notebook cover with this fancy gold effect text,
as you can see here.
It's also very easy to turn text into a vector and change
it. Just click on convert to curves here,
then click on the node tool on the left menu and then just
alter the shape.
So you can create a unique style font.
Now here's a neat thing you can do with text that I've not come across before,
although I'm sure someone will tell me you can do it. But this is so quick.
If we have some text like this here and have a pattern,
look at how quickly you can apply that pattern to the text.
Just drag that layer on top of the text,
then just drag the text layer like so,
and they have your pattern applied to your text.
Now just think of the things you could actually do with that.
Now creating a gradient color background is also really quick and
easy. You just create a rectangle or whatever shape you want,
click on the gradient tool, drag it across,
and then it's really easy to change the colors and alter the gradient. Yes,
I know you can do that in other software,
but this is really quick and easy. Now,
if you do a lot of work with photographs and even use them to create covers.
I've done that and I've created covers using photographs.
Then you can purchase Affinity Photo. Also.
Now it's the equivalent of Adobe Lightroom.
But what I like about it is that if you create something in Affinity Photo,
you can easily send it through to Designer by just clicking on the file file
menu and clicking on edit in Designer.
Now using it to create and change. Interiors is also very easy.
This is the free log book template interior that you can download from my
Gumroad shop here.
The link to the Gumroad shop is down below in the description.
You can actually use this as the basis to create virtually any sort of log book
interior you like.
And most of the money I actually make with low content books is from
creating logbooks. They're easy to create.
Don't require fancy graphic design skills,
have less competition than a lot of popular niches and also sell very well.
Here
you can see it's easy to move the lines around and you can evenly distribute
them so the line spacing between the lines is equal.
Now I'll give you one tip, click on preferences here,
which will open this menu.
Then click here where it says select object when intersects with
selection marquee.
So when you drag your bounding box over components of an image,
it will just select those components and then you can make changes to them. Now,
before we get onto one of the, what I think is a huge advantage of the software,
which you want to take advantage of,
I just want to mention one thing you can't do with the software and that's
image trace. If we go over to Adobe Illustrator, I'll show you what I mean.
Here we have our pixel image and if I enlarge it,
you can see it becomes pixelated as it's a raster image.
However, if we click image trace,
then on 16 bit color and then on expand,
we now have a vector image.
Then if we make the stroke black and increase the thickness here,
then we've now created an image that can be used in a coloring book.
However,
there is a get around and that is using third-party software.
Here's a list of software that will achieve this result. Some are free,
some are paid. Okay.
So now to one of the big advantages of this software,
the pricing.
There's just the one payment to make unlike the Adobe software suite,
which is on a subscription basis. Now this is big.
Particularly if you want to save money or you don't like monthly payments.
And at the moment they're offering their software at half their normal price.
Now I paid full price, but it's currently half price at £23.99,
Which is about $30,
which is a bargain really for the features it offers. I mean,
if you look at something like the Adobe suite,
I was paying something like $60 a month.
Now you can also try it out on a free trial.
I only recommend software and services that I actually use,
and this is one of them. So go take a look if you like the sound of it.
If you want to see me in action,
using it to create a coloring book interior then watch this video next,
where I walk you through the process of creating an interior.
Now don't forget to hit the subscribe button if you want more videos like this
on self publishing. Thank you for your time. It's much appreciated.
And until next time, goodbye.