In order to sell books on Amazon, a good cover is essential.
It needs to stand out from the rest of the books and it needs to catch a
customer's attention.
And nowhere is this more important than with coloring books?
If we have a look on Amazon, we can see here, all these bright,
interesting looking images and they're colorful.
So this is what we're going to do today.
I'm going to show you how to create a colorful and vibrant coloring
book cover like this, which will hopefully catch customers attention.
Now we're going to need vector editing software with the technique I'm going to
be showing you how to use today.
I'm going to be doing it in Affinity Designer.
Other Software that I do recommend is Adobe Illustrator.
Now that's a subscription payment software.
Affinity Designer is a one-off payment. So that's the advantage of that.
There is free software, however, there's Inkscape,
and there's the basic version of Gravit Designer. Now,
in order to create this book cover, we need four main components.
One is the template for the book cover.
That includes the size of the book cover template.
And that includes the area for the back cover,
the front cover and the spine down the middle.
We're going to need a background pattern.
We're going to need a foreground image,
and we're also going to need text on the book.
So we need to get our template first of all.
So what you need to do log into your KDP account,
click on the help button at the top here, then left hand side,
click on format your paper book,
and you click on cover calculator and templates here.
And then you have to enter the information.
So this is going to be a paperback interior type is standard black and white
paper type, white paper, page turn direction, left to right, measurement unit,
inches. Interior trim size.
Now most books coloring books are 8.5 by 11 inches.
So that's what we're going to choose. And the page count,
I'm going to make that 60 pages. So we'll just enter 60,
then click on calculate dimensions and then click on download template,
which will download the template to your computer.
And this is the template that we've just downloaded. Now,
the important component that we need here is where it says overall dimensions.
And this is going to be the size of the file that we're going to open up on
Affinity Designer. So I'm just going to make a note of that. Okay,
so here we are in Affinity Designer.
I've clicked on file new and it'll open this dialogue box.
And here we put in the size of our template,
which is a width of 17.385 by a height of
11.25.
I keep the color profile as sRGB and the DPI is
400. That has to be a minimum of 300 and then click on create.
So this is our blank document.
Now what we need to do is drag in that template that we just downloaded.
And we drag in the .png format.
So we can shrink that down and just drag it into place. Okay.
So now in the layers panel on the right hand side,
we just want to lock this layer. So you can see here,
we've got this little lock icon, just click on that.
Now the next thing we need to do is to create the back cover
components. And so I'm just going to click on the rectangle create tool,
start in the top left hand corner and just drag across.
Now I'm going to enlarge this and I'm going to drag this across to that blue
dotted line. Now you can choose whatever color you like.
I'm going to have this in black.
I'm going to click on the fill button in the top right hand corner here and just
move the slider to black. Now the sliders we've got here are HSL,
hue, saturation and luminance. Now you can see here,
we've got the stroke as black.
I'm just going to tick on this to make the stroke invisible. Okay.
So the next thing we need are our front cover components,
and I'm going to go to Creative Fabrica for this.
And what I always do is just tick on this little box here,
where it says print on demand so that we can be sure that we can use these
commercially and use them in print on demand products like our books.
Now this is going to be a mother's day book.
So what I searched for was mother svg bundle.
You can also search search for mother quote, bundle.
Those two searches will tend to bring up all these different bundles,
as you can see here. Now,
the important thing about these images is that we need them vector format,
and that is in either .ai, .svg or .eps
format. This is important. When you're on somewhere like creative Fabrica,
which by the way, I'll leave a link to that down below in the description.
They are doing a $1 special deal for the first month.
So you could go and download loads. But if we click on this one,
you can see here, if we scroll down,
it tells us what format the downloadable files are going to be in.
I'm going to go ahead and download those.
Then we go back to Affinity Designer and just pick one of those quotes
and drag it in to your software.
Now what you need to do left click on the house,
just drag and create a bounding box around all the different components.
Click on command C or control C to copy. Then go back to your book,
cover command V or control V to paste. Just drag that over,
holding down the shift button, just reduce or change the size of it.
The main content of the book cover has to be within this pink
border because when the book is created,
there's a risk that anything touching that pink border could get trimmed off.
Now I'm just going to reduce that ever so slightly and place that around the
middle of that white box. Now in the right hand side layers panel,
you'll see all these different layers highlighted. If they're not,
then just hold down shift and click on each layer.
Then click on command G or control G to group those layers together.
And we're going to call this layer quote.
Then right click on that layer on duplicate.
And then on the layer you've just created or the bottom layer of these two
quote. Layers, just click on it and rename it. We're going to call this shadow.
Now, click on the quote layer and then go to the color tab in the top right hand
side. And here we've got two buttons here,
one for the fill color and one for the stroke color.
So we want to choose the fill color button and we want to move the slider to
white.
Now it looks like it's disappeared and you can see a faint outline around that.
Right hand side layers panel, click on the shadow layer.
And this time we want to click on the stroke button and move the
slider to black. Then click on the stroke tab.
Now here we have a slider which can control the width of the stroke of the
shadow layer.
And if we move that we can see it creates this black
outline around our text.
So just increase that to something that looks reasonable. Okay.
Next thing we need to do is add color to our text.
Now click on the quote layer on the right hand side.
Now what you need to do is ungroup this layer.
So click on shift command G or shift control G and you'll see,
it ungroups those layers. So we've got these three layers here.
Now we're going to click on the layer where it says best, go to our color tab,
click on the fill button. Then on our sliders,
move the luminance to 50,
saturation to 100 and you can see here. Now, if we slide the hue,
we can change the color of our text. We're just going to have this as red.
Next click on the area where it says mom,
or you could click on the layers panel on the right hand side, where it says,
mom, click on the fill button. Sliders like before,
and this time we're going to move the hu. To a green color,
then click on where it says ever again. That's highlighted in the layers panel,
click on the fill button, move the sliders like before.
And this time we're going to have this in a pink color. Now,
the next thing we're going to do is add a gradient effect that gives the tech a
little bit more depth.
So again like before click on best click on the effects button,
click on or tick gradient overlay and click on this little cog here where it
says layer effects. I'm going to move this over so we can see it. Now,
the gradient, we need to rotate that to 90 degrees. And then in blend mode,
click on hard light. Now we can change the opacity. And we can see,
we can add a slight shadow to the base of the text.
And we'll repeat that for the next components of the image. Again,
click on gradient overlay, angle 90 degrees,
blend mode, hard light,
and then just move the slider until it looks good.
And I'll quickly repeat that for the, the next component. Okay.
So next we need our third component of the book cover.
And that is the background image. Now for this,
I'm actually going to go over to Vecteezy and I've put in zentangle.
The reason I do this is that so many different patterns come up.
Now I'm going to choose this particular one.
And this is by an artist called Kuntal Parmar who has lots
of different patterns. And I can thoroughly recommend these.
So I'm going to choose this one and just click on download to download it to
your computer. Back to Affinity Designer.
And this time I'm going to drag the .eps,
which is a vector image into Affinity Designer.
So like we did before just drag a bounding box around that image,
command C or control C to copy,
go to our cove,r command V or control V to paste. Go back to our layers panel.
And you can see our background image is highlighted here.
We're going to rename this background and now just left click on that layer
and drag it down to just above our template layer and
below the black rectangle. So you can see here,
we've got our background below our text. And if you zoom out,
you can actually also holding down shift,
change the size of this and move it until you come up with something that looks
good. So what I want to do now is make this background really pop.
So while it's highlighted, while that layer is highlighted,
click on this adjustments button here. Scroll
down and click on vibrance.
And we can move the slider so we could move the vibrance up and
then also move the saturation up and you can see it'll go from black
and white all the way up to really bright saturated image.
Don't want to overdo it too much, just enough, make it look good,
but not over compete with the foreground image.
And next we're going to need some text on our book.
Now the title of your book has to go somewhere on the front cover or the spine
of the book. Now this is only 60 pages.
So that's below the minimum number of pages whereby we can put the text on the
spine. So the title of the book is actually going to go on the front cover.
Now we could call our book best mom ever,
but I like to use a keyword which helps with the search,
helps getting it found on Amazon.
So we're gonna call this mother's day coloring book. So left hand side,
click on the text tool. Then click on our cover.
And I'm just gonna type in mother's day
coloring book. I'm just going to enlarge that,
move it into the center like so.
If you want to make sure it is within that pink border on the template,
you can make the background layer invisible just to check.
And there you can see that's nicely in place. Now,
before I switch to the background back on we'll change this text to Krungthep,
which I think is a great font for book covers.
Then go over to the right hand side to that layer.
Right click on it and click duplicate. Then in the top layer,
we're going to click on the fill button, move the slider to white,
and you'll see, it looks like it almost disappears.
Then click on the layer below, that we just created.
And this time click on the stroke button, move the slider to black,
then click on the stroke tab and increase the width.
And then just increase that to something that looks good.
I think that looks okay. Now in the right hand side layers panel,
we can tick our background layer to turn it back on.
And there we have our book cover.
So the next thing we need to do is now turn this into a PDF file.
So click on file, click on export, click on PDF.
Now usually I keep this as PDF for print and make sure that the DPI is at 300.
That's the minimum requirements for Amazon. Click on export and name,
this book cover or whatever you want to call it and save.
And that will export. And now if we go to where we've downloaded that,
just click on it and you can see this is our book cover PDF,
and that's ready to upload to the KDP platform along with your
interior that you've created. And also, you know,
writing in the other components titles, subtitles, keywords, et cetera.
And that will then obviously create your coloring book.
So I hope found that useful.
If you've not watched the video yet on how to create the interior,
then I'll leave a link to that video here. Thank you much for your time.
It's very much appreciated.
Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and until next time goodbye.