In order to sell books on Amazon,
one of the most crucial steps is getting customers to notice your book and then
to click on it.
And it is a big issue from a lot of the books that I see on Amazon and get asked
to review. So in this video,
I'm going to show you how to create a striking cover that will hopefully
attract customers attention and hopefully get that click which then leads
on to a sale. And this applies whether you're you're selling fiction,
nonfiction, no content or low content books and for any niche as well
for that matter. So if you're looking to self-publish on Amazon,
if you're looking to create a business,
make money online with your computer at home,
then follow along as I show you how to create a really good cover.
Now,
if you've not been to this channel before then welcome my name's 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 this video is going to be the first in a three-part series.
Today I'm going to show you how to create a striking cover using free graphics
that can be used commercially. In the second part,
I'm going to show you how to take images like this and like
this,
and turn them into a book cover like this and like this.
And in the third video,
I'm going to show you how to take those images and use them to create other
products, diversify your income, and hopefully make more money online.
So the book we're going to create today,
or the cover we're going to create today is going to have a vintage,
heritage or retro type theme. And this was inspired by this author, Alice
Cantrell. And these books have I call a kind of heritage,
vintage type theme or botanical type theme. We have a look,
a closer look at one. You can see here,
we've got all these insects on a nature journal and she's created a whole brand
around these styles of books.
And I think they're pretty striking are effective and are
getting sales. Because if we have a look here at one of her books,
she's got one with the best sellers rank of
34,413,
which if we go to the book calculator at tckpublishing.com,
she is selling between 130 to 300 a month,
which at $8.95 means just from that one book alone,
she's making between $400 to $950 a month,
which I think you'll agree is not bad at all.
And when you consider all the other books she's got there,
she's making a decent income from this one brand around this vintage type
theme.
So you can use what I'm going to show you to create the cover of almost any type
of book. So, first of all, we need our cover graphics.
Now we're going to go to this website called heritagetype.com where they sell
fonts and illustrations.
But they have a free download section.
And there's five pages of these different types of graphics that you can
download. And there's a huge variety available here.
So we've got these here, fish butterflies,
and we've got silhouette type images, black and white line drawings.
These unusual animal people here.
Got animals and each package or each download also has a similar color
theme as well, which is very useful for keeping your,
your covers looking unique.
And also having that cohesive look to them. And as I said,
there are five pages of free graphics to download. If we go to the second page,
we can see here, we've got fruit, mushrooms, again,
fish insects, all sorts of different images.
And these are downloadable. Some of them are just PNG images and some of them,
like these here are available to download in PNG
and vector format.
Now the book we're going to create today is going to be a fishing journal.
Is going to have a fish theme. And fortunately for us,
we've got these graphics here that we're going to download.
So I'm just going to click on those and open up the file here,
where our images are downloaded to.
And if we double click on the license we can see here that these are
free to use under the creative commons license and they can be used
commercially.
It does say that they can't guarantee that they're copyright free in every
country, but they have used images that were created many years ago,
I think before sort of 1923 or 1924.
So they should be copyright free. If you want to double-check,
and I suggest you do,
just do something like a reverse image search on Google
images just to check that they aren't copyrighted anywhere else.
So we'll open the folder here or double click on the folder where our fish
images are downloaded to. Just double click on one,
and you can see that's quite a large image there and looks extremely good
quality.
So now we're going to go to our image editing software.
Now I'm going to be doing this in Affinity Designer,
but you can actually do what I'm going to show you in Canva,
Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop,
Inkscape Gravit Designer.
Almost any image editing software that you can think of because it's a
straightforward process that we're going to do.
So I'm going to open Affinity Designer and we're going to need to create a new
document. Now this document is going to be the template for our book cover,
and it's going to include the front cover, the back cover and the spine.
Now the best place to get a template for this is bookow.com.
So if you go over there,
you'll see this bit here where it says KDP cover template generator.
Just click on that.
It'll take you to the page where you can create your own template.
So this is going to be a six by nine inch book with 120 pages.
So we put in width six, height nine number pages,
120. We go down here, put in our email address,
click on consent to email and then email the cover template.
And you will be emailed a template like this and this
here in the top left-hand corner is the most important part because this will
give us the size of our template,
which is 12.52 inches by 9.25.
So we go ahead and just put in that in our dimensions boxes here,
12.52 wide.
Make sure you put in inches the correct unit and 9.25 and click
on create. And we have our page here. Now,
if you're doing this on Canva, I'm just going to give you a little tip.
When you go over to custom size to create your, your page,
make sure you click here where it says px, that's for pixels,
and click on inches, and then put your dimensions in these boxes.
It's a common problem that people don't change it to inches leave it as pixels
they put in the dimensions,
and then when they try to upload it to the KDP platform,
it comes out all wrong. So there's just a little pro tip for you.
So we're over onto our blank page. Now,
what I normally like to do is just click on the rectangle tool,
start in one corner and just drag.
And we've got ourselves a grayish colored rectangle here,
and I'm going to change the color of that. I'm going to do that on our sliders.
So I'm just going to adjust these and we're going to have a slightly yellowy,
light green color.
And then I'm just going to drag in the template that we downloaded on top of
that and using the move tool, just drag that into the correct position. Now,
if we see in the layers panel that is above our college rectangle,
that we've just created and we're going to make the layer,
with our template on just invisible for the moment.
So the next thing we need to do is start dragging across the images of the fish
that we downloaded from heritage type.com. We're going to drag each one across.
Now, all these are probably going to be a bit big,
so I'm just going to resize them slightly.
I'm just going to place them on the cover like so.
And you can place these wherever you want.
There's no particular formula that I'm using.
Whatever looks aesthetically pleasing.
But there's one thing I will say.
And that is just leave a space over the right-hand side here for our title.
[Inaudible].
Now I don't want all the fishes pointing in the same direction.
So I want some pointing to the left.
So the way to do that is just click on the fish with your left mouse click,
then right click go to transform and click on flip
horizontal.
And you can see that's turned the fish around and we can place that anywhere
we like. Maybe on the other side of the page like that.
So I won't bore you to death with dragging all the pictures of these fish
across. I'll do that,
and then come back to you when I've dragged all the images across.
So you'll see here, we've got our background and we've got our fish,
most pointing to the right-hand side, and some point onto the left.
And you'll notice that these go across from the back cover across the spine and
into the front cover,
which is fine because once this image is folded into a book,
it'll look quite good. You'll have fish on both the back cover and front cover.
Now, as you can see, we've got this space here,
which is where we're going to put our text.
And the title of this book is going to be fishing journal.
Highly original I know. So what we need to do is click on the text tool,
go over to where we're going to put our text and just type in fishing.
And we're going to increase the size of that slightly.
So I'm going to hold down command or control and just drag and enlarge.
And then what I'm going to do is change the font.
Now for these types of journals, for the more vintage type journals,
I prefer a hand-drawn type font.
You can use more of a classical serif font if you like,
but I do quite like the hand-drawn type fonts and it can be a hand-drawn serif
type font as well. But for this,
we're going to use one called Beverly Serif and there we have it.
So I'm going to hold down command while I left click and just enlarge that
slightly. So underneath that, we're going to write the word fishing.
So I'm just going to click on option,
click on fishing and just drag downwards.
Then double click on that and type in journal.
Click on the move tool and then just click on or move our
word.
And you'll see here that actually Affinity Designer will center the
word journal with our word fishing.
And I'm just going to use the arrow keys just to move that up slightly.
So I think I'd agree. That looks quite good. Now in terms of color,
that's in black.
I think we're going to change the color slightly and using the sliders up here,
we're going to adjust the color.
I think we'll have that as a brown color,
which I think looks better for this particular book.
So there we have it that's the cover finished.
So this is what the actual book cover will look like on Amazon,
which I think you'll agree. It looks pretty good. And you can see how quick,
easy and simple it is to create one of these and it's free as well and
can be done in free software. So it's a winner on all accounts.
And as I said in the next video, we're going to take things a bit further,
a bit more advanced,
which is useful in building up skills to create different types of covers.
I'm going to show you how to use a catalog of over a million free
images to create unique books. Again,
those images will be copyright free and you'll be able to use them commercially,
which is good. And also in that video,
I'm going to create two covers and I'm going to give those two covers away to
two winners who watch the video.
So if you're interested in getting a free cover and want to be in with a chance
of getting that,
then make sure you click on the subscribe and click on the notification bell
and also turn notifications on.
So you do receive notification of when that video is released.
Now if you wondering or what niche do I create these books in?
And you're trying to think of some ideas, then watch this video next,
where I give you my top 10 niches and you can use this technique to create
covers for those niches. I hope you found this content useful.
Thank you very much for watching. Thank you much for your time.
It's very much appreciated. And until next time goodbye.