In this video,
I'm going to give you a super quick way of creating a KDP coloring book
to self-publish on Amazon. Now,
the type of book I'm gonna show you how to create sells extremely well.
So if you are looking to make a side income or full-time income,
self-publishing on Amazon,
then follow along as I show you how to create one of these. Now,
if you're not 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 with the thumbs up,
hit the subscribe button and smash that notification bell to receive
notification of when I produced more videos like this. Now, earlier this year,
I did a video on how to create the interior of a coloring book using
quotes. But that process involved going out,
finding suitable quotes or funny sayings,
and then finding a font or attractive fonts that you could combine
together to then create the interior of the book.
But the solution I've got for you today solves those two problems.
Becasue I've got a ready source of quotes and sayings in attractive designs that
are ready to use to create the interiors of coloring books.
Here on Amazon we've got some examples of the types of book we are going to
create, and I've just put in quote coloring book into the search bar.
And this is what we find. Now,
if we look at this first book straight away it'ss got a bestsellers rank of
597. So if you put that into the book sales calculator,
we can see it's selling between 3,000 to 6,000 books a
month. So you can see how well this is selling. And for the majority of people,
this one book would be a full time income. Now you may say, well,
this book is being published by a publishing house, which is correct. However,
if we go along,
we can see that there are books here that are published on KDP,
including these two. And if we scroll down,
these four are all being published on KDP. And again,
look at the bestsellers ranks. All low, all selling very we well. Now,
if we look inside one of these books,
we can see it consists of two main components.
One is the patterned background and the other is the quote or saying
on a black background, which makes it stand out.
And also you've got these little decorative flourishes.
Now to get this sort of effect, it would take some skill.
Some skill in combining fonts together that work well or skill
in lettering to,
to create these sayings and quotes in these particular designs.
And also adding in those decorative flourishes. However,
there is a site where we can get these already made and that site is Creative
Fabrica. Now ou could probably find similar on sites like design cuts or
designbundles.net, but I like Creative Fabrica.
It's my go-to site for images, fonts,
and KDP interiors. Now at the moment, they are doing a special deal,
which is also very good and that's $1 for the first month and that's complete
access to everything. And after that, it's $19 a month,
which is what I actually pay. And that for that first month you get access,
as I said to everything. So you could really fill your boots with images,
fonts and interiors. Now a small disclaimer,
I am affiliate for Creative Fabrica.
So if you do click on the link down below in the description,
I do receive a small commission, which does help fund this channel. Now,
in order to get what we're looking for,
we need to use a particular search term,
and that is SVG bundle.
Now SVG will give us all results of ,svg files,
which are vector files, which is what we need to create,
what we're going to create today.
And the software we're going to use with these .svg files are
vector editing, softwares like Affinity Designer,
Adobe Illustrator,
or free software like Inkscape and Gravit Designer.
But don't let the idea of vector graphics put you off.
It does sound scary to some, but what I'm gonna show you really is quite simple.
Now what I suggest doing, rather than just putting in SVG bundle,
I would combine that term with a niche word,
like dog SVG bundle, as we can see here,
or cat SVG bundle or camping SVG bundle.
And when you do this,
you can see that it brings up all these quotes and sayings in
these nice designs.
If you have a closer look here at this funny dog quotes bundle,
we can see we've got these saying or quotes,
and it's rather attractive lettering,
combination of fonts that work well together with these decorative flourishes.
So they're already made, ready to use.
Now a little pro tip when you're doing your search,
make sure you tick this box here,
where it says print on demand so that all the results you get can be used
in the interiors of your books.
Now I showed you some examples of different niches,
but you could find all sorts and you could do things like yoga,SVG bundle
mother's day father's day, Christmas, Halloween, Easter.
You could just try and experiment with lots of different keywords for lots of
different niches and see what comes up. But make sure you do have the,
the commercial and print on demand usage. So we're gonna use these here,
which is the funny dog SVG bundle. So I went ahead and clicked on download.
Now I am going to be using Affinity Designer today,
which is my favorite bit of software for creating book covers and interiors.
So once that's downloaded,
we go to our software program that we're going to use,
and we need to set up our page. So do this by going to file,
clicking on new. And you'll have a box that appears like this,
very similar to whatever software you're using.
And we need to set our dimensions of the page.
We need page width and page height,
and this is going to be for a 8.5 by 11 inch book.
Now the pattern on each page is going to go to the edges of the page.
So these pages are going to have bleed.
So the actual size of the document we need to create needs to be
8.625 inches by 11.25 inches.
I've set the dots per inch to 300 and obviously the document unit to inches.
And then we just click on create, and we get our blank page.
Then the next thing we need to do is go to where we've downloaded our .svg
images, pick one, and then just drag it into our software program.
And here it'll automatically open.
Then we just need to create a bounding box holding down the left mouse click and
dragging.
We put a box around all the text and then hit command C
or control C to copy.
Then we go to our page and click command V or control V to paste and
just drag that into position somewhere near the center.
Doesn't have to be exactly in the center at the moment.
Then we're just going to increase the size of this slightly by holding down
shift and dragging. And again, moving it back to the center. Now,
whilst you've still got the bounding box around it, if not create another one,
we will want to click on command G or control G to group
all these different components. Then in the right hand side,
in the layers panel,
we need to right click on our layer and click on duplicate.
Now we're going to rename our layers. So the top layer,
we're going to call quote and in the bottom layer,
just click on it. We're going to call background. Okay.
Now click on the quote layer,
then go to the color tab at the top or wherever it is on your software program.
Click on the fill button. And then here,
I'm just gonna drag the slider across to white.
So you'll see text may disappear. We've got a very faint outline.
Then we need to click on our background layer this time,
click on the stroke button, then click on the stroke tab.
And now we want to increase the thickness of our stroke and we're going to
increase this to around 40 or to whatever looks good. Okay.
So there you can see, we've got our text on our black background,
so already it's starting to look good. The next thing we need is our background.
So again, go to Creative Fabrica and here I've just done a search for patterned
background. You could do SVG pattern background,
pattern background collections, and then you can see what comes up. Here,
I quite like these by Manifesto Design. And again,
they are print on demand usage allowed. So I went ahead and downloaded those.
Now, if you do go ahead and click on view profile,
you'll see what other designs the artist has.
And you can see they've got other collections of backgrounds here.
So you've got lots that you can use to create the interior pages of your book.
So now you need to go and find where you've downloaded it and then just drag it
into the page that you've just created. Now in the layers panel,
on the right hand side,
we need to just drag this down to the bottom below our background layer,
and then just drag it into the top left hand corner or around the top left hand
corner, holding down command or control just en arge,
and then just drag into position.
And there you can see we've got a page which looks pretty good.
Now this is going to be the first page in our book.
It's going to be the right hand side page. Now the content we've got here,
which is the main content of the page we need to make sure is within
the margins of the page so that it doesn't get cut off when the page is
trimmed.
And so you don't get errors when you try to upload the book or the interior
to Amazon. So how do we set the margins? Well,
I've got a simple solution for you. If you go to my Gumroad shop,
which I'll leave a link to in the description again,
go and find the KDP Margin Taemplates, which are free.
So you go head and download those.
Now you will be given all these different options for all the different
downloads for the different sizes of pages and whether the pages have bleed or
no bleed. For this example, we're going to download these two templates here,
which is the left and right page of the 8.625 by
11.25 pages with bleed.
When you've done that go and take the template, in this case,
it's the right side template,
and just drag it into Dffinity designer or whatever you're using.
And then just drag it into position on the page.
Now this will click into place because I've got this little magnet button here
at the top selected. Then in the layers panel,
drag that down to above the patterned background.
So you can see we've got our main content,
which needs to be within these pink borders. So in fact,
we can just select those two layers of the quote and the background.
We can increase that and move it to the center. Now,
this is exactly in the centre, both horizontally and vertically.
But what I would suggest doing rather than have it in the center vertically is
just moving it up slightly because it does make
it more aesthetically pleasing and more natural to the eye.
Then we can either untick our template or just drag it down to
the bin. And there we have our page all set up.
The next thing we need to do is export this as a .png file.
So just go click on file, click on export,
make sure PNG is selected and click on export,
and that will download it to your computer. Now,
in order to create the interior, you need to create it in software,
such as Keynote or PowerPoint.
Now I've created all my books with Leynote and or
PowerPoint. Now, some people do say, well,
that's not very professional for creating a book. Well, it works. It's simple.
And I get very few errors and a lot of my books sell well.
And in fact, I'm making a full time income from my books.
So I think, yes, it is professional. However, if you wanted to,
to create your interior using more professionals, software suites, likeAdobe
Indesign or Affinity Publisher, then go right ahead and do that.
So I'm going to open Keynote.
Now we need to set up pace the right dimensions. In Keynote this is points.
So for an 8.625 by 11.25,
that's 621 points by 810 points.
If you're in PowerPoint, you can set that as inches.
And I've got the first page here,
which is the right hand side page and what you can do if you want to then create
all the pages of your book, just click on command C or control C to copy,
and then just paste and just paste for the number of pages you want in your
book. In this case, we can set it at, I don;' know, say 60.
So we go back to the first page and all we need to do is drag in that .png file
we created. Just drag it into place, drop it,
and then just move it. And it will usually click into place.
And there we have the first page of our book.
Often what a lot people do is leave the page behind
the coloring page blank. So the next page you would go to,
to fill in would be page number three, page number five and so on.
And that's because of the potential bleed of colors through to
the other side of the page when people are coloring them in.
So then you can go and repeat the process that I've just showed you
to create page two, page three, page four and onwards,
and you could create a coloring book with all funny dog related quotes,
cat related quotes, just funny quotes in general,
swear words or swear quotes, sarcastic quotes, anything that you can think of.
That's where your imagination comes into play. Now what about the cover?
Well we can create an attractive cover design using one of the
interiors that we create. I'll show you. So we're back in Affinity Designer.
And what you can do is just click on one of the words or double click,
and that will highlight or put a box around one of the words.
We can go to our color box. Now here, it's got the stroke as red.
So we want that as an invisible stroke.
So we'll just click on that little button there.
Then we want to make sure that fill is selected. Now using the sliders,
I move L to 50,
I move the S to right across to 100 and then we can change the color.
And you can see, we can have a nice attractive color there,
and we can do the same for these other words. Again, if we select this one here,
move the sliders, we can change the color as before and here.
We could leave it as red.
And have I already done one here just as a quick mockup, and you could write a
subtitle down below the book, a dog lovers, funny quote coloring book.
I've left the background blank here,
but probably worthwhile coloring the elements of those as well to make an
attractive looking cover very similar to the ones that you see here
on Amazon.
So they attract the customer's attention and hopefully get clicks and hopefully
get you some sales. Now, in terms of the number of pages for a book,
what I suggest doing is having a look at the,
the number of pages in all these books and just taking an average.
This one's 108 pages. This ones 82 pages, this ones hundred and three pages.
So somewhere between 80 to a hundred pages would probably be adequate for one of
these types of books. Now,
if you are starting out in this whole KDP book publishing business,
then I've got a playlist here which runs through all the different parts of the
process of creating books and uploading books. I do hope you found that useful.
Thank you very much for your time. It really is very much appreciated.
Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and until next time, goodbye.