Whether you're creating low content books or written work,
getting your book rejected or KDP not even letting you get that far
due to in the previous stage is a real pain.
And it's frustrating because a lot of the time it's difficult to even tell what
you've done wrong. Well, in this video,
I'm going to tell you what the biggest issue is and give away a free
resource that will hopefully stop you running into to these problems in the
future and allow your book to be properly formatted. Sound good?
Then let's go. Now, if you've not been here before then welcome to the 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 get a thumbs up,
hit the subscribe button and smash that notification bell to receive
notification of when I produce more videos like this. Okay.
So what is the biggest problem? Well,
based on all the comments and questions I get,
it's around the formatting of the interior of the book. And in particular,
the margins. You see in order to get your books accepted,
your main content has to be within this invisible boundary on the
page,
or you get these errors appear when you hit the launch previewer after uploading
your cover and interior designs.
Or sometimes it just comes as a rejection after hitting publish.
The problem is these margins are invisible and the size
varies depending on the page size, whether your book has bleed or no bleed,
the page numbers,
and whether we are looking at odd or even numbered pages. That,
is the left page or the right-hand side page when you,
when you're looking at the book.
And when you get the error message on the preview,
it's often difficult to understand what it actually means.
I know I have difficulty, but that's probably just me.
So to solve this problem,
I've created these margin templates and I've been using them for the last two
years.
And I'm going to give them away to you and are free to download from my Gumroad
shop, which you can find in the link below, in the description.
And hopefully they will stop you making these errors in the first place and save
you much of your most valuable asset, which is time.
So I'll show you what they are and how to use them.
So first of all go to my Gumroad shop. Again,
the link is in the description below.
And here is what the sales page looks like.
Here are the templates where you can download them.
There are eight in total and they are books with 24 to
150 pages, which covers most books.
They are for dimensions 6 by 9 inches or 8.5 by 11
inches and for books with bleed or no bleed. And you can see,
they are designed for the left, which are the even numbered pages and the right,
which are the odd numbered pages.
So let's take a look at an example.
Now this is going to be for six by nine inch with no bleed. Now,
just a quick recap.
Your book has no bleed if the content like this here on the left
does not go to the edge of the page.
Or it has bleed if it has a pattern or images that go
to the edge of the page, like this one here. Now,
the sizes of the pages with bleed are slightly bigger than those without bleed.
Now, if you want to learn more about bleed and margins,
I'll leave a link above to a video I recently did on this.
Now for the example I'm going to show you in a moment I'm going to be using
Affinity Designer, but these templates can be used in any image,
editing software, such as Adobe illustrator, Photoshop, Gravit Designer,
Inkscape and also Indesign and Affinity Publisher,
and also free web based software, such as Canva,
which I'll show you a bit later on in this video.
And they can be used for both written content and low content
books. Now in this example, I'm going to show you today,
I've downloaded the templates we're going to use,
and I've created this blank page,
which is 6 by 9 inches. Now, first of all,
we're going to do the left-hand side page.
Then I'll quickly show you about the process with the right hand side page,
which is very similar. So we've got the blank page here.
Now you need to find where you've downloaded the PNG files,
the .PNG files. So here they are.
And it's just a simple case of dragging them across into your image editing
software, and then dragging them into place. Now,
in order for your page to be properly formatted,
the content has to be within these margins.
That is within this pinky red border.
So what you need to do is take your content. In this case,
we're going to use this running log interior example,
just command C or control C to copy,
go to the page with the template on and just paste and then position
it wherever you like within this pinky red border. Now,
if you were to do something like this, I'll enlarge it and move it over.
You can see here that the content overlaps this pinky red border. Now,
if you were to try upload this to the KDP platform,
you would get the error saying that the content is outside the margins.
So you need to adjust the size and adjust the position.
You can use your arrow keys or just drag it,
and you can be left with something like so.
So we can see here that the content is within this red pinky margin.
So then all you need to do is just click on the template and you
can untick it to hide it,
or you can simply just delete it like so. And there,
we have our first page and we know for a fact that this content is now within
the margins. So if we go to other page,
which will be the right-hand side page, we just go through the same process,
find our template. And here we have here, the the right template,
no bleed 6 by 9 inches.
So we just drag that one across and drag that into position.
Again, find where your content is that you want to put in the page, copy,
go to the template paste,
position that wherever you want and you could increase it like so.
Probably a better way to do it, to make sure everything is consistent,
is go to the first page you've created. Just click on the content,
copy that, then go to your other page, paste that,
and just using the arrow keys or just dragging, just move it into place.
Therefore, you know,
that the content within the margin is the same size on both
pages. And again,
just a case then of deleting or unticking the template so it
disappears. And there you have your two pages and you can then, or what I do,
is copy each of those pages into something like Keynote or PowerPoint
to create the whole 120 page PDF file.
I've shown you how to do that in a lot of the videos where I do go through
creating interiors.
But this video is purely about keeping your work within the margins. Now,
what about a page with bleed?
So here we have a page that we've set up with bleed. Now, as I said,
pages with bleed are larger than pages with no bleed because the pages
will actually get trimmed at the edges. So for this,
for a 6 by 9 inch book with bleed,
the page size will be 6.125 inches by 9.25
inches. So I've created this blank document with those dimensions.
So again,
we go to the files that we've downloaded and here you can see the correct one.
Here is the right page template bleed
6.125 x 9.25. So here I've given you the sizes that the pages should be.
So that will help you in setting up your own individual page size.
Now I've pick the right-hand side here.
You could have the left hand side template as well,
depending on which page you are actually creating. And again,
just drag that into position.
So now all the content should be in the center here. Now,
what I'm going to do is just tick that to make it disappear.
And I'm going to put in a patterned background on the page.
So we'll go to this example here, just copy the pattern,
go over to a blank page, paste it into place.
So this is what your page would normally look like. Now this is a pattern.
It could be images or whatever.
And remember some of this is going to get trimmed off around the edges.
So I'm going to turn back on the template and just drag that to the top.
And so now any content we want to put on top of that page,
that's not going to be trimmed off, we need to keep within these margins.
Now I'm going to use an example of a recent coloring book interior that I
created. Again,
if you're interested in watching that video on creating coloring book interiors,
I'll leave a link above and also in the description below.
And a guest is going to take this center component command C control C to copy,
go to our page and just paste that into place. Now, again,
that's pasted under the template. So just drag that to the top. Now,
as we can see here, this is far too big.
So just pressing command or control and clicking on the mouse we're just going
to reduce the size of that.
And what we want is for this to be within again, this pinky border.
And there we have it. We have our content that we know is within the margins.
And like before, we can just click on the template,
either turn it off on the layers panel or just delete it.
And there have your page,
which has got bleed with the content in the center,
which is within the margins.
So this is vital to get your book accepted at the launch
preview stage. And after publishing.
Now I said I'd show you an example with Canva.
So let's head over to Canva and here we have the home page.
Now you're going to click on custom size.
Now I want to tell you something that a lot of people fall foul of and is the
units here. Most people put in something like 6 by ,
but it's in pixels.
So you want to change that to inches because what will happen is you'll create
it with the pixels. You'll come to upload it to KDP and it will,
it won't look right.
You'll get all these errors and you won't know quite what you've done,
but that's one of the biggest errors that people tend to make in canvas.
So we're just going to put in 6 by 9, click on create a new design.
And like before it's just a case of dragging the template into
our page. Like, so. Now for this,
you might have to drag it into position and then just drag the corner down
to fill the page like so. And then you can put your content within this border.
And like I showed you with the image editing software you can just delete it
afterwards. Now, as I've said,
you can do this with written content as well as low
content.
So if we just go back to the template,.I've just copied some Laurem Ipsom Dolor
text,
and we'll just paste that into place and you can move it wherever you want and
just drag, increase the size, drag it into place.
And that way you will make sure that your text is within the
margins and you won't encounter any errors.
And we can deletethe template again,
and there you have the text properly aligned within the margins.
So that should stop you getting those errors at the launch preview stage,
and also after publishing your book. Now,
if you're a beginner at this or a seasoned hand,
then watch this video next on what I think are 10 great niches to publish books
in and make money online. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button.
Thank you very much for your time. It's very much appreciated.
And until next time, goodbye.