Hey everyone and welcome to today's video,
where I'm going to show you how to create your very own cut and paste, KDP,
low content book interior, using free templates that I've made,
especially for you.
So if you are new to publishing low content books on Amazon,
or you are already publishing your own books,
then follow long as I show you how to create one of these interiors. Now,
this video is a follow on to a recent video I did on the cut and paste niche,
where I looked at the niche in detail and those all important keywords.
So I'll leave a link to that video down below,
if you've not watched that already. Now,
this video is gonna be split into three main parts.
First we're going to go and these free templates that I've created for you.
Then I'm gonna show you how to add your own images,
shapes numbers to these templates, to build up these pages.
And then I'm going to show you quite simply how to put these pages together,
to create your PDF file, your interior PDF file,
which will then be ready to upload to the Amazon platform, the KDP platform.
Then all you need to do is hit that publish button and publish your very own
book. So, what are we waiting for? Let's get straight onto it.
So we need our free templates. Now I've uploaded these to my Gumroad shop.
I'll leave a link to that down below in the description.
You'll come to this page, which looks like this,
and it's the cut and paste templates. So you just go ahead and download those.
Now these are .png files.
There are 10 of them in total.
So there are five different,
types of interiors here with these files and for each one there's a
left and right page. Now these are for 8.5 by 11 inch books,
and these are no bleed pages.
So that's important when it does come to uploading your book to the KP platform,
those are the settings that you're going to need. So once you've done that,
you've downloaded those 10 files to your computer we go on to the next stage,
which is adding our own images, shapes, and numbers.
So you're going to need to do this in software.
Now you can do this in Canva and you could use images on
Canva,
but there are some shortcomings there because what I want to do with my images
is convert them to black and white images.
And I also want to create images with outlines.
And it's a lot easier to do that vector editing software.
So I'm gonna be doing this today in Affinity Designer.
Other options are Adobe Illustrator and there's a free option,
which is Inkscape and also Gravit Designer, the basic version.
So we've got our templates onto our computer,
and we're going to go over to Affinity Designer. Now,
as these pages have no bleed,
the settings are going to be 8.5 inches by 11 inches.
I've got the dpi setting to 300 and the color profile to
sRGB. That doesn't really matter because this is going to be a black and white
interior.
Now you can create these interiors as color interiors as some publishers do,
but bear in mind that it's going to cost you more to create one of those.
So you're going to have to charge more on Amazon.
So after we've clicked on file, clicked on new, opened up this dialogue box,
entered our figures, we just click on create.
And this will give us our blank document.
So now open the file where you've downloaded those images,
those .png files to. And first of all, all you need to do is just drag one.
I'm going to choose the match the letters, right hand side page,
and just drag that into Affinity Designer, drop it in place,
and then just drag that file. So it clicks into place.
Now this is a right hand side page, and I'll show you the basic setup.
Here on the left hand side,
we've got this dotted line and this is the line that kids would cut along and
then remove this whole page from the book.
I'll just quickly show you what the corresponding left hand side page would look
like.
You can see here that the dotted line is on the other side and
the content is shifted over slightly to the left. Okay,
now I'm going to show you what you can do,
give you some ideas of how to add content to these pages.
So for this one, we're going to do letters.
So this is where kids would cut out around these dotted lines of these lowercase
letters and glue them,
or paste them into place to match the corresponding capital letter.
So quickly, how do we create these types of letters? Well, it's quite easy.
I'll open up a blank document. Left hand side,
we're going to click on the text tool. Now what I'm showing you,
you can do exactly the same in those other softwares that I mentioned,
Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape, the principles are the same.
And then click on the page. Now we're going to create a capital A.
Obviously you can do this for any letter.
And I'm going to click on the move tool,
just drag the corner to enlarge that so we can see what we're doing. Now,
as this is a book that's aimed mainly at kids,
we're going to create a kid friendly font.
So I'm going to click on the dropdown menu for the fonts and choose aerial
rounded MT bold. Now for this,
we need to create an outlined letter. So the right hand side,
we have our buttons here for the stroke and for the fill.
So click on the fill button and move the slider. We're working with the hue,
saturation, luminance sliders. And just move that over to white.
Now you can see the letter has disappeared.
So now click on the stroke button and move the slider to
black. And you can see already, this gives our letter,
this nice outlined appearance.
Now you can adjust the thickness of the stroke by clicking on the stroke tab and
then just adjusting the width.
So you could do that to whatever you think looks good. I had a setting of 7.5,
which I think looks pretty good.
And then it would just be a case of copying that, pasting into place,
holding down command and just reducing the size of it and placing it into
position.
And then an easy way to do the next letters is just holding down option,
clicking on the letter and just dragging it across.
And then you can double click on that and type in another letter and so on.
And so you can do the same for all the, the letters.
And so build up your page to look something like this. Another option.
Another idea is to use numbers and objects. Now,
the images I've got here, this coin image I actually got from Creative Fabrica.
Now the images I'm going to be using today,
I'm using mainly from Creative Fabrica.
I get most of my images from either Vecteezy or Creative Fabrica
because I know that I can use them in my commercial products and use them on
print on demand products as well. There are other options.
There's things like Design Cuts, Designbundles.net and Envato Elements.
There's lots of different options out there.
Those are just two of the options I've always used for my books and never had
any problems with them. Actually,
I'll leave a link to Creative Fabrica down below because they are still running
this special $1 for the first month where you can use as many images
as you want to really fill your boots with different images and downloads.
Now here, you'll see with this one template,
which is the match the letters template, as I've called it,
you can create a number of different types of pages. Here,
I've just give you examples of two,
but there are lots of different types you could create just using your
imagination. You could use pictures of animals and matching letters,
that type of thing. Okay.
Another template we've got here is called match the pictures and
here I've downloaded some shapes. Again
I got these from Creative Fabrica. You'll notice here,
it says full print on demand usage allowed.
Now I created the outlined versions very similar way as I created the
outline versions of the letters. I'll just show you here quickly. What I did.
I clicked on the image went over to the color tab, clicked on the fill button.
Again, like we did with the letter, moved the slider over to the right.
Looks like it's disappeared. Then click on the stroke button,
move the slider over to black,
click on the stroke tab and adjusted the width of the stroke
until something came out that looked good.
Another idea for this particular type of page would be to again,
use numbers using those like coin images or whatever images you want to use.
You can just change it up a bit mix things.
And the next type of page you can create is from the template that I've just
called, what comes next. And here's an example of such a page.
Next was the, what I call the letter to picture page.
And here's an example of that.
And this is where we have pictures of animals and they stick in
the corresponding letter to match that animal. Again,
I got these images from Creative Fabrica and the way to turn these colored
images into black and white images is quite straightforward. I'll show you how.
So I've downloaded those from Creative Fabrica.
I'm just going to draw a bounding box around one of the images. Command C,
control C to copy.
Let's go over to a blank page command V, control V to paste.
Holding down shift to just reduce the size of that,
move it on to our page and then enlarge that so you can see it.
Now what I did next was hit command G or control G to group all those
layers together. And then on the layers panel on the right hand side,
clicked on adjustments,
scrolled down and clicked on black and white.
And here we can change these settings. Now for this,
I just moved down the yellow and adjusted the red slightly.
So there you've got your black and white image,
which you can then put a bounding box around,
copy and just paste onto your page and move that into position.
So that was a letter to picture.
The next type of page was what I call the build a picture,
where there's a picture in the top half of the page and images that kids can cut
out and stickonto the image. And here's just a basic example of one,
just to show you. Again,
I got these particular images from Creative Fabrica and I turned them into
black and white images in just the same way that I showed you,
how to turn that bear image into a black and white image.
So that's using the five different types of templates,
but don't worry I want to show you one more type of page that you can create.
Now, just on a side note, some of you may say, well,
that's only five page templates. That's only five pages in the book.
That's not many. Just remember with each page template,
you can create many different types of pages.
So you could have one that uses numbers. One that uses letters.
One that uses images. You can swap,
match your all different types.
So those five different templates could create so many different types of pages.
Now, this is the other one I wanted to show you.
And it's this type of page here,
where kids would cut out these shapes of say an animal or whatever
image and glue them together on a blank page to create
this image we can see here on the top right hand corner of the page.
Now this is where the beauty of using vector editing software comes in.
And I'll show you why.
So we go back to that page of images that we downloaded from Creative
Fabrica.
Now in order to download vector files from places like
Vecteezy, Creative Fabrica and the others,
you need to download either the .ai file,
the .svg file or the .eps file.
So like I did before just drag a bounding box around one of the images. Again,
we're going to use the bear. Command C, control C to copy. Go to a blank page,
paste that into place. And again,
we're going to have to reduce the size of that.
Now I'll enlarge that so we can look a bit closer at this image. Now,
the beauty of a vector image is that it's made up of shapes and we can
click on these individual shapes. So clicking on one of these shapes,
then holding down option on the keyboard,
we can left click and just drag and drag a copy of that shape.
And so we can do that for all the shapes on this bear.
So for the eye holding down shift,
we can click on all the individual shapes within the eye. And then,,
like we did before holding down option just drag and we can drag a copy of the
eye. And we can do that for all these other components here as well.
And then once we've done that, we can see here,
we've got them all over on the left hand side here.
And then we can just put a bounding box, just left, click and drag,
move them into place and just hold down shift, dragging,
and then enlarging all of those.
Now we want to convert all of these to black and white.
So holding down left shift of the mouse, drag a banding box around everything,
click on command G or control G to group all those components.
And then in the layers menu right hand click on the adjustment
button, scroll down, click on black and white.
And then we can use our sliders like we did before to create a black and white
image that looks good.
So what you can do next is now add a heading to each page,
and that's very simple to do. So click on the text tool,
click on the page and just write in your heading.
And I'm going to just type in match the letters.
With the move tool, just move that into place.
And there you've got the full page set up.
So what do we do now in order to put these together to create our PDF?
Well, when you've created your page, you click on file,
click on export, click on PNG,
whole document and click on export.
We'll call this something original, like page one, and we'll download that.
And then you would do the same for all the pages that you've created.
And in order to put them together, we're gonna go over to Canva.
So over at Canva click on create a design,
click on custom size.
Make sure this setting here is to inches.
8.5 by 11, click on create new design.
And this will be our first page. Then on the left hand side,
click on uploads,
then go to those PNG files that you've created for your interior pages and
just drag each one into the upload box.
Now this is going to be our first page, which is the right hand side page.
Now you could put this puzzle or activity on the first page, if you liked,
or you could have something like this book belongs to dotted
line where child could fill in their name.
I'm just going to go straight into the activities here.
So this is a right hand side page, page one.
So I'm just gonna drag that into place. Move it into the top left hand corner,
drag down, bang. We've got our first page. Then click on ad page.
Now this is the page behind the first page. This is page two,
and we're going to leave that as blank because kids are going to be cutting up
this page. So we go onto our page number three and click on add page and again,
drag in the next page in, into the uploads.
And move that across like, so, and again, click into place. So again,
the next page would be blank. Go on to add the next page,
just drag that into the uploads. Once it's uploaded,
drag into position into the corner,.add next page,
which would be a blank page and then add page for our next content,
the cutout bear.
You can see it's very straightforward to build up the interior this way.
So you'd build up the interior with the pages like so until you came
to the number of desired pages in your book. Then the next stage is this.
Top right hand corner, click on share,
then click on download and you'll get all these options here, PNG, JPG,
et cetera. You want the PDF print, the high quality multipage document.
Click on that.
Then you'd click on all pages and click on download.
So that PDF file is now ready to upload directly to the
KDP dashboard. And then you can hit, publish and publish your book on Amazon.
Now, if you've not watched that video on the cut and paste niche,
where I go through those all important keywords,
which are vital for getting your books ranked on Amazon,
then watch this video next on,
where I explore the niche in detail. Thank you very much for your time.
It is very much appreciated.
Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and until next time, goodbye.