One of the big issues of creating books and publishing books online
is getting customers to notice your book and click on them. Well,
in this video,
we're going to try and overcome that by showing you how to create attractive
vintage style book covers,
using images that can be found online that are in the public domain and
are free to use commercially,
but there are a few steps that you need to go through so that you can use them
effectively. And that's what I'm going to show you in this video.
So if you are trying to start up a publishing business, publish your own books,
make money online, um, create a passive income,
then follow along as I show you how 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 the second in a three-part series on creating attractive
striking stunning book covers using vintage style
graphics. So if you haven't watched that,
then I'll leave a link to that video down below,
and you can watch it after watching this video or pause this video,
watch that first, and then come back to this.
And in that video I showed you how to use a resource of free vintage
style graphics to create a, what I thought was quite, uh, uh,
striking looking fishing journal book cover. Now in this video,
as I mentioned, we're going to go one step further and we're going to find,
or I'm going to give you some resources of images that are available in the
public domain and can be used commercially well,
99.99999% of them can.
So let's go straight ahead and get started on this.
So here we have this
website@biodiversitylibrary.org,
and here we've got a couple of links.
So go over to view more images on flicker,
and it will open this webpage here.
And we have all these albums of different types of
images. Now these are related to sort of natural history.
So they're going to be insects, birds, plants, that type of thing.
And if we just click on one here,
which is related to I think butterflies and moths,
I'm sure some experts out there will tell me,
but it looks like there's both butterflies and moths here.
And we click on one of these images. It will take us to a page like this,
and we can see we've got these images here of what appears to me to be
butterflies. And if you just scroll down slightly here,
you'll see the license. And it says in the public domains,
and it will take us to this page here. Now it says no copyright.
This work has been identified as being free of known restrictions.
And you can copy, modify, distribute,
work on these images and even use them commercially. However,
it does say the work may not be free of no copyright restrictions
in all jurisdictions,
which means basically in every single country.
So what I advise doing is, first of all, just looking,
if you can see here, the date,
when the image was published here it is 1891.
So.
There's very, very, very.
Slim chance that there's any copyright, uh, on this particular image.
But what I would advise doing is going over to Google image search and doing a
reverse search on an image,
and you just click on upload image and you can choose a file to upload.
In this case I'll use an image of some beetles that I downloaded, and
this is a sort of result you will get. And here there is very little,
and there's nothing to indicate there that someone has ownership of these images
or has a copyright on them.
So I would suggest doing that really for any image that you do use
just to double check and make sure everything's okay.
So when you found the image that you like here,
it's just a case of clicking on download.
You'll be given these options here for the image size.
I normally go for the biggest image size so that you are downloading the, the,
the biggest, best quality image that's available.
And I also did the same for some butterflies.
Or, or moths, I think they were butterflies.
What you can also do on the flicker page is go to photo stream.
And then you can click on search. So you could put something in.
Like butterflies into the search.
Click enter, and you'll have all these images appear,
which you can then search through, find something that you might like.
And if we look on this main page, we can see here on the right-hand side,
that we've got a resource of over 319,000
photos. Now in the previous video,
I did mention a resource of over 1 million photos.
So that takes us to the next site.
And this is the flicker page of the British library. As you can see here,
we've got over 1 million photos. So in total,
we've got over 1.3 million photos to search through to find something that would
look good on our book covers.
And I'm sure you can find something that would fit the bill.
So if we go through here, we've got all these albums.
Now these are not just natural history type photos.
They've got all sorts of things here, science fiction type images, clocks,
and timepieces, uh, machinery.
I quite like the machinery ones because you can find architecture, machinery,
sort of technical, um, drawing type images, which are very effective,
uh, on notebook covers. And also for other items that you can sell,
which we will be coming to in the third,
in this series of three videos where I'll show you how to use these types of
images, we're going to create to diversify your income.
Hopefully make more money and also by diversifying protect your income as well.
So let's get back to this British library resource. Again,
you can click on photo stream, click on search and find anything you like,
I'm going to look at maps because I'm going to create a cover with vintage
maps. And you can see we're presented with all these different images here.
So if I click on this image, we've got details down here,
which will tell us when this was published. So again, 1861.
So that will be out of copyright. Now,
the slight difference is with the British library is that they have this here,
where it says no known copyright restrictions, which is slightly different.
And you can read about it here.
If you click on the link and I suggest you do because you really, you know,
it's your business.
You need to make yourself familiar with all these licensing agreements.
And basically what it says is there is no known copyright, but again,
cannot guarantee there.
Is no copyright at all or someone doesn't own the photograph or.
Or rights to it, or whatever. So again,
I suggest just doing that reverse image search that I just showed you how to do
just to double check there's no copyrights on there.
And that's also a useful thing to do on any image that you might be
downloading from sites like Pixabay or unsplash,
where it says that they're copyright free,
but they're not always in every case and I do a search like that on every single
image I use. Now,
what we need to do next is after we've downloaded our images,
these are going to be raster images.
So they're going to be usually sort of PNG files or JPEG or JPG files.
And we want to convert them into vectors.
Now I'll show you what the difference is.
So if we take this image that we downloaded and all I did was once I
downloaded it, just dragged it into affinity designer.
And if we enlarge this image,
we can see that pretty quickly it pixelates.
So with raster images,
you can't enlarge them sort of infinitely because they do pixelate
and degrade.
And the other issue is we can't just put a box around a beetle and drag it on
copied or use it on our cover or anywhere else.
What you'd have to do is go round, trace, round the edge of the image,
then cut it out and then copy and paste it, which can take some time.
And again, you've got that issue of the pixelation. Now with a vector,
I'll show you the difference. Now we've got the same image here,
but if we enlarge it, it doesn't pixelate. Now, if you do enlarge it, yes,
the colors break down a bit, but here's one of the biggest benefits.
You can take an image, say this beetle here,
you can drag a bounding box around it
like so just command C or control C to copy,
then go to a blank page and just command V or control V to paste.
And there we have our image of a beetle, which we can move around.
Can enlarge it, make it smaller, do whatever we like with it, rotate it. Now,
what you would need to do is,
and you can do this with vector images is clean up the image.
Now we can see here,
we've got these components like this number two and this little dot there.
We can just, bounding box around that, delete it. This here, delete it.
We can enlarge our image and find all these bits of artifacts here. Delete them,
delete them, just click on them, delete them.
And also you'll notice here around the edges of this particular insect.
We've got this coloration here, so we can clean this up as well.
And what you can do is click on it, press delete,
and you can see we've tidied up the edges. And we might do that again once more.
So again, just click on that particular color delete again. Now,
if you go too far,
you can just undo the action by clicking command or control Z
or Z, if you're in the states,
and you can go through each Beatle image,
just copy and paste it and clean it up to use later.
And also one of the big benefits.
If we create a vector image out of our main image,
we can click on the background like this and just drag it or delete
it. So the next question is,
how do we create these vector images well you can do it in
software like Inkscape or Adobe illustrator,
you can't do it in affinity designer or affinity photo unfortunately,
whether that feature will come up at some point, I don't know, but if it does,
that would be a real boom to that, that particular piece of software,
but you can do it in Adobe illustrator,
but I know a lot of you out there don't use Adobe illustrator,
which is fair enough. It's not the cheapest bit of software to use.
It's only available on a subscription basis.
So if we go over to Google and you can do this,
just search for image, trace software, or image tracing software,
and you'll have all these options here.
And you've got websites that have listed the best vectorization software
or vectorizers or image tracing software.
Now I went and had a look at these to look at what the alternatives were.
There are some free alternatives, there are some paid alternatives.
So I went to head over to vectorizer.io.
And now this is not a free piece of software. You do have to pay,
but it says here, ten credits is two Australian dollars, 74,
which is around about two us dollars. Now that will give you quite a few images.
And if we look at this beetle one here,
this one process has given us nine separate images of beetles,
which works out at roundabout 22 cents or something like that per beetle,
which I think is pretty reasonable. But as I said,
you can find software that will do it for you for free.
The results may not be as good, a quality.
I'm not sure because I haven't gone through all the different software out there
that's available. So how do you use this bit of software?
Well it's just a case of clicking on upload images,
finding the image you want to vectorize double clicking on it and it will do all
the work for you. Now there's all these different settings.
But what I used here was just the absolute standard settings.
I didn't make a change to anything at all.
Then all you need to do once it's done,
its job is just click on download and it will download the vector image
to your computer,
which you can then just drag into whichever image editing software you use.
Now it has to be vector editing.
Software that you use. So that's the common ones are.
Affinity designer, Adobe illustrator Inkscape and gravit designer.
There might be some others out there. I think vectornator might be another one.
So then once I got all the images I wanted to use,
it was then a case of creating the book cover. Now I won't go through all the,
the book of a template where to obtain it from her,
how to set it up because I did that in the first video.
So I'd be wasting your time. So if you want to know how to set up the page,
go to that first video, watch that,
and then come back and use the images that you've created.
And what I did was just dragged all those images that I vectorized
and dragged them into this notebook template page that I
created in affinity designer.
And you can see each one of these is easily moveable around,
so you can arrange them, adjust the angle,
make it look aesthetically pleasing.
And I left this space here for some writing,
which is going to be the title of our notebook, a nature log book.
So I wrote in there nature log book, and again,
as I mentioned in the previous video for these types of log books,
I do like a handwriting type font. And we've got this one here,
which is actually the amatic font, A M A T I C.
And whilst creating this cover,
I can switch on the template that I downloaded from bookow.com and made sure
that everything here was within this pink border. Now,
what you can do is put a bounding box around everything, press down option,
left click on the mouse and just drag across
and position that like so,
we can get rid of these words here and then just rearrange our
insects a little bit to cover, to fill that space.
And you could have a similar sort of front cover image on the back cover of the
book as well. And just double check by turning on our template,
that all the images are within that pink border, which they are.
So we're good to go on this cover. Overall,
the cover will look something like this, which I think looks pretty good.
Now the next cover we're going to create is going to be even more simple because
we're not even going to need to vectorize these images. So we'll go over,
back over to the British library page. And as you remember earlier,
I did a search for maps and I'm just going to click on some maps that look a bit
unusual, look a bit attractive and just click on download. And again,
the highest quality,
the biggest size I downloaded I think it was roundabout eight or nine
images of these maps,
sort of vintage maps I checked each one for the copyright
and then went back over to affinity designer and over our template
I just dragged in these images of the maps and arranged them
like so no particular order,
just something that looked a bit random, all the maps at different angles.
And then the next step to this was putting in a shape on which to put our
text and for this we're going to have an ellipse.
So I just clicked on the ellipse tool and then just drag create an
ellipse. Now that's hidden beneath our maps.
I'm just going to drag that ellipse to the top in our layers panel.
And then on top of this ellipse place, some text, and I've already written some,
which I'll just switch on here. This is going to be travel journal.
Now I'm just going to move that ellipse.
I'm just going to reduce the size of that slightly,
like so and there we have it a pretty
decent looking book cover. Doesn't take long to create.
And the book will actually, when it goes on to Amazon will look like this,
which again, I think you'll agree. It looks pretty good.
Now what I'm going to do is actually give away these two
covers to two lucky winners who watch this video now in
order to be in with a chance of getting one of these covers,
what you need to do is go along to my website, paulmarles.com,
supply your email, and subscribe to the newsletter,
which I'm going to start creating soon.
Make sure you subscribe to this channel and then leave a comment
down below. And in the next video,
I'll pick out the two lucky winners at random, who will each.
Receive the travel journal or the nature log
book, book cover. And I'll supply.
These in PNG and PDF formats, not the original,
vector source file, but Just the PNG and the PDF file.
So the PDF file will be ready to upload to the Amazon KDP platform
without you having to do anything at all.
And this will be for a six by nine inch book with 120 pages.
So all you need to do is supply your own interior,
which you can create yourself or purchase of a site like creative
fabrica. Now, as I said,
hopefully all the links to the sites that I've used will be
in the description below. Remember if you haven't yet watched that first video,
I suggest you do so because it shows you how to set up and create the cover
in the first place. And if you've not seen that, I'll link to that video here.
I hope you found the content useful. Thank you very much for your time.
It's very much appreciated. And until next time. Goodbye.