Hey everyone!
Jason here, digital marketing consulting.
And in this Canva 2.0 tutorial, you're going to learn exactly how to put together your
next eBook, using canvas.
So make sure you check out the timestamp table of contents in the description to skip around
the video for design inspiration, along with some other helpful Canva tutorials, to design
other awesome things using Canva 2.0.
Now before we dive into my screen, there are two big things we need to know.
Number one, canvas has a 30 page limit.
So, if you have a very long eBook, you're going to have to use something like smallpdf.com
to export everything, all of your Canva designs as a PDF, and then put them together.
So everything is in one PDF.
So it's very easy to do.
Number two, if you're doing anything with Kindle, please don't use Canva.
I get a lot of questions about this.
Kindle is not going to format properly from a PDF.
You need to be using a plain text word document, and then it can be properly formatted into
the ePub format.
You can make your individual images, that you're going to put inside of your Kindle
book, but don't use Canva for your entire book.
So with that, let's go ahead and jump in, and I'm going to walk you through the best
templates for eBooks.
Now, if you're going to be designing an eBook specifically for people to use on mobile,
then I recommend going with the Instagram story, Facebook story, or your story or WhatsApp
story templates, you can go ahead and check those out on your own.
For this particular instance, we're just going to be assuming that we're going to be doing
a normal eight and a half by 11 us, paper.
So the first place you want to look is inside documents.
You're going to click on report, so you can hold control or command on a Mac and control
on the windows.
And go ahead and open this up in a new tab.
I'll go through these templates in a second.
Then inside of personal, a good place to look is book cover.
And actually that's going to be my topic for now.
I no longer recommend starting with magazine cover, like I used to, in the past.
Under education, you're going to want to check out the yearbook and table of contents templates,
and then under marketing, you're going to want to check out newsletter and proposal.
And so what I mean by check out is, just go ahead and hit control or command, open these
up in a new tab and just scroll through all the templates to get some inspiration and
design ideas.
One of them is bound to stand out at you, and that'll be the one that you'll use.
So, I'm actually going to use the book cover, but I'll just scroll through here very quickly.
So you can see their whole lot of template options.
And this is what makes Canva so valuable, because you don't have to come up with your
designs from scratch.
I will go through how to put together your actual content pages from scratch, but when
it comes to your cover, there are plenty of examples here.
So I'm actually going to skip over this one.
We'll come back to table of contents and then the other one you want to check out is, here
we have the magazine covers.
This used to be the one that had the best, but I think now these are more, I use them
more for kind of lead magnets or really short guides or PDFs, not so much full-blown eBooks
anymore.
And then you'll also want to check out the proposal templates, which is another great
thing, if you're just creating some quick guide and not like a full-blown eBook.
And then finally checking out the newsletter templates.
If you're looking for something fancy with your content pages, I'll get to more of that
in a bit.
So, let's start by choosing our cover, right?
So covers kind of the most important part of the book.
Books are still judged by their cover.
So I'm going to scroll up here.
They have a section for business.
So I'm going to click on business cover.
You can also use the search box to look for things, and you're going to want to be very
broad with your search terms.
So for example, searching marketing would be too specific.
You'd want to search something like business or office or search for food or recipe, workout,
fitness, something like that.
Very, very broad.
Don't be very--, don't be specific.
Their tagging system is very broad.
So, I'm just scroll down here and choose one that I want to save us time.
I looked ahead of time.
So, I'm actually going to go ahead and start with this cover, it's going to be very simple
and then we can go ahead and change some things up.
You can always come up here to change your fonts.
They have so many different fonts.
There's a lot of options here.
We can come in and it changed the size.
And of course, you have more colors every color under the rainbow, and you can bold
and italicize.
For some strange reason, Canva doesn't have underline and they don't have strike-through.
You can also click this to automatically make everything all caps, which is kind of cool.
So, I'm going to go ahead and blow this up a little bit.
So, it's easier to see on the screen and I'll just go ahead and type in our name.
Come down and change up the title of fast track your, let's make this about YouTube.
I like doing YouTube stuff.
Your YouTube growth.
Oh no, it's more than one line.
So we'll go ahead and highlight it, trying a different things.
A couple of things didn't work.
So, let's bring the font down to let's just do 32.
Now that's too small.
So we'll play with fun a little bit.
Give our book a name.
And then come down here and Oh, they already have a buy.
So I guess we'd better change, what's at the top.
I'll put my name there and then we'll change this to, just say it's part of a collection.
How about that?
So “Five step content machine”, By Jason Whaling.
And then we'll just go ahead and delete this.
I don't have a, I don't have a cool testimonial yet, so we'll go ahead and put an image in
here.
So let's go to elements and we'll add something about YouTube in here.
Search for YouTube.
Then we've got a nice little play button.
So we'll just click and drag that down here.
And I’ll make this full screen, so you can see the whole thing.
And here we go.
There's our cover, “Aspire notebook collection, FastTrack your YouTube growth, 5-step content
machine by Jason.”
All right, cool.
So that is really all you need to do, for your book cover.
So let's go through one more example real quick here, and then we'll move on to the
table of contents.
So let's one that will require an actual image, right?
So let's try this one.
And first of all, I'm going to change the blue.
So I click on the actual element and I can come up here and change it to my company blue.
Will change all of this color, to the actual blue of the company and change the title.
And realize that the blue looks really bad.
So, we'll change it back to orange.
So it kind of works.
Obviously play with it, play with the colors a lot more.
I won't waste your time here.
Just type in another name of a different product that I have.
And then we could come down here and give it a sub headline and I'll go ahead and change
this bottom to match the orange.
There we go.
So we’ll match the company orange and we'll change this to match the company orange.
And of course, we could change the background image, to something that shows a video and
you can go to something like Unsplash, Pixabay or pexels.com, to get free images that you
can just add to the background.
And the easiest way to do that, is you'd be able to upload them here.
And then all you have to do is, click and drag.
So, I'm going to go to a folder where I already have some backgrounds and here's one of a
camera.
So all I have to do is click and drag it over and it will automatically put it in the back
for me just like that.
So now, I've got a nice camera, probably do a little bit more, but there you go.
You see, we made two covers very, very quickly.
So, we have our second one here, YouTube content machine 2.0, we just dropped in a background
image that was relevant to creating content, which was a camera.
And then we have one that is super simple, just with an icon.
And that's really all we need to do.
So we have our covers down.
Let's go ahead and do our table of contents.
So this is something pretty Ninja, that you can do.
I'm going to come over to this design, which is a bunch of table of contents templates.
Now what's awesome with Canva 2.0 is, you can move things from one design to another.
So we're going to go through table of contents and we'll choose one that we really like.
Now I've gone ahead and done some pre-work here.
And I like the way this one looks.
So, I can go ahead and make all the changes I need, to this table of contents.
Save it as its own file.
So I'll come up here and just say something simple, so I can remember what this table
of contents is called.
And then I can come over to my current design and I can refresh the page.
So now we'll have the ability to import what I just saved into my eBook cover design.
And after refreshing the page and waiting about 90 seconds, we can come back in here
and we're in our covers.
We're back to our covers now, and we can go to folders and we can click on all your designs.
And up here, you can see here's the table of contents, that we just saved in the other
tab right here.
So this is the table of contents we just saved.
And now we're going to be able to import it into our design here.
It automatically resizes or resizes a close as possible.
And now we've essentially taken one of the table of contents templates and added it into
our eBook.
So we'll do a quick jump ahead, to me reformatting this and just like that, I was able to easily
change the colors.
So all you have to do to change the colors is, click on the element and then come up
here to the background, color and change what it looks.
So we can just change it to yellow.
We can change it to red, different red or turquoise.
In this case, we're just using our brand blue.
And then you can also click on individual elements like this one.
And come up and change some of the confetti.
So something I really like about Canva with these pre done elements is, you can actually
manipulate the colors of some of these pre done graphics, so that you can make the colors
fit.
So I've gone ahead and change this.
So all that we need to do here is we'd go ahead and give our chapter titles.
And just like that, research create rank promote.
We have our table of contents.
Of course, you can go through and create your own table of contents, with whatever template
you think is best.
Now comes the important part.
And this is where you're going to save yourself a lot of time and headache, by following what
I'm about to go through it.
And that is creating a template for your content moving forward.
So the best way to do this, I'm going to show you two different template or two or three
different templates, you can put together.
Create a new blank page, then come into shapes.
And what you want to do is, essentially think about it, creating a frame.
So you have a lot of content and maybe you have some images for your eBook.
So now it's time to create a frame, for all of that content.
And the simplest way to do this is, with some basic shapes.
So there are two, really two pieces of information you need, in your frame.
You need a page number, and then if you're going to put your logo or the title of your
book, you can also do that.
So in this first example, I'm just going to use a basic square I’m going to center it
at the bottom, bring it down, use my company color.
Will do, or let's be fancy.
Let’s be different today.
We'll use orange and then I'll pull in another one.
And this time it's going to have a nice little border and I'll shrink it down, put it in
the center, and then change it to blue.
And then I would put the logo or the name of the book in here.
So we're actually going to do logo.
So I'll go to my designs and find a folder with my logo in it, make the logo nice and
small, and then put it in the box.
And then that would be essentially everything we would want to do, for our page.
I know that seems super simple, but when it comes to designing your eBook, the table of
contents and the book cover, that's where you want to spend all of your time.
After that, just putting together a very basic page template that you can easily copy and
paste your content into, is going to save you a lot of headache and you don't want the
design to distract, from your content.
Now something else that I really like to do, we'll go back up here to elements, is to shrink
a square down up here, and then use that to put in the page number.
So we'll come up here, shrink this box down to a little square.
Then we'd come in and click add subheading and go ahead and create our page number here.
And one of the things you do want to focus on is, make sure that you're using one or
two fonts.
It's very easy to have every page have a different font.
Especially if you're using, templates.
And let's bring this up a little bit.
I think 28 would be a good size for that.
So now we have our page number and if we go back down to fit here, so you can see the
whole thing, we have our page number and we have the bottom of our page, plenty of space
for content.
Now this might be a little too plain for you.
Okay.
Let's get a little more fancy.
So I'll click on add new page.
And by the way, we can just hit duplicate and get the same thing, right?
But let's go ahead and start from scratch again.
This time I'm going to have a much more in-depth design here.
So we'll go ahead.
We'll use this guy again, and this is something of course you can use as well, just copy for
yourself.
And create, use these to create sections.
So, this will be section one and section two, and we'll go ahead and change this guy to
let's do turquoise.
And then something I also like doing is, you can come up here to transparency and then
pull the transparency up and down.
So, I'm going to pull the transparency down about 50, and then I'll do the same thing
with this guy.
And I'll do it orange, since that's what our main color’s been.
And I'll bring it down to 50, boom, 50, there we go.
And now it's time to add some icons to these.
So let's search again.
And maybe this particular section is about research.
So I'll search for research and then click on graphics because that's what I'm looking
for.
And unfortunately, all of these are coming up for the paid version.
So I do have a paid version, so I can go ahead and use these.
But if you see this little crown, that means you have to be a Canva for work user.
So, let's search for something that you would actually be able to use, if you're not paying.
And searching for book, we have a couple of free ones.
So these three are free.
So maybe we'll try using this one and we'll change the color to white and we'll make it
a little smaller.
And then we can just click and drag so we could put it in the center or you can put
it more towards the top.
We'll put it towards the top like that.
And then we can insert a text box, right over here, a normal text box, a bit of text.
We can click and drag this up here, and this is going to be where our content is inserted.
So I can go ahead and make this nice and big, and that's a good margin.
And then we can go ahead and have plenty of space, our text on.
Of course, when you click and drag like that, it'll automatically size up the text.
So we probably want our texts to be somewhere around 16.
And then we can go ahead and copy this and bring the text box down here, for our other
section and center it up.
And then that way we can just copy and paste in our text and put any images that we want.
And let's say, let's go find another icon to put here.
We're still talking about research.
So let's say globe and here's one of the world.
So we'll go ahead and click on that.
We'll change the color to white again, we'll click and drag it down and then we'll go ahead
and put it inside of here.
Come on.
There we go.
Oh, always want to play with the shapes or position, maybe what we want to kind of half
off like this.
I kind of like how that looks.
And so we'll go full screen here, so you can see the finished product.
So here's another example of what you can do with your page design.
So you can see there's a lot you can do here.
And these two really are kind of like my go-to favorite ones, either doing something like
this or doing something like this.
So to quickly summarize what we've done, the first thing we did is, we came in here and
we looked for the book cover templates, and we found two book cover templates.
So we have this one right here, five step content machine that is just with an icon.
And then we have the second one that has a stock background photo.
Of course, you can go to unsplash.com, pexels.com or pixabay.com to find free photos for your
eBooks.
And then we went ahead and created a table of contents, not my best work, but you can
go through the templates yourself.
And I also showed you how to import it, from another design, so you don't have to come
up with a table of contents from scratch.
And then finally we have two different ways, you can lay out your pages, just a very basic
layout like this.
Or if you want to be a little more involved, we can do the bars on the side and use icons
to really just spruce up the content.
What's really important with these last pages is, making sure that it does not distract
from your content, right?
Because after the first two pages, your cover and your table of contents, the actual content
pages can be very simple and very basic.
So thank you so much for watching.
I hope you found this video informative and actionable, and most importantly got some
ideas for how to create your own eBooks, using Canva 2.0, I'm very interested what you come
up with.
Go and comment below, if you have any questions on designing your eBook inside of Canva.
Hit that like button, subscribe and as always, keep building the business you love.