I'm going to show you how you can take an image like this to create a book
cover like this and an interior like this,
to create your very own self published KDP dot marker
books, like these currently selling on Amazon and selling very well.
If we look at these low best sellers ranks,
it indicates that these books are popular and making the publishers decent
money. In fact,
one of the popular books on here is bringing in around $1000
to $2500 a month in royalties.
That's pure profit.
Now the software I'm going to be using today is Affinity Designer.
It's a vector editing piece of software,
which is what we want for what we're going to do today.
Other alternatives for this are Adobe Illustrator, which you have to pay for,
or there's a free version, which is Inkscape and Gravit Designer.
And our Gravit Designer is free for the basic version,
but you do have to pay to upgrade to the pro version. So,
one of the most common places I get my graphics,
fonts and interiors from oareur Creative Fabrica and that's where we're going to
get today's image from, as we can see here.
And this is a picture of a lion,
and we can see it's got commercial and full print on demand usage allowed.
Now you can get vector images from many different websites.
Examples are designedbundles.net and Vecteezy, wherever you get them from,
do make sure that you do have the license to use them commercially
and on print on demand products.
And that's something as a business owner,
you need to check out and make sure you're satisfied with that yourself. Now,
one thing to note on Creative Fabrica is that they do sell interiors and I did a
search for dot marker,
and they do sell these dot market interiors here.
But there only appears to be about, I don't know, 16 or so different interiors.
So the problem could be lots of people download these,
use them on their books and you fall into issues with
duplicate content. However,
if I was to use these downloadable interiors,
I'd either modify them myself to make them a little bit more original or combine
them with images that I'm going to show you how to create today.
So let's go to our image of this lion. Now,
remember these books are aimed at sort of the two to five year olds.
So we want sort of very simple, cute images.
And this one is such an image.
One of the benefits of getting images from a site like C reative Fabrica is that
you can click on the artist's name and see what other graphics they've got for
sale. And here we can see that they've got other animal faces. In fact,
it looks like they've got lots of different images here.
So when you're creating your book,
you can have images that have a similar style.
So you create a more professional cohesive interior. So anyway,
so we're going to this go to download it and then just drag it across into
Affinity Designer like so.
Now we want to convert this image into a plain black and white lines
image. So to do this, we put a bounding box around our image,
click on the fill circle, top right here,
and just move the slider to the white.
And you can see we've got our lined image. Now,
one of the issues with this is this part of the component of the image is hiding
a lot of what we want to see. So we're just going to move this to the bottom,
of the layers, like so.
Now we want to make sure all the components of the image are aligned
and those lines are uniform.
So the next thing to do is just click on the stroke button here above
then move the slider to black.
And then we click on the stroke tab and just increase or
decrease the width of the stroke to our liking, as you can see here.
I'm just going to set it at around about 10 for the moment. Okay.
Now the next thing to do is I want the eyes black.
So I'm just going to click on each eye, click on the color tab,
click on the fill button and just move the slider to black.
Do the same for the other eye.
So now we've got our image we want to transfer it to the template of our page,
and this is going to be an 8.5 by 11 inch book.
So we just open up a new document,
put in our dimensions and here we have our page.
Now what we need to do on here or what I'm going to do,
which I think is going to help. A lot of you is put a margin,
just an outline of a margin on the page.
Now if you're not sure where to find the measurements of these margins,
then go to the KDP help page,
to the build your book format of paperback manuscript, scroll down.
And there you have it tells you what size the margins should be,
depending on the number of pages in the book. Now,
a lot of these books that I've looked at on Amazon have between 60 to a 100
pages. So for that number of pages,
we want an inside margin of 0.375 inches and the top bottom and right-hand side
of not 0.25 inches. And that's for the right hand side page.
Obviously for the left hand side page, it'd be the right-hand side margin
that would be 0.375.
It's one of the most common problems that people contact me about is the issues
with bleed, no bleeds set in the margins.
Now this book is going to be a no bleed because the images aren't going to go to
the edge of the page. So all we need to do is just have our margins there.
So if you are unsure, then make sure you check out the help page,
because it can cause issues when you do it load. And as I said,
it's one of the most common questions I get asked about.
So we've got our page here and we've just want to set our faint outline of the
margin.
So if we click on documents set up and we have our document unit set in inches,
and then we just click on this little chain here just to unlink everything.
So the left hand side margin is 0.375 and the other
settings, right, top and bottom of 0.25. Then we click on,
okay. And you can see it's giving us here our faint border.
So now we go back to our image,
bounding box around it command C or control C to copy,
go to our page command V or control V to paste.
And then we just move that into position. Just reduce the size,
holding down shift, reduce the size of our image, put it onto our page,
just increase the size again.
And we'll just increase that so we can see what we're doing and just position
it. Not quite halfway down, but just towards the top end like that.
And I think we'll just increase the size of that slightly.
So now our lines look a bit thick, so we just want to reduce our stroke width.
So a bounding box around our whole image,
click on the stroke tab and then just move our width of our stroke down to 5
points.
Now the next thing we need to do is click on our pen tool because we want to
draw a line down the middle of our image and just click on the top of the page.
Now you can see I've got the magnet button switched on here on Affinity
Designer, which helps us with aligning things up.
So I'm just going to click the top there, click at the bottom.
And we've got a line down the middle of our page.
This will become explanatory in a moment.
So now we need to create our little circles that kids use their dot markers to
stamp the color in. Now I did a bit of research.
Most seem to be around the 10 millimeter size or 18 millimeter size.
It looked like 18 millimeter was probably the most common diameter.
So that's what we're going to create today.
So what we need to do is just click on the document setup tab.
Now we did have it set to inches.
We want to change this to millimeters and click on, okay,
then click on the ellipse tool here and then holding down shift, just drag.
Now you can see here. It tells us that the width and height,
basically the diameter of the circle.
So we just need to move that until it says 18 millimeters, like so.
And then click on our move tool.
And then just drag that in into position on one side of this black line that we
drew. Now holding down alt,
but you mouse over the circle and just drag and you'll see it drags a duplicate
copy, and we can move these all over the picture like soaps.
I'll do that for the whole image, but I won't bore you with it all.
So now you can see half our image is filled with our circles.
Now we need to hold down shift and select each of these circles
And click on command G or control G to group them. Now,
what we need to do is command C or control C to copy and then paste.
And that will paste a layer of circles on top of the circles that we've already
produced. Then we right click, click on transform,
click on flip horizontal.
And then we just moved that whole group over and just position it.
You might need to use the arrow keys just so it looks in a very similar position
to the others. And you can see by drawing that line,
we can create this symmetrical image. And we can now delete our line.
So now we've got our image here with all the circles.
So now we want to create the actual interior PDF of the book.
Now I do this in Keynote. I've done them in PowerPoint.
You can do them in Canva or Adobe Indesign
or Affinity Publisher. I've done all mine, mostly on Keynote,
some on PowerPoint,
and it's just something I'm familiar with and I can do it really quickly.
So that's what I use. Now, before we do transfer over to keynote,
what I need to do is draw an invisible box, around the edges of this rectangle.
So click on the rectangle tool,
start in one corner and just drag a box across.
Now this box has got a stroke and a fill of white.
So we need to go click on the fill and click on this no fill.
And same for the stroke.
Click on the stroke circle or button and click on the no stroke.
This will help align the image when we do create our interior.
So the next thing we do is go across to Keynote. Now,
before we do a go over to Keynote,
I want to write the word lion underneath our image.
So we go back to our document, click on the text tool,
click on the page and just write in the word lion.
And I'm just going to drag that into position.
Now because we've got the magnet tool on it will align it with the middle of our
image, Like so. Now I want to change the font,
in this case I'm going to change it to chalkboard. And again,
we need to just move that the words so it aligns in the center.
Now I want to change this. I want to give this word stroke.
So click on the stroke, move the slider to black move,
click on the stroke tab.
And we want the stroke width our 5 to match our image.
And then we want the fill color of our words to be white.
So just click on the fill button and then just move the slider across to white.
And there we go. That looks pretty good.
So now we'll go to Keynote and we have our blank documents set up here.
I've put in the custom size of 612 points by 792 points.
For some reason,
Keynote only works in points and not inches or millimeters.
So I just converted the inches to points.
If you're using something like PowerPoint you can just do it in inches.
And I think it's the same if you use InDesign or Publisher or whatever or Canva.
And you can produce your first page here and then just control C to
copy and control V to just paste all the blank pages. However many you want.
Then we go back to Affinity Designer, put a bounding box round,
our whole art board. Command C or control C to copy,
go to Keynote and control V command V to paste.
And then we have our first page.
So you can see you would now repeat this process with other images and build up
your book like so.
Now one thing to consider is because these like felt tip marker pens.
You may want to leave the back page blank so that in case colors
do bleed through. And it's a similar type of thing with coloring books.
And you build it up like that, save as PDF,
ready to upload to KDP. So now we want to produce a cover.
Now, first of all, we need the dimensions for our cover.
And in order to get those go to a website called bookow.com.
Then click on the link where it says,
create space / KDP cover template generator.
Scroll down and put in the dimensions.
8.5 inches by 11 inches here. I've just put in 120 for the page count.
That's just an example. I said, it can be less if you like.
And just putting your email address here, tick this box,
and then email a cover template. And they will send you this template,
which looks like this.
And the important information we need is up here in the top left-hand corner,
where it gives us the dimensions of our book cover and that
17.52 by 11.25.
So we go back to Affinity Designer and click on file,
click on new and add these dimensions, create,
and we have our new document here.
Now what you'll need to do is then drag in that template of the book cover
onto our document. And it will look like so.
So what I'm going to do now is draw a rectangle over this with the rectangle
tool. But first I want to just lock that layer.
So we've got it highlighted click on the little lock. Okay.
And we've got our rectangle tool selected.
Start in one corner and just drag down.
And I want to change the fill to a nice color,
just moving the sliders. I think we'll go for something like this color.
Move that slider down to 50. So luminosity.
And I think that will be a good starting point.
Now in order to get our image aligned on the front page,
we're just going to make that layer invisible.
Now we're going to draw a bounding box just around our lion's face.
Command C or control C to copy.
Go to our book page and command V.
Using the move tool just move that into position on our book cover.
And we've got this more or less in the center of the front page.
We could enlarge that slightly if we wanted to. We don't want to go overboard.
And then we can switch back on our colored background.
So we've got our liinb's face here, but it looks a bit dull at the moment.
So what we're going to do next is just these dots that we produce.
We're just going to ungroup them. So we hold down shift,
command or control and G to ungroup then, and same for the other dots.
Because we want to color them individually. And now we can select each dot,
holding down shift, that we want to color in the same color.
So I'm going to make all these dots on the outside orange.
Just move our sliders and get a nice orange color.
And I want to make the lion's mane a brownie color. So again,
it's just a case of moving the sliders. You can choose whatever colors you want,
that are in keeping with the cover of your book or something like that.
And then we can go through the process of coloring all these individual dots.
And we end up with an image that looks like this, which is quite colorful.
So what we need to do next is add our text. So,
basically I'm going to write dot marker coloring book.
Now I do like to keep my covers very simple,
but very bright and make the text readable because remember a lot of times these
are shrunk to thumbnail size.
So customers need to be able to read them when they do look at them.
So I'm just going to write in her dot marker coloring book.
I've done that already to make it quick.
And we've got these words here. This is in a font called Chinchilla. And again,
I made the text, white,
the fill is white with a black stroke.
And you can check to make sure that the,
the words are within the dimensions of the book by just turning off the colored
layer.
And you can see that we're well inside this pink box of the template.
So it can turn out purple rectangle back on.
And we can also write down our text down the spine of the book,
if we wish.
And then it's just a case of saving this as a PDF file.
Again, ready to upload to Amazon. Now,
if you did miss my previous video on this niche,
where I look at the niche in detail and look at the keywords,
then click this video next to learn about that because the keywords are
important for getting traffic. Thank you very much.
Make sure you hit the subscribe button and until next time, goodbye.