up until now it's only been possible to self-publish paperback books
on amazon via the kdp platform and i say up until now because now it's possible to publish hardback
books which is very exciting particularly if there are certain books that you want to
publish in hardback version and it may be journals diaries planners your fiction or non-fiction book
so in this video i'm going to show you how to create your own hardback book to publish
on amazon and in this part one video we're going to go over how to create the cover
and get the interior and then in part two to this video i'll show you how to put it all together
with the title description the pricing and upload it to amazon and then you can become an author or
publisher and this would also be useful if you've already published books on the amazon kdp platform
now if you've not been to this channel before then welcome my name is Paul Marles and i do videos on
how to make it to keep it and grow it and that's your money i'm talking about if you do like videos
like that then please do give it a thumbs up hit the subscribe button smash that notification bell
to receive notification of when i produce more videos like this so this was exciting news when on
the amazon kdp platform they enabled this section here which is the upload of hard cover books and
these books have what is known as a case laminate cover which is just a plain hardback cover but it
doesn't have that soft paper dust jacket if you like so this was quite a big move and a step
up from just being able to publish paperback books now when creating your books you first of all have
got to decide on what type of book you want to create now this may be a non-fiction or fiction
book that you've already written and had formatted or it could be things like puzzle
books planners diaries log books but in today's example i'm going to show you a basic what we
call a blank line journal or notebook which is a very simple book to create and it's especially
useful if you're just starting out in this business because i say they're very easy to create
but you can apply what i'm going to show you today to any type of book that you want now
when it comes to publishing books the initial step is getting the interior that's the contents within
the book and it's creating the cover those are the two main components of a book the cover and
the interior now when it comes to the the interior and publishing in hardback version there are five
five trim sizes you can choose from and today's book is going to be a six by nine inch book then
we have to decide on the number of pages in our book and most books when it comes to things like
log books journals notebooks planners they tend to be 120 pages but the page number may vary
depending on on the type of book you produce things like culling books will usually have
less pages things like non-fiction and fiction will have more pages but the page numbers of a
hardback book have to be somewhere between 75 to 550. now when i first started in this business
there were no resources to getting interiors to these types of books and you had to make
your own and using powerpoint or keynote you get a blank page draw the lines and then copy
and paste that page 120 times then download it as a pdf and you'd have your interior now it's
a lot easier in fact i've got a gumroad shop and there is a lined paper interior which is 120 pages
6x9 inches and that's absolutely free so you can just go along there and download that and you've
got your interior straight away ready to upload to the kdp platform and create your line journal but
if you wanted to create something different you have some other options now one of these options
is creative fabrica which is one of my go-to sites for for graphics and interiors and also
fonts i'll leave a link to it down below i think they're running a special offer at the moment
dollar for the first month and here i've just put in the general search for kdp interior
and you can see there are over 46 000 results so you've got a lot of interiors to choose from and
you could narrow down your search by putting in something like you know recipe planner handwriting
book coloring book whatever you want to create your book on and a lot of these interiors are
downloadable as in pdf format and again are ready to upload straight away to the amazon kdp platform
the other option to get some free interiors is also book bolt at book bolt dot io you can just
click on resources go to interior wizard scroll down a bit click on interior wizard and here
you have a lot of different interiors that you can download for free it's a case of clicking on one
putting in the size of your trim six by nine put in your page count 120 download you've got your
pdf again ready to upload to the the platform so that's quite simple when it comes to the
interior obviously if you are creating a fiction or non-fiction book you're going to have to have
it all formatted correctly so the next stage when we're creating our book is the cover now the cover
is going to be created from a template and this template includes the back cover the front cover
and the spine down the middle and we need to get this at the correct size kdp have made this very
simple for us because they've created this new cover a calculator and template form and all
you need to do is select your binding type so we select hard cover interior type and most are
black and white unless you want to create a color interior however i do warn you if you do create a
cover interior the print costs are going to be a lot higher which may then cause issues with your
pricing you may end up pricing it too high and pricing yourself out to the market so most books
no no content books and low content books will be in black and white now paper type i normally
just choose white paper page turn direction for normal books is left to right measurement units
we're going to would be working in inches interior trim size six by nine inches and the page count as
we've mentioned is 120 we can click on calculate dimensions and then click on download template
and when we've downloaded our template this is what it will look like now the background of the
book has to go to the edge of this pink border which is called a bleed area and any content that
you don't want to lose any important content such as the title of the book any particular graphics
has to be within this pink margin anything outside or in this pink margin does risk getting cut off
so all important content should be within this white area and the same goes for any
title that you write down the spine here now the important data we want from this is this here
which is the overall dimensions which is going to be the overall size of our template so we're
going to make a note of this here which is 14.034 inches by 10.417 inches now in order to create our
cover we're going to be doing this in canva and you can sign up for free on canva get your free
account and the reason we're using this is because it's accessible to most people via the internet
it's free of charge and it's a very simple way of creating a basic book cover when you do get
more advanced and want to try new things you can then go on to use things like adobe illustrator
or affinity designer which is what i use or software like graphic designer or inkscape so now
we've got the dimensions for our template cover we go over to canva and here in the top right
right hand corner we click on custom size now this step is important because a lot of people make a
mistake here straight away and that's the units here it says px for pixels we want to change that
to inches if you don't change it you'll end up creating your cover and when you try to upload
it it will come out all wrong on the platform so in here we put in the size of our cover and click
on create new design and it will give us our blank template from which we're going to work
now what we need to do is just click on the upload box there on the left hand side and we want to
upload that template to the canva platform so just find where you've downloaded it on your computer
and you want to upload the dot png version so just drag that across i've already done this once but
we'll do it again and we can click on that or just drag it across and we'll move that into the top
left corner it will click into place and we drag that down to the bottom right hand corner and we
want to lock that into place so just click on the the lock top right hand corner next is we want the
background for our cover now you could do this simply by clicking on elements clicking on the
square shape and just moving that to the top corner and just dragging into position like so
and changing the color to whatever you like but i want something slightly different so it's going
to delete that and are going to go back over to canva now on canva i went to the graphics menu
and clicked on backgrounds and here we have a variety of different backgrounds we can use and
i quite like the look of this old vintage style background so i'll go ahead and click on that
and download it now you'll notice here it says commercial and full pod usage allowed pod stands
for print on demand so it means that you can use these graphical elements in books that are print
on demand so you've got the full license to do that which is important so go ahead and click
on download then we'll go back to canva click on the upload tab again and from where i downloaded
the background it's going to drag that across into our upload file again and you can see here i've
already done that so i'm just going to before it downloads go ahead and click on that so now what
we can do keeping that in the center just drag to the top then just enlarge it by dragging down drag
to the right drag to the left and that will make sure that this is all in the center and we want
to make this a bit transparent so click here top right hand corner on transparency and reduce that
to around about say 50 percent and that is so that we can see our template underneath and make sure
that our content that we want to keep is within this area now first of all we want to title so
we're going to go to text and you've got all these different texts that you can choose from
and these are all free now as a side note when using elements from canva i would suggest making
sure you make yourself familiar with the licensing agreement and here you have the basics and the
free content licenses you can upgrade on canva to the pro version and that gives you extra licenses
if you like but for the free versions it's all explained here now a lot of people do ask me about
licensing and can i use this can i use that unfortunately i'm not a trademark or copyright
lawyer or licensing lawyer so i wouldn't take my advice as a legal advice anyway but it's something
that you do need to make yourself familiar with but most of the free content here you can use
to create your books so we're going to use this font here so i'm just going to click on it and
i want to get rid of this bit at the top here where it says happy so it's going to delete that
i'm just going to drag that across make it a bit smaller
and this is going to be a travel journal now holding down option left clicking my mouse i
can drag that above which will create a copy don't double click on that click on the bottom section
writing journal and i'm going to move this just across like so shift click on both of them just
reduce the size slightly and move that to around about here when i'm positioning text on a book
cover i tend to divide the book into thirds and have the title either along the line of the bottom
third or along the line of the top third it's just tends to be a bit more visually appealing
now we want some graphical elements on this now on canva you've got these free graphical elements
available and click on see all and you can see what's available here anything with a crown
like this one here is only available in the pro version but the others are available in the free
version and to get information on each graphical element you can click on the three dots like so
and it will give you a bit of information about the licensing for a particular graphical element
and you can just click on those drag them across change the size rotate it etc but i want something
a bit more fancier so i'm going to go back to creative fabrica and this time i put in travel
and i like the look of these travel sketches clip art so i went ahead and downloaded those
going to go back to my travel journal cover go to where i've downloaded my graphical elements
and again drag a few of these into the upload box and it's very simple you just drag across
and it will find itself into the upload section and then when you've done that it's just a case of
clicking on them like so and then just changing the size moving it into the position that you
like so i'm going to have this airplane here move that like so and have this balloon
it's going to move into place down here suitcase again i'm doing this very quick you'll probably
want to spend a bit more time than what i'm doing and we'll have this picture of a camera here and i
think this will make you know decent sort of cover like so now if we click away from our graphics
click on the background that we downloaded go to the transparency box at the top
and just increase the transparency and there you can now see that we have our cover for
our travel journal and the next thing is we need to download this as a pdf file
which will then be ready to upload to amazon now in order to do that top right hand corner click on
download and we want to choose pdf you have two options here pdf standard pdf print click on pdf
print this is the high quality version which is what we want and you just click on download
that will download the pdf version of the cover that we've created which will be ready to upload
to the amazon platform and then in part two to this video i'll show you how to take this cover
take the interior put it together with all the other elements and upload it to
the kdp platform and then you'll become your your own self-published author or or publisher
now when that video is published i'll leave a link to it up here in the meantime you might want to
check out the book tutorial playlist that i've got down here which goes through other aspects
of publishing books in more detail so thank you very much for your time it's very much appreciated
don't forget to hit the subscribe button and turn notifications on and until next time goodbye