In this video,
I'm going to show you a quick and free way of creating your very own
KDP, low content journal with a duotone effect. Now,
this is a cool way of creating a really striking book cover that should
hopefully catch customers attention on Amazon, and therefore, hopefully,
get you to make some sales. So by the end of this video,
you should be able to create cover.
You'll have the resources for the interior and be able to upload that to the
Amazon KDP platform and publish your book on Amazon. So,
if that sounds good, then follow along. Now,
if you've not been here before them welcome to the channel,
my name is Paul Marles and I do videos on how to make it,
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videos like this.
So I'm going to show you how to create a book cover using this duotone effect.
Then I'm going to give you the resources to upload an
interior to Amazon,
and also the resources to be able to modify the interior yourself.
And I'm going to give you that for free.
So I'll give you the details on that towards the end of the video.
And then I'm going to upload the cover and the interior to the Amazon KDP
platform to show you that it all works fine and what it should look like.
So let's get straight into it.
Now we're going to be creating a recipe journal,
but the effect that I'm going to show you can be used in any type
of book you want. And this effect has a bit of a sort of retro appeal to it.
So if we go down on Amazon and look at some of these recipe journals,
we can see that all the covers tend to have a
similar appearance and color theme.
So we're going to create something that looks really striking. Now,
some of you are
going to say recipe journals too competitive, and I agree.
There's 10,000 results in the search results for recipe journal.
So if you want to create one of these yourself,
then I suggest maybe looking at some sub-niches and related to the recipe
journal. And that could be things like, I don;t know,
a recipe journal for vegans or recipe journal
for low gluten diets.
There's lots of ideas out that if you put the work in and use your imagination.
But, this cover I'm going to give you, as I said,
can be used in any type of book that you like.
So we're going to go over to Canva. I said, this is free.
Canva is free. You don't need the pro version. And what you need to do,
first of all, is click on custom size here in the top right-hand corner.
And when we do that, it's going to ask us for the width and the height.
Now this is the width and height of our book template that we're going to use to
correct the cover. And the templates includes the part for the back of the book,
the bit down the middle for the spine and the front of the book. Now,
we need to get ourselves a template. First of all.
So once you've created your account on.
KDP, or you may have an account already go to the help section.
When you get there in the left-hand menu, click on format, your paper book,
and it will take you to this page and just scroll down a bit.
And this area where it says, download a cover template,
just click on cover calculator and templates. And when you do that,
it will give us this page and we need to fill out these boxes.
So we'll go through those quickly. So first one,
paperbacks going to be a paperback book, interior type black and white.
Paper type white paper. Page turn direction left to right.
Measurement units, inches. Interior, trim size.
Now this is going to be an 8.5 by 11 inch book.
So we'll click on that. And the page count,
and this is going to be a 120 page book.
The reason for that is that many books that you buy,
these sort of low content and our content books tend to be 120 pages.
So that's exactly what we're going to do. And then click on calculate dimension.
So it will give us the dimensions of the cover template. And here,
where it says full cover.
It will give us the width of our template and the height of our template.
So we need to remember these numbers and enter them into Canva.
But before we do that, just go ahead and click on download template.
This will download the template to your computer. Let's go back to Canva.
So now we can enter these figures for the width and the height.
But one thing that is vitally important is here. It says PX,
for pixels, click on that down arrow and click on inches.
If you forget to do that, you will create a cover,
which when you upload to KDP will look odd.
So let's put in our numbers here,
17.52 by 11.25,
and click on create new design. Okay. Now what we need to do next,
because we've got this white area for our cover,
is just dragging the template that you've just downloaded.
And you will drag in the .png format when that's dragged in just
drag that to the top left-hand corner,
click on the bottom right-hand corner and drag it into place.
And it will click into place nicely. Now, what I normally do next,
here in the top, right, is just click on the lock. So we lock this layer.
Now we want our image for the front cover.
So before we do any colors for the background,
we want to drag in our photograph, which we're going to use,
because this is important. And I'll show you why in a moment.
Now you can use a photograph that you've taken yourself.
You could go to a site like Pixabay or Unsplash where there's lots
of apparently royalty-free images. Now I say apparently,
because I'll show you why. When you go over to Pixabay and here I've put food,
because we're going to be doing a recipe journal.
We've got all these photographs,
which are apparently royalty-free and most of them are,
but you do need double check that they are royalty-free and you need to double
check that these images don't already appear on a stock
photograph website like Bigstockphoto or Shutterstock. Now,
the way to do that is to click on an image, click on the free download,
and that will download it to your computer.
Then go along to Google image search.
Then you will want to drag the image you've downloaded into the Google image
search,
and it will give you a list of all the sites where this image is found.
And if we scroll down,
we can see all these different sites that has this image or are
using the image.
And so we just click on the first few pages and just double-check that this
image is not on a stock photo site where they're charging for it
and where they may have some sort of copyright on it.
Otherwise you may run into trouble. And as I said,
you can use your own photographs for this.
It's a good use of your own photographs.
What I'm going to go and do today is on Canva, click on photos,
click on, see old. And I'm going to choose a photo from Canva.
And this one I like.
So I'm just going to drag that across and drop it into place.
Now I'm just going to alter the size of this slightly,
move it around to a position that I want.
Like so. Now what we need to do is apply. What's called a duotone effect.
So here in the top left click on edit image,
scroll down and where it says, duotone click on see all.
Now we've got all these different color effects that we can use.
So you could have this as sea blue, and you can see it changes.
We've got violet, Amber, any colors you want. For this,
I'm going to choose pop, which has this pinky purple color. Now,
the reason we want to apply this effect to our image first of all,
is because of the next step.
And that is we're going to apply our background to this cover.
So we click on elements again, then click on lines and shapes.
Now you can click on see all, or you may have this rectangle here already.
And we're just going to drag this rectangle across. Now,
this is over our image.
So we need to click on position here and then click on backwards.
And this will place it behind our image. Now,
we want to change the color of this.
So click on this color icon or badge here.
Now the beauty of applying the duotone effect, first of all,
is that Canva will now, as we can see here,
give us this palette of colors related to the image that we've just applied this
effect to. So I'm going to pick this color here for our background.
Now I'm going to drag that into the top corner,
drag it down and
then drag it across. So now we've got our background. Now,
I want to apply another square shape to, so again,
drag it's across. Click on position, move it backwards.
So just click on that once.
And now I want to place this in the front part of the book cover.
Now to get this in the right position what we need to do is click on the main
color of the background,
click on the transparency and move the slider down so that
it's transparent. Then we want to enlarge our book cover and move down.
Now we can drag this purple rectangle around.
And what I want to do is just to line align that to this dotted line here,
like so. Okay, now we can reduce the size again.
Then we can click on the colored background area,
click on transparency and move the transparency back up to 100. Okay.
So this is the general design of the cover that we want.
Now you could get rid of this bit here on the left-hand side,
where it overlaps the spine and goes onto the back cover.
But I actually quite like that. And I want to keep it.
If you wanted to get rid of that,
what you could do is just apply another rectangle to cover that area,
drag it down and change it to the color of the background that we just
created. Like, so. But I don't want that. So I'm going to delete that.
Now we want to apply some text. So left-hand side click on text.
Now you've got all these different fonts and styles that you can use.
I want to use this one here, where it says happy birthday.
I'm just going to drag that across, reduce the size a bit,
drag that into position. Now I want to remove that birthday bit.
I'm just going to click on delete. Now, here, where it says happy.
I'm going to change that to my. And again,
I want to reduce the size slightly.
Then I'm going to drag in happy birthday again, this time remove, happy.
Now some of you might write to me and go, oh,
there's a quicker way of doing this. There may well be.
There's often a quicker way of doing all these different types of things,
but this is the way I found out how to do it and I can do it pretty quick.
So whatever suits you. And we're going to write in recipe here,
and we want to change the text, color to white, reduce the size,
click outside that and just drag that into place.
Like so. I'm going to increase the size of that slightly. There we go.
Now I want to write journal underneath that. So I'm just going to click on my.
Hold option down on the keyboard and just drag that down there.
Double click it and type in journal.
Click outside the box, and then just drag that across into position.
There we go.
Now I like my text quite big and bold on the front cover of a book so
that when people see the book on maybe their phone or a
tablet, it stands out the text is easily readable. Now,
in terms of positioning, text and images, I tend to use,
what's called the rule of three.
Now it's going to make this background transparent again.
I'm going to make sure this text is within this white area of the front cover,
because if it's outside that there's a chance that it could get trimmed off and
you'll just get an error when you try to upload to KDP. So in fact,
this all might be a bit too large,
so I'm just going to reduce the size slightly and drag it down a little bit and
move it across. Now, when I say the rule of thirds,
what I want you to imagine is that as a line, going down vertically here,
a line going down vertically here,
and it splits the cover into three equal columns and also the
same going across.
And I put titles main graphical elements on
those particular lines. So with this text here,
I'm actually going to move that across to the left so that the bulk of the text,
the main body of it just is over that vertical
third line.
On the left. So I think that looks pretty good.
I'm going to go and turn the transparency back up. Okay.
So now we need to download this cover as a PDF. So just click on, download,
click on the down arrow here and click on PDF print,
which is a high quality multi page documents.
So click on that click on download,
and this will download the PDF of the cover template to your computer.
Okay. So now we come to the interior.
What I did was I went to Affinity Designer and I created this very basic
interior for a recipe journal.
And then what I did was just copy and pasted this. Although before I did that,
I created a left side and a right side
of this interior. And the reason for that is because of the margins,
the margins are different on the left side and on the right side
pages.
So I created these two pages copied and pasted them
into Keynote. So we can see here.
Page one is the right-hand side page. Page two is the left hand side page.
When I did that, I just selected them both,
copied and pasted all the way down until we got to 120 pages.
And then I saved this as a PDF. Now that PDF,
that 120 page PDF recipe journal interior,
I'm going to give to you guys for free and I've put it in my Gumroad shop,
which I'll leave a link to down below in the description.
So you could use that as is. However,
what I've also done in the Gumroad shop in the same download is put the
.svg
versions of the left-hand and right-hand side pages,
which you could drag into something like Affinity Designer, Inkscape,
Adobe Illustrator, and you could move the components around. Change the fonts
if you like. Move the lines,
move the left-hand side bits over to the right-hand side,
whatever you wanted to do. And you can change this to whatever you want.
There's no copyright license on this and you can do whatever you want with the
interior. You know, you can use it obviously commercially.
And to save lots of people using the same interior.,I suggest maybe
just changing the interior a little bit as well, and also into the Gumroad file,
into the Gumroad download,
there's also the .png versions of the left-hand and right-hand side pages.
And you could drag those into Canva and add other pages as well.
So you could add a few pages,
maybe for a list of contents at the beginning of the book.
So once you've got your PDF file for the interior, which as I said,
I'm giving you away for free.
So you can go ahead and create this book straightaway.
And once you've got your PDF of the cover interior,
you want to go across to KDP and this is where you create your
actual book. So you'll need to create a KDP account,
if you haven't got one already. And that's free of charge.
So after you've filled in all the title, subtitle, keywords,
you'll come to the second page and here for the print options,
you'll select black and white interior with white paper, trim size 8.5 by 11,
then you'll click on no bleed. This interior has no bleed.
And all the content on the interior pages are all within the margins.
So you don't have to worry about that whatsoever.
Then you click on the paperback cover finish. I like matte,
but you can choose glossy if you like. Then you come to the manuscript area.
You'll click on upload paperback manuscript,
and then just upload that PDF file for the interior.
I've already done that as you can see. And here where it says book cover,
you'll click on upload a cover you already have. A print ready PDF.
Then click on upload your cover file and then upload the PDF
of the cover that you've created in Canva.
And you can see I've already done that and then click on launch previewer. Now,
sometimes this may take a few minutes to appear.
So we'll just jump straight ahead. And this is what you'll see.
And you can see here, there are no errors. Cover looks fine.
If you wanted to, when you were creating your cover,
you could write some text down the spine, but I'm not doing that today.
And over in the left-hand side, we can't see any errors here at all as well.
So click on the right-hand side arrow,
and this will take us to the interior and we can just flip through the interior
pages. And again, there's no red warning triangles.
There's no red warning borders and there's no warning text on the left-hand
side. So that interior I'm giving you is absolutely fine.
The way I've showed you how to make the cover is absolutely fine as we can see
here. So you would just go ahead and click on approve.
And then you would go on to save and continue.
That would take you to the next page where you put in the pricing of your book,
and then you would click on publish and there you would have your jrecipe ournal
published on the KDP platform on Amazon.
And as I said, you can use this technique, this duotone effect,
technique to create any type of book you want. Now,
if you have not uploaded a book before,
and you want to know how to go through all those stages of putting in the title,
subtitle, keywords, et cetera,
then I've done a video which I'll leave a link to here on how to do that.
It will walk you through all those steps. I hope you found that useful.
If you did,
please give it a thumbs up and don't forget to hit the subscribe button.
Thank you very much, really appreciated. And until next time, goodbye.