Number tracing books for kids are very popular on Amazon and sell very
well, making their publishers a lot of money. So, in this video,
I'm going to be showing you how to create your very own interior for a number
tracing book for free. So you can get into starting publishing these,
self-publishing them on Amazon,
and hopefully creating your own passive income. 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. 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. So,
the number tracing niche is all part of that overall big
homeschooling niche. And in fact,
I did a recent video where it was one of my top seven niche
picks of 2022. And in my most recent video,
I looked at this niche in more depth, looking at the market and the trends,
looking at those all important keywords.
And also just giving you some ideas about how to get
and create an interior. But in this video,
I'm going to go into more depth on creating your own unique,
and that's important,
unique interior that can use to upload to the KDP
platform to create your own book. So what waiting for?
Let's get into it. Now,
if we have a look at the interiors of some of these books,
we can see that basically they consist of numbers in this dotted or dashed
font,
which kids can trace around and practice writing these numbers.
Some books also have the numbers in words as well.
They're more aimed at the slightly older age groups.
And this is an interior I actually downloaded from Creative Fabrica,
which is my go-to site for images, fonts, and KDP interiors.
And you can see here again, we've got this same format.
We've got an image just to decorate the book, make it look more interesting.
What I'm going to show today uses images that actually helps kids count as well.
And we've got these sort of handwriting lines with this
dotted font. Again, that kids can trace around. As I said,
we're going to be doing this for free.
And so we're going to be doing this in Canva.
So head over to canva.com, you can create your own free account,
and I'm going to be using a free account today to do this.
Once you've done that, go to the top right hand corner here,
where it says custom size, and you'll click on that.
This is the important bit here where it says px for pixels.
Change that to in for inches.
Now most of these books are 8.5 by 11 inches.
So that's the size we're going to be using today.
So I'm just going to enter those numbers. And we click on create new design,
and this will give us our blank document. Now,
before we go creating on this single page,
what I would advise doing is just clicking on add page below
there. Now, in order to create one of these interiors,
we're going to need three basic components. Those are,
the linned interior. Those are the lines on the page.
We're going to need a font, a dotted font that kids can trace around,
and we're going to need an image or images that make the book look a bit more
interesting and that kids can use alsouse to count with.
So first of the interior, the lined interior. Well,
if you go over to my Gumroad shop and I'll leave a link to that below in the
description. Have a scroll down, or it might be at the top, but go to this here,
which is the number tracing keywords product.
Now this product contains all the keywords for this niche,
which will be useful and helpful when it actually comes to publishing your book
and getting your book seen.
But it also contains a couple of bonus components and that's the interior
file or interior template, if you like, for these pages.
And when you download them,
you'll notice that there is a .svg format,
I and a .png format.
Now we need to use the .png format. That's very important.
So go ahead,
download the interiors from here and then go back over to
Canva to our blank page. Now what we'll need to do left hand side,
click on upload. And then,
from where you've downloaded your lined interior,
what I want you to do is just drag that across into
the upload section. Like, so.
Then what you need to do is just drag that file,
that you've just downloaded onto the blank page. Now,
if you move that towards the top corner,
you'll see that it expands automatically to fit the page.
And this has the margins already set. Now,
on this first page,
what we're going to do is have a blank section at the top where we're going to
add some words and images.
So what we need to do click on elements on the left hand side menu,
then on lines and shapes. You can click on see all,
but we want this square here.
And then just drag that over to our blank page.
And then position it over some of the lines. And you can just move that across.
Now at the moment, this is a gray color.
So click on the color swatch in the top left and just click on
white. So just click on that white box again.
And what I want you to do is top right hand corner, click on lock.
Now let's go with the numbers. Now to make this more interesting.
We'll we won't go for number one or two. We'll go for number three.
Now what we need to do,
left hand side click on the text box and in the search text box
type in student,
and this is going to give us these two fonts here.
One is the standard c anva student font,
and the other is the canva student font dotted.
Now you'll see here, we've got this where it has a little crown,
and if we hover over the crown, it says pro.
That's for people or people that have actually signed up for a pro account
on Canva can use these components that have that little crown.
And I think it's something like $10,
10 US dollars a month to sign for the pro version.
It gives you access to some extra features,
gives you access to extra graphics and images,
that sort of thing. But what we're gonna do today,
you can do with the free account. So click on the canva student font,
first of all.
And what you can do is just drag to make that a bit larger and then just
double click to select it all and type in the number three and just click
outside the box and then click on it again and just drag that into position.
Now we need to hold our left mouse down and just drag downwards so that we
increase the size of this number so that it fits within the lines.
So what we want to do now is just double click on our number,
click on the text color box, and then we'll make this a gray color.
Now, what we need to do is follow this on with the dotted font.
So an easy way to do this is just to click on the number,
hold down your option key on your keyboard, left click on the mouse,
and then just drag. And we'll see here,
we'll do this at about where it says one.
And then we'll repeat that process again, where that little number says one,
just so they're roughly spaced apart equally and once more.
And the next thing is just double click on each number, click on the fonts here,
click on that student dotted font.
And then just holding down shift, click on all the numbers,
go to the font color, and we're going to have this in a lighter gray. Okay.
So that would be our first line. Now down to the next lines. Well,
the easy way to do this is holding down shift,
click on each number in that line,
and then holding down option left click on the mouse,
drag that whole lot down. And you can see here, it puts a box around everything,
and you can align these up with the numbers above.
And we can repeat that as we go down.
And so that would be the first page. Just reduce the size of that.
And what we can do is, like we've done before,
go to our upload section drag in the lined template onto the next
page. And again, holding down shift, click on all the numbers,
holding down option left click the mouse.
You could drag those down onto the next page and just move them into position.
Because normally you'll find that most of the books have sort of the
first initial page with an image and numbers. And then the next page again,
will all be the same numbers. And you could mix this up if you wanted to.
You could remove that number three, the solid number three,
and just drag across a dotted number three, and then repeat as you go down.
So that would be two pages of a book and you can see it's pretty
straightforward. Now when it comes to this blank section,
what I want is to write number in,
in words and to put some images in there.
So we're just going to go over to our text box, left hand side again,
click on that. And we're going to use the student font again,
and we're going to enlarge this box and we're going to type in the letter or the
number three in words.
And then we're just going to position that and enlarge it. Now that's in black,
which is quite bold and I want,
so I want to change the color to a slightly lighter gray. Okay.
Next for some images. Click on elements again. And then in the search box,
I'm going to search for bird. Now what I suggest doing,
because this is for young kids, just having some basic simple images.
So I'm going to scroll down. Now, I know what I'm looking for.
Cause I've used this image already. And it's this image here of a,
looks like a duckling or something like that. And you can see,
it hasn't got a little crown on it so we can use that for free.
So it's just a case of dragging that across, onto our page.
Just going to reduce the size of that and move it down here. Now,
in terms of using images and publishing,
using them to publish your book and the licensing. Well,
what I suggest doing is going over to the Canva licensing page,
where it tells you everything that you can and cannot do with the image
in terms of commercial use.
And I think you'll find that what I'm showing you today,
you can do commercially. But I suggest wherever you get images from,
whatever source you do, make yourself familiar with the licensing agreement.
So that you're satisfied, you know,
what you can and cannot do because it is your account.
And as part of this business, it is your responsibility. Okay,
so we've got our duck here or duckling.
And I'm just going to move that there. And I'm going to just hold down option,
left click of the mouse and just drag. I'll put another one there,
make that slightly smaller option,
left click of the mouse and just drag this one into position here and reduce
that size ever so slightly. So now you can see, we have our page set up,
we've got our number in words,
and we've got these images here, three birds that kids can count.
Now you'll notice that this is in color.
I think if you publish with color images and keep it as black and white,
Amazon will publish that in black and white.
But what I prefer to do is just change my images
to black and white. And that's easy to do. Just click on our image,
top left here. We've got these color boxes.
These are the colors used in the image.
Just click on the light colored image and just click like so,
and convert this to a gray image.
Now you can do these for these other birds, but to make this quicker,
I'm going to delete those option left click of the mouse like so.
Okay. So that's our first page and I think you'll agree,
that was relatively simple and quite easy to do.
Then what you would do is carry on filling out these other pages,
then go onto the next page. Now these books have number counting, you know,
one to 10, one to 20, 1 to a hundred. Some of them, as I mentioned earlier,
combined the numbers and also combined the tracing around the actual words
of the numbers. So you would go through creating more pages,
adding your page in da, da, da, creating these.
Then what you would need is the PDF file,
which you will then use to upload to the Amazon KDP platform.
How to do that. Top right hand corner, click on download file type,
click on that down arrow and choose this here, which is the PDF print.
Now at the moment, it says all pages in brackets four,
obviously when you've created your interior you'll have more
pages than this. So PDF print, all pages download,
boom. It will download the PDF file to your computer.
Now none of these images or interiors goes to the edge of the page.
So when you are uploading this to KDP,
this will be a no bleed interior. And as I mentioned earlier,
all the margins are already set. So you don't have to worry about that either.
So this is pretty simple. Now I want to show you one more step.
If you want to make this interior look a bit more advanced. Now for this,
we're going to use Keynote or PowerPoint. Today, I'm going to be using Keynote.
So what I want to do is click on download,
click on png,
where it says suggested then click on this down arrow,
where it says all pages and click on just page one.
So that's the page we've just created. Click done.. Click on download.
So this is going to download a PNG of just that one page
next, go to keynote. Or as I said, you can do this in PowerPoint.
Now set the page size. In Keynote this has to be in points.
So it's 612 by 792 points for a 8.5 by
11 inch page. In PowerPoint,
you can set it in inches. Left hand side here, just click on,
copy then paste.
And you can do that a few times to create the pages that are going to make up
the interior of your book.
Now that interior that I've just downloaded that one page in .png
format,
I'm just going to drag across onto our blank page here and just move that into
position so it's centered. Usually clicks into position.
So what do I want to do with this page? Well,
if we go over to Amazon,
you'll notice here that these numbers have these arrows,
which shows kids and adults the direction with which to use the
pen or pencil stroke. And a lot of these books do have that.
Now some books don't.
So if you didn't want to do it and just leave it as a very basic interior,
you can. But if you wanted to spice things up a bit,
I'll show you how to add those arrows. So in Keynote,
we're going to enlarge our page so we can concentrate on our solid number
here. Next click on shape and in the top right corner here,
we've got this pen icon. Click on that.
And what you do is click either side of the curve here
and then move the pen to the center and then just drag and it'll
form this nice curve. And then you press escape on your keyboard.
Now over on the right hand side,
you'll want to click on this format button and click on
style, and then where it says, end points.
This is the first point of that line.
So we're gonna click on that little dot and then the end point of the line will
be an Arrowhead. So click on that. And then increase the,
the thickness of the arrow and we'll change the color to a lighter
gray. And there we have our arrows.
So now all there is to do is to add the numbers. So the first stroke,
number one is this first curve here.
So we click on the text box at the top there, double click that,
add in one.
Now that's going to be a bit large and I want to do it the same shade as
the arrow. And then we can reduce the size of the font also.
And then just drag that over to our arrow.
Then using option, holding down the left mouse key, just drag down here,
double click it and type in two.
So now you can see it looks pretty good.
Now you could leave the other numbers as is,
but if you wanted to move those components that we've just created down,
holding down the shift button,
just click on those different components that were just created,
holding down the option key, left mouse click.
Holding down or holding down the left mouse.
You could just drag those down and again,
holding down in position and you build up your page like, so.
And then let's move that to the top. And then you would go on to page two,
download the .png file from Canva, drag that into Keynote. And again,
you could add any embellishments, arrows as you like.
This way you would actually be building up your interior then in Keynote or
Powerpoint.
And it would just be a case of going to file clicking on file and exporting as
a PDF. Now, a lot of these books in terms of numbers of pages,
they tend to have on average around 80 pages. But you know,
you could do one with less pages or you could do a book with more pages.
That's entirely up to you. Now,
if you are a complete beginner at this and have not created or published your
own book yet,
then what I suggest doing is going to my book tutorials playlist here,
where I run through all the process of creating a cover,
uploading a basic lined interior and cover to KDP and going through the whole
upload process. in total. If you want to watch that video, where I look at the,
the niche, the number tracing niche in detail,
then click on this video down here. Thank you very much for your time.
Don't forget to hit the subscribe button.
It's very much appreciated and until next time, goodbye.