In this video,
I'm going to show you how to create the interior of a book you can,
self-publish on Amazon that's selling particularly well at the moment. In fact,
one seller is making between 9 to $20,000 a month with
this type of book. In fact, they're probably making a little bit more.
So if you're interested in creating a second income or a full-time income,
or even a passive income by publishing on Amazon,
then watch along as I show you how to create one of these books. Now,
if you've not been here before, my name is 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. And 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 book in question that I'm going to show you how to create is called a
scissor skills book.
Now these are designed for kids around the 3 to 5 mark,
and they're designed to help them improve their fine motor skills by using
scissors to cut out shapes and lines in books. And as I said,
they're selling particularly well.
Now I've recently done a video on this niche,
which I'll leave a link to before where I sort of look at the niche,
show you the interiors and show you the important keywords,
which are vital to get in traffic,
to your book and to making those sales.
So what we're going to need to start with are three things.
One is our graphics,software, our graphic design software.
The other is our actual graphics or images to create the interiors of these
books. And the third bit of software is the software
that's going to bring it all together so we can create our PDF that's ready to
upload to the KDP platform and create our self-published book.
Now, the software I'm going to be using to create the pages today is
called Affinity Designer. Now there is other software.
Now what I recommend doing is using vector editing software.
Vectors are very good because they don't lose a quality if you expand
them in size.
And it's very easy to manipulate the images and to do what I'm going to show you
today. Now other software that's available now there's free software,
which is Inkscape is one example.
The other is Gravit Designer.
Now that's free for the basic software,
but you do have to upgrade with a payment, if you want the pro version,
which has a few more features.
And the other common one is Adobe Illustrator,
but that's on a subscription basis, but very good. Probably the,
what we call the gold standard although what I'm using today, Affinity Designer,
I think comes a very close second, if at all second to Adobe Illustrator.
Now the beauty of Affinity Designer is that it's only a one-off payment and
they're currently running a promotion, which makes it half price.
Now it's currently selling for £23.99,
Which must equate to around the $30 Mark.
Now the graphics I'm going to get today,
I'm going to find off Creative Fabrica.
Now that's my latest go-to website for finding
interiors, graphics and fonts. It's got them all. You can buy bits individually,
or you can buy a subscription package. Again. I'll leave the link to that below.
It is an affiliate link. I do receive a small commission.
It doesn't cost you any more. And it helps me keep this channel going.
Other sources that I use or have used in the past are things like vecteezy.com,
which is very good for getting vector images.
There's also things like Design Bundles.
You can find royalty free images on things like Unsplash and
Pixabay as well. And sometimes you can pick up vector images there.
You've just got to be careful that they are in fact royalty three.
And I do advise any image you download from there you do a search on Google
images just to check that it isn't actually, you know,
for sale under license from other software platforms.
Because sometimes images can fall through the net on those particular
sites. And in fact, you think they're royalty free and they're not,
and it can get you into a bit of bother. Okay? So,
we're going to be using Affinity Designer.
So now we need to go and get our graphics. Now,
if you don't want to create the pages yourself,
you can go to Creative Fabrica and do a search for scissor skills
interiors, or KDP scissor skills.
And you'll find that there are ready-made interiors to create these books.
Now there's not many, there's only a few here. Now,
the slight disadvantage with the fact that there's not many is a lot of
people could go along and use these particular interiors,
which means you might run into issues of duplicate content,
but let's have a closer look at a couple of these interiors.
We've got this one here,
which looks very basic and I've downloaded it to have a look at it.
And you can see there's just basic lines for kids to cut along,
to help with their scissor skills. There's shapes and there's images of animals.
Now this one's very basic.
This particular interior has one significant problem in that there are no
blank pages between the images.
So if a child was to cut along one of these pages,
they'd be cutting into the page on the other side as well.
So you could download this and use a bit of software to
merge it with blank pages, if you like.
So you could have the image page, then the blank page.
The other interior that looked a little bit better was this particular one.
Again, I downloaded that to have a look and now this has got color images,
but if you were to upload this to KDP and just click on the black and
white image upload, it would convert these to black and whites.
The only issue would be, would be that if people did the look inside feature,
so color images,
and then they received a book and they're black and white images,
you could get a negative review. So bear that in mind.
But you can just get an idea here of the images that kids can
cut around. It looks very basic, a bit more detailed than the previous one.
I do prefer this particular interior and they've got the blank pages as
well, so that when they cut around these particular images,
they're not damaging the images,
graphics on the other side of the page. But again,
if you get hundreds of people downloading these images and just uploading them
as is to KDP,
you could run into duplicate content issues,
but you could use some of these pages and combine them with your own pages that
I'm going to show you how to make today. Okay.
So now the first thing we need is an image of
some scissors. So again,
on Creative Fabrica we've got this little image here of some scissors.
It says commercial and full print on demand usage allowed.
Whenever you use graphics from any site,
you must make sure you're familiar with the licensing and it's not much good
messaging me asking me, is it okay to use, because this is your business.
You need to make sure you're satisfied with the licensing agreement and
understanding the licensing agreement is actually part of this whole business.
And the problem is a lot of these sites do check or do change, sorry,
their licensing agreements from time to time.
So it could be that you asked me and I go, yeah, it's all good to go.
You use it and find out that it's not,
and you get into trouble with Amazon and lose your account.
So please make sure you're familiar with the licensing yourself. Okay.
So now what we want to do is create this sort of a
page that you can see here. So what we need, first of all,
is our images of the balloons.
And when we drag them across to Affinity Designer, this is what we have now.
I only need the outline of the balloons here.
Now this is the beauty of vector software.
You can move and edit all the individual components. So what we're going to do,
holding down shift, is just click on the three components we need,
which are these three here. Going to click on copy.
Go and now open a blank page on new
page, on Affinity Designer. And this is going to be an 8.5 inch by 11 inch.
We're going to click on create,
and we're going to paste our balloon onto this page and reduce
it in size? And we're going to move this over here,
just adjust the angle ever so slightly. Okay.
Now holding down alt and the left click of the mouse,
you can drag a copy of this image across, and again,
just alter the angle just to mix it up a bit. And again, holding down alt,
drag off another image there. So we've got our three images on the page.
Now we need our lines. Now to draw the wavy line,
I'm going to click on the brush tool and we've got width 16
pixels, and we're just going to draw a wavy line.
Now, what we.
Need to do is just click on the move tool.
And we're going to turn this into a dotted line. So where it says stroke,
top right corner here, click on this little dotted line, just there.
And you can see if I just enlarge that we've got our dotted line.
Now what we need to do next is where it says dash,
we're going to change these parameters.
So we're going to the first box we're going to put in the number two ,second box
the number three and just click one of the other boxes.
And we can see we've got our dotted line now.
And that looks pretty good already. Okay. Now we need our zig zag line. Now,
rather than using the brush tool for this, we're going to use the pen tool.
So we just click and just move like,
so. And then we want our square sort of toothed line.
So we're going to use the pen tool and click on our.
Balloon.
And just create a square sort of sawtoothed
pattern.
So there we have our lines that kids can cut along and now we need our little
scissopr graphics. So we'll just go back to our scissors here,
copy and paste.
So just drag that down and so just need to move this into place and just change
the angle, like, so. Press the alt key.
And then you can just drag across another one of these scissors. Again,
change the angle, according to the line, and again,
press down the alt key drag across and there. We've got our first page.
So kids can cut along the lines here towards the balloon.
Now you could think up some other images to do this sort of thing with.
You could have the path to a house or past to a,
you could have instead of a balloon, a car, or say a garage.
And at the bottom where the scissors are,
you could have a car so kids could cut along imagining that they're drawing
along the road from the car to the garage.
So use your imagination to create these different types of pages.
So that's the first type of page done.
So the next type of page we're going to do is an image.
Of an animal.
Or you can use an object, whether it's a truck, car, mermaid unicorn.
Today,
we're going to use an animal we're going to get a frog and then we're going to
have it so the kids can cut around the image of that.
Now the third type of page we do that you find in these books is called a cut
and glue page. But I'll tell you about that in the moment.
So what we need to do is go to Creative Fabrica and find the image of a frog.
And I just did a search for frog and found this one here, which I like.
Now you'll notice it.
It's only says commercial usage allowed nothing about print on demand.
That's fine becasue I'm not actually going to be using this to create the
interior book. This is just for demonstration purposes only.
So go ahead and download that and just drag that into Affinity Designer.
Now we've got all these components, colors that we don't actually want.
Now you could go through each one and just click and delete.
A quicker way would be to go to the layers panel on the right-hand side here,
click on the first colored component there, go down, hold down shift,
click on the last colored component, which selects them all.
And just drag them to the bin. And there you see straight away.
We've got our black and white frog image,
which we then put a bounding box around. Command C to copy.
And then we just paste this onto our blank page.
Our 8.5 by 11 page.
Now we want to create a dotted line around the outside of this frog.
Now you can do it with the brush tool.
Better ways actually to use the pen tool and to start at one
point and then use the Bezier points to change the
curve. And then press down alt,
remove that little Bezier point and then gone to the next one.
And you can see it's quite easy then to adjust the curve and you can just work
your way along again. I'm just doing this very quick, just as a demonstration.
But you can see here we get better, better curves, more even curves.
And then what we end up with is something that looks like this.
We've got our image and as I said,
it could be an image of anything with our dotted line around.
We go to our scissors, copy,
go back to our frog command V to paste our scissors in place.
And then you could put this anywhere you like along the dotted line,
which indicates to kids where to cut.
So that would be another page that we've done. Now, the third one,
which is a bit more interesting, I think, is the cut and glue pages.
And what these are,
are shapes that kids can cut around and then glue them onto a blank piece
of paper or cardboard or whatever to create another image.
I'll show you what I mean. It is this here,
and you can see there's all these shapes here that kids can cut around,
glue them together to make this image. So again,
we're going to start with the image of our frog.
Now we're going to draw a bounding box around our frog and holding down alt and
left click of the mouse,
just drag a copy of the image there. And then just holding down shift,
reducer the size. Now this is the beauty of vector editing software.
We can just draw a bounding box around the components we wish to move.
So here, we've got the head and all that, the components inside,
and we can just drag this to one side and rotate it like so.
And then we've got the legs.
Let's drag them up there. And we've got these legs, these frogs legs,
drag them up there and we've got this circle from inside the body.
We're going to just drag that up there. And we've got the main bit of the body,
which we're going to drag down here and I'm just going to move all this down a
bit so we've got a bit of room to maneuver in. Now,
you can see that I've got quite close to the left-hand side.
Now you need to make sure you've left enough space for the margin.
These pages are going to be no bleed.
So now what we need to do around each component of the image is draw our
dotted line. And again, I'd recommend using the pen tool over the brush tool.
And it's just a case of, as we did before, just drawing a line around the edge.
Alt to
get rid of that Bezier control and then join another one and just adjusting the
curvature with these controls here. Click alt to remove.
And again like, so again. This is very quick, won't be particularly exact.
And so what you would do,
is do the same as I've just done there around each component of the
image, and you could add some text at the top.
And what we end up is a page like this. And again,
we've copied and pasted our scissors graphic into there.
So kids know where to cut around. So kids can cut around these shapes,
glue them onto paper or card, and they've got themselves a nice picture.
And also a big component of these is the coloring aspect.
So you've got the coloring, the cutting out and in this case,
the gluing as well. So it's a,
it's an activity book that encompasses a number of different activities.
So now we need to put all these components together to
create our PDF book. Now,
most of the books that I've seen have something like 60 to 90
pages.
So probably have somewhere between 30 to 40 images because you're going to have
your page with the images on, and you're going to have your blank page.
Now today I'm going to be using Keynote to create the interior of my book.
So we've got our blank document set up on keynote and we've set the custom size
to 8.5 by 11 inches. You'll notice here on Keynote, it's actually in points,
which is equivalent to 612 by 792 points.
But on PowerPoint you would just put in some, put in the size 8.5 by 11.
You can do what I'm going to show you in Canva, Indesign and Affinity Publisher.
Also. Now we've got our one page here, so we need to copy that, command C,
and then just paste. And you'll see,
we build up the number of pages for our books.
So you would go down doing 60 or 90, however many pages are in your book.
And we're going to go to the first page.
So we go to Affinity Designer select our first image. And it's very simple.
It's just a case of dragging a boundingbox around our image,
command C or control C to copy,
going back to Keynote and just pasting. And there we've got our first page.
Now we need to leave the second page blank so that doesn't the image doesn't get
damaged when kids cut on the page. And so we go to page number three,
then back to our graphics program, bounding box around the image, command C,
control C to copy back to Keynote and paste in place.
And so we repeat again for the next image.
And this will go on to page five,
leaving the pages blank and so on and so forth. So you'd build up your book,
go onto page seven next, and then page nine,
paste in your images until you've built up all the images in the book that you
want. And then it's just a case of saving that as a PDF file,
and that will be ready to upload to the KDP dashboard. Now,
if you do like the idea of creating these types of book,
then click on this video here, where I look more in depth on the niche,
but more importantly, talk about those keywords,
which are essential for getting traffic to your book,
which is the first step in making sales. Thank you very much for your time.
It's very much appreciated.
I hope you found the video useful and until next time, goodbye.