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, to 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 sums up, hit the subscribe button, smash that notification bell to receive
notification of when I produce more 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.
