Create A Journal For Free To Publish & Sell On Amazon - Low Content Book Publishing Tutorial

in this video I'm going to take you through a very simple stepbystep tutorial showing you how to create a journal that you can publish and sell on Amazon KDP and how you can do it all for free hello my name is Caroline and welcome to my channel I share videos every single week all about self-publishing books and you're watching one of them right now so thanks so much for taking time out of your day to join me now if you've seen any of my previous videos you would know I'm a big advocate for having some sort of budget to be able to invest in your self-publishing business whether that be a budget for having books made or a budget for spending on Advertising to promote your books to get more sales but I get that not everybody can start off with spending money on having books made one thing that I love about self-publishing is that it is accessible for anyone regardless of where you're from regardless of what your background is or how much money you have to spend on starting a self-publishing business and Publishing books so for those of you who don't have money to spend on getting books made or if you would just prefer to make the books yourself without spending any money this is the video for you today we are going to make a low content journal in three easy steps that you can get published on Amazon KDP within a matter of days and if you do stay till the end of the video I'll show you the best way to promote your journals to maximize sales and the great thing about this method is it is totally free so let's get straight into the tutorial before we get into the actual making of the book first you are going to have to decide on what size you want your book to be we need to do this first so that we know what size our pages and what size our cover is going to be when we create it in canva or whatever program it is you're going to be using to create it there is no no point going ahead and creating a cover creating a whole interior for your book only to find that it doesn't match Amazon's measurements when you want to upload it to KDP take a look on Amazon at the various book sizes that they have available but for journals they are generally going to be a 6 in x 9 in book if you're creating more of a notebook or even sort of like a composition notebook which is sort of like a school notebook these can also be in an 8.5 in by 11 in but most of the time for journals you're going to want to use a 6X 9 in also decide on how many pages you want in your book now because the size of your cover is actually going to be determined by how many pages are in your book when we create our cover file it actually includes the front cover the back cover and the spine all within the one file so the more pages that you have in your book the thicker the spine is going to be which effects what dimensions your cover is going to be when you are creating it now if this isn't making any sense right now it will become clear when we start creating the cover journals can range in page size as in how many pages are within the book and at the end of the day it's really up to you how many pages you want in your Journal but usually a standard Journal will have somewhere around 110 to 120 pages so now we've decided all the technical stuff let's start creating first head on over to Amazon KDP to download a cover complet so we know what dimensions we need our cover to be and we enter in the information of our book and this will help us to get access to the cover template so we're going to be creating a paperback of course if you're creating a hard cover choose whatever is suitable for your book our interior is going to be a black and white we're going to be choosing white paper of course if you want to choose cream paper that's your choice and this is where we pop in the dimensions of the book so we're choosing a 6x9 in and we're going to have 120 pag pages so we can calculate the dimensions of what the book is going to be but we also want to download the template and we can use the template when we're creating our cover so now that we have everything that we need to create our book Let's Start creating so the first thing that we need to create is a cover you can create the cover first you can create the interior first whichever is easiest for you but let's just start with the cover now you don't need to use canva you can use whatever program that you have access to and like using but if you don't know what program to use or you don't know how to use any other kind of program canva is just really easy to use and you don't have to have canva Pro for this you can just use the free version canva Pro can be handy to have especially if there are going to be images and elements that you really want to use that fall under the pro license but you can get started creating journals using the free version of canva first we're going to want to create a design in a custom size the dimensions that were given in the cover calculator so we're going to want to create a cover that is in total 12.52 in by 9.25 in create new design and now we have our canvas that we can work with we are going to want to put our template on our page so that we know where our elements can go so we head to uploads I've uploaded the cover template which is what we downloaded from the KDP website and we add this to our page drag it to size and now this is going to tell us where we can and where we shouldn't put certain things so the black solid line around the edge is where the book is going to be trimmed which is going to be where it's going to be cut the blue dash line is where the spine is going to be folded the white area is where you can put whatever you want the red area is where you don't want things if you don't want them cut off and if you don't want anything hidden by the barcode don't put anything down here in the corner so it just gives you a really nice idea of the layout of the cover so what we can do is we can actually just make this a little bit lighter so it's not so bold and so we can see the elements that we're going to be putting on the page when we click on elements over here on the left this is where you have all the images and shapes and things that you can use in your cover there's going to be two lots of elements that you'll see for example we'll click on graphics and if you did a search for let's say flowers for example and you're going to see ones with a little Crown in the corner and ones that don't have a crown in the corner the ones that do have a crown in the corner are for the pro version and the ones that don't are for the free version so if you're only using the free version of canva just look for anything that doesn't have a crown in the corner if there is something you really want to use that is the pro version you can either upgrade to the pro version of canva or you also have the option if you just wanted to use one image and you don't want to sign up for a monthly subscription you can actually pay just $1 and get access to the pro version of that image but for the purposes of a journal if you wanted to keep it really plain and not use anything that's going to cost you any money you could do something as simple as just a plain color with the word journal on it or the word Notebook on it so for example to be able to do that you would just go to shapes and we'll add a square we drag it to fit the cover we'll send it back so that we can see that cover template so that when we pop some text on let's say we're adding a heading and we just want it to say gratitude Journal we can make it a little bit smaller we can drag it over here and it will give us an idea of where it's placed in relation to the spine and the edge of the page so you want to try and Center it or put it wherever you want to put it on the page I'm just going to send the template back again and we can adjust the color of this maybe you want a nice pink color or we can use the gradients down here or maybe you do want something with a bit of a pattern so you can go back here to the elements you might want a watercolor background for example and if we just look for one that isn't part of the paid so this one actually has a transparent background and I can even just drag that over the color that I originally put there and that doesn't look too bad this is just something I haven't really put any thought into I've just picked very quickly something from this search panel that's just showed up so ideally you would spend a little bit more time designing your covers and you'd already have an idea in your head of what you want your journal to look like but you could do something as simple as that that literally took me a minute and obviously you can get as detailed and intricate and creative as you can with it or as you want to or you can keep it as simple as you want there are lots of journals on Amazon that just have a plain black or a plain color for their cover and just the word journal thegu the limit here with your creative imag in ination for what you're going to design for your cover now let's just take a moment here and let's talk about canva licensing there is so much confusion out there about whether you can use canva to create and sell books and whether you can actually use the images and elements provided in canva on your books but all this information can actually be found on the canva website so if we head on over to the canva website we have this section which talks about the content licenses and using canva for commercial purposes and so it talks about that the content on canva can be for either free or Pro what is allowed so this basically sums up what you are allowed to do with the content on canva so as it says here you can sell your design on merchandise t-shirts stickers books Etc we're creating a book or as digital products so even if you're creating an ebook you can use the canva elements now if we get further into canvas's content license agreement this is where it talks about the differences between the free content license and the pro so if you are just using the free version of Cana it's important to know where they've got those elements from so they get their free elements either from pixabay pixels or from public domain and in terms of what you can use the free images and elements for is determined by where it comes from so it says here you hover over the content in the object panel so here for example it's going to tell you where the image has come from from there when you've determined where the image has come from if it has come from pixabay you need to check the pixabay license for what you can use it for if it comes from pixels you need to check the pixel license if it's covered under the public domain you need to find the source and check what you can use it for and if it is not one of those things then it is covered by canvas free content license which says here that you're allowed to use their content free or Pro on books I do suggest that you go through and read their licenses yourself really familiarize yourself with it learn what the terms mean it can seem a little bit like legal jargon but it is really important to know because it can come back and buy you later on if you do use something that you're not allowed to use so hopefully that's made it a little bit more clear about the canva license and what you can and can't use their images for and when you can and can't use their images so let's say you have finished creating your cover we just need to click up here to share but we're actually going to be downloading it and you want to download as a PDF best for printing and when you're done with all that we can now go and create your interior now we do the same thing we want a custom siiz interior which is going to be a 6x9 in book and what you want to do first of all is just start off making one page now there are a couple of different ways you're going to be able to create a journal you're going to create a journal that has basically repetitive pages so the same page over and over that could be just lined pages so basically like a notebook a journal that is completely blank aside from the lines where the user determines what they're going to write about what they're going to journal about that day let me show you how to do something as simple as creating a lined page for your Journal now I looked at a lot of notebooks and a lot of journals before I started creating my own journals and I suggest that you do the same whether you look at journals and notebooks you've got at home or just pop down to a store near you that sells them and take a look through them just to get an idea of what the lines look like now I know these sounds silly they're just lines but you don't want your lines too thick and you don't want them too far apart or too close together I personally have a lot of notebooks and journals myself I love buying stationary and just hoarding notebooks and when I look through mine most of them have around 23 to 25 lines per page they aren't thick lines and also they aren't a really bold black color sometimes the lines go to the end of the page and sometimes they don't that will just be your preference all you're going to want to do is go to elements we want to go to shapes and we just want a line we click on the line it's placed on the page now one great thing about canva is it does have guidelines that helps you snap your element to the page so that it's centered so that you have the same space between each line I like my lines to go a little bit further than what the canva guidelines are but it is completely up to you what you do like I say some lines go to the edge of the page and over which is like this and some don't what you do there is your choice that line is way too thick also one thing to keep in mind is things look very different on your computer screen to when you get it printed out sometimes things don't look so thick and dark and black on your screen but when you actually get a printed copy of your book it looks a lot thicker than what it does on your screen so especially for journals you want thin lines so I'm going to put this to the thinnest that it can go this is something that's personal preference and that's the color of your lines I personally don't like books that have dark black lines so I'm going to change the color and I'm going to do sort of like a light lightish gray now we've got our line we just need to replicate that so we're going to select it copy and then we want to paste it and we want to place it where you think how much space you want between each line then we're going to drag over the two and then again copy and paste drag it down and this is where canva becomes really helpful because it will snap your lines into place where there's the same amount of space between each line so you're not going to be spending too much time trying to make sure your lines are the same width apart or the same distance apart so then we're going to select all those lines again copy paste and we're just going to keep doing this until we have a page full of lines and so that didn't take very long at all to create a whole page full of lines now I just counted those lines and I have over 30 which I think might be a little bit too much so I know this is doubling up and going over what I've just did but I'm just going to just quickly redo my lines so that they're a little further apart okay so now I've got 24 lines and so that's sort of on par when I was looking at my own notebooks and journals that's around about how many lines that they have so on your screen it might not look like there's a lot of space between the lines but actually when you print it out and you get a printed copy of your Journal it's going to be plenty of space to write now the next type of journal page that you could do is where you do have a prompt on the page but every page is still the same same so this is quite common with maybe a gratitude Journal where someone's sort of just checking in each day and jotting down things that they are grateful for so you might just have something along the lines of adding a text box in so you could start off by just having the date for example so they can jot down the date and then you could maybe do something like and we'll pop that in the middle then they've got a few lines to write about how they're feeling then you could maybe pop in three things I'm grateful for today in this case we would remove that line and pop that in the middle and then we could even pop something like my favorite moment of the day and again we'll just delete this little line so we've got room to put the heading in and there you go so you could have the kind of guided prompt Journal that is the same every single day so each day it's just to check in how they're feeling what they're grateful for what was the best thing that happened today and every page is going to be the same the next type of prompt Journal that you can do is where every day is a different prompt so in this case it's going to take a little bit longer to create because you are going to have to create a new prompt every single day but there is quite a quick way to do it because you can duplicate Pages very quickly in canva and you can do that by just using this duplicate page button at the top here and we just keep clicking that duplicate page until you have enough pages that you want now if you are creating a guided prompt Journal that's going to have a different prompt every day I would still suggest creating the first page duplicating it as many times as you need and then just going through and changing the prompts that you need to change every day so at least just create the basic part of your page that's going to be repeated every single time like the lines and the date and things like that and then just go through and adjust what you need to now another quick way to do this as well is just pop down here to this grid view let's say you've created a bunch of pages maybe you've duplic ated it 10 or 20 times what you can do is click on this grid View and then select all of the pages copy paste and that will duplicate your pages as well okay so now I have a prompt Journal that has 120 pages in it and we need to download this so we can upload it again we go share we want to download and we want to download this as a PDF again best for printing all pages download and at this point you're going to have two files one is your cover file one is your interior file and that is all you need to take into your KDP account and upload your book so head to Amazon KDP into your account and upload your book once you've uploaded your book it can take a few days to get reviewed and approved by Amazon if it doesn't get approved you'll get an email about the reason why it hasn't been approved so you can go fix whatever the issue was but if everything's all good your book should be available for sale on Amazon within a few days okay so now you have published your Journal it is available for sale on the Amazon Marketplace most most people think that that is all they need to do they can now go off and make more books and their book will just magically start selling but we actually need to do quite a bit of work to get the ball rolling with sales now in my opinion one of the best way to promote low content books especially books like this like journals is with Tik Tok which is great because it is totally free I have done quite a few videos about books that have seen huge success from promoting them on Tik Tok but but if you haven't seen any of those videos I'll show you the kinds of videos that you will need to create to promote your own journals here are a couple of examples of videos around journaling that have done well on Tik Tok all I've done is popped in the search term journaling one of those videos is this one here if we just watch this video it is basically somebody filming a pen the book a handwriting in that journal and just showing basically how they use their journals another example is this one here it's had 1.1 million views and it is just someone flicking through a journal with the hook saying do you struggle with figuring out what to write in a journal here are some examples and they're just giving some examples of some things that you could Journal about while also displaying journals within the video so the content of your videos will vary depending on the type of Journal you've created and what the purpose of it is but basically you are going to be creating videos of yourself using your journals this means you don't have to have your face in the video if you don't want you don't have to use your voice if you don't want these videos are incredibly easy to make and shouldn't take a lot of your time to create you can just use your phone if that's all you have if you have time create two to three videos per day but if you can't do this many aim for one video per day experiment with trending audios and the format of your videos until you find what works for you reply to every comment you get on your videos especially the ones asking where to buy the journal or where they can get the journal and when you reach your first 1,000 followers you can then add a link to your bio directing people to the book on Amazon why I love Tik Tok is because any video at any moment can just take off and go viral Tik Tok does not take into account how big your follower account is or how your previous videos have performed so even if all your previous videos have had hardly any views the next video that you upload can be the one that can just take off and start gaining views so it just gives everybody an even playing field it gives everybody the opportunity for their videos to be seen regardless of how big their account is consistency and perseverance is the key with Tik Tok so that is my easy to follow step-by-step tutorial on how to create a simple journal for free that you can publish and sell on Amazon KDP I really do hope that you found this video helpful and this tutorial useful if you have been struggling to get started with publishing books because don't have money to invest into Outsourcing somebody to help create the books for you or to purchase things like pre-made interiors and having covers made then I really do hope this video gives you the information and the steps that you need to get started creating Books thank you so much for watching I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Self Publishing Central

Views: 5,992

Keywords: amazon kdp, low content books, canva tutorial, kdp publishing, amazon kdp tutorial, kindle direct publishing, side hustle, kdp low content books, low content books kdp, passive income, amazon kdp publishing, no content books, kdp no content books, make money online, canva book cover tutorial, kdp journal tutorial, sell books on amazon, no content book publishing, create a journal to sell, kdp tutorial, low content books canva, self publishing on amazon 2024

Id: 83Lnl2-jHEY

Length: 21min 50sec (1310 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2024