Create a Journal to Sell on Amazon KDP for FREE with Canva and AI

in this video I'll show you step by step exactly how to create a journal on canva so you can sell it on Amazon KDP and start making money what's going on guys welcome back to another video so if you're new to the channel my name is Sean and I've made over $1.6 million from publishing books on Amazon KDP so if you want no OBS publishing advice from someone who's actually doing it then make sure to subscribe so this is my second account I sold my first KDP account so I can't really show you but for my second account I got five journals and as you can see over the lifetime so far I've made $265 from these five journals so that is about $5,000 per Journal which is not too bad considering that I'm not running as I'm not marketing it it's just sitting there and making money for me uh pure passively so once again this is my second KDP account it's a newer one and you can see that over the lifetime I've made $220,000 just from ebooks and paperback books and there's also audio books you can sell outside of this so probably the lifetime I've made over $300,000 so far from this account so Amazon KDP is an amazing business model and journals is one of the easiest ways to get started in this business and if you do it right it can be very very profitable as well so here are some journals that are selling very well and it's a very simple Journal that you can literally make uh we're going to go and make something like this in this video so this journal right here is making $28 to $34 every single day I got this tool called book beam you got to pay a little bit but it shows you how much it's making per day so that's very cool if you guys want to check it out the link is below this video and this journal right here is making $349 to $460 every single day so this book alone is doing about $122,000 a month with just eight reviews and the reviews are not even good so you can see that if you do it right it can be very very very profitable so first you want to go to this link kp. amazon.com cover calculator I'll leave a link below this video but essentially we got to figure out our book size so first The Binding type uh it'll be hard cover or paperback I recommend you do the paperback I recommend black and white interior to start I recommend white paper and for the reading direction do left to right now this is up to you but this is pretty much the standard and for the measurement you can do inches and once again you have many many different options but the standard is 6X 9 in if you ever want to spy on your competitors and see what dimensions or what trim size they're using all you have to do is open up the product right and then scroll down to the product details and you can see the dimension is 6x9 so that is exactly what we're doing here for the page count it is once again up to you but I recommend you start off with 120 Pages this is once again the standard so once you enter that detail you can calculate dimensions and it'll give you these information right here so what you want to do is to download the template and once you download it and within the folder you download there are three different files the one you want is this PNG file here so once you open it you will see that the overall dimensions here these two numbers are what you put into canva so that is what you want to do next go to canva.com if you guys have a free account that is all you need if you want to use a pro account for additional elements that is completely fine too if you didn't sign up to canva yet once again it's free I'll leave a link below this video but once you sign in all you have to do is go to create a design scroll down to custom size change this to inches over here and you want to enter this information here so we're going to be entering 12520 and 9250 so that's exactly what we entered here click on create new design okay so this is how it looks inside next you want to go back to your template and click copy and paste that into CA from there drag it to the corner here and then you want to drag this all the way to the corner it should fit perfectly next you want to click on it and click here for transparency you want to lower the transparency so you can kind of see where the red lines are these are the lines that you don't want to put any additional text or images uh because it's going to get cut off so Within These red lines is where we're going to go and you know design uh our book covers so if you've never used CA before just to give you a quick explanation there are free images you can use free shapes you can use and there are some graphics that only a pro member uh can use but I have a c free account so if you want to upgrade to Pro it's like 20 bucks a month you get additional elements but you don't need it to get started there are also a bunch of text bunch of different text Styles uh as well as background and a bunch of things so let me do a quick demonstration for you as well so if you want any images all you have to do is look up whatever you want to find right so you can search animals there are a lot of images once again these are all pro images right but there are non-pro images like this one that you can go and customize it here and you can change the the shape you can go and flip this around you know this side this side right there's a lot of things you can do with canva so essentially all you do is kind of play around with it and start creating your book cover now your book cover will be on the right side okay so basically this right side square is the front cover this middle thin square is the uh spine of the book and then this uh left side is the back cover so you could also do title text here you can do subtitle text you can always change the text font size a lot of things so you could go and add images play around with it essentially you can look at other books that are selling and try and model that but going back to this book right here that is selling really well you can see that there's no images or design right it's just text and it's still doing really really well this book alone is doing about $900 a month there's another book on the same topic right essentially a journal uh for people to not forget things right and this one is even simpler it's just literally text so you don't always need images it really depends on the topic so let me try and go and create something like this book or this book so I'm going to remove the images here and I went to elements click on shape and let me go and fill the entire uh cover like this and I'm going to change the color to something like this but actually instead of adding a square here I can just uh go and update the background color so I can just go here and update the color uh of the background and honestly just remove the square and that works as well so this way if I completely lower the transparency of the template you can see that the background color is set all right next we got to come up with our book title right and usually the title is a funny saying like things I need to write down because I'm old and I forget stuff and then the subtitle is kind of a description of you know describing the book so in this case it's funny gift notebook Journal gift for co-workers friends and family same as this one right here crap I'll forget unless I write it down so a funny kind of sentence and then a a description so a funny notebook gift for seniors okay so how do you come up with this well it's super easy nowadays because you can do this all on AI so what I've done is I went to chat GPT which is a free tool right and then I ask can you give me 10 funny quotes about how I'm getting old and need to write things down this is for the title of my journal I'm creating okay and I got 10 funny quotes right here I used to remember everything now I can't even remember what I forgot my memory is so bad I need to take notes just to remember where I put my notes so it's a little long right so I basically asked it these are great but can you make them shorter and I got 10 more which are shorter and exactly kind of what I'm looking for okay so some of the good ones I got are not forget just creating a paper trail forget Google I've got my own search history so these are pretty good but what I've done is just asked it to give me 10 more and we have 10 more here and out of all this my favorite is this one I'm not aging I'm just increasing my note taking efficiency I think that is a nice title for a journal in this Niche so we're going to use that so I paste that in here obviously it is too big so we can make this smaller here uh we also want to probably make the text smaller so it fits as well so you just want to kind of play around with it and once again make sure it doesn't doesn't go over the red lines here now another thing I'll probably do is I'll separate these text into two different boxes so something like this and I'll just uh increase the size of this also I probably want to update the font so I'll try this one out uh looks pretty good so I'm going to go with this one chunk five okay so now we have the title here and you can see there are different styles you can do so this one you can see that uh the first word is big and then it's a small you know word after that and then the next one is big and also it's small after that and they alternate colors so you can definitely go with that approach this one right here is just a it's formatted to the left and it's just one word or a couple words in a vertical style so we can try to do that too so if I want to do that I would just select this right and move it to the left here and that actually looks pretty good and I could even do something like increasing my not taking efficiency like this anyways definitely play around with it see what you like so once again you could even add images here right so if you're going to add images like these all right so this could look pretty good as a front cover here you know especially if I put it here here uh and you can also put it in the back cover but if you're going to do the back cover make sure that it doesn't go over the barcode or the red uh spaces here okay make sure you put it in the middle but in my case I'm not going to add any images so the last thing you want to do is get a square so get a square here and move it over the spine okay and make sure you make it smaller a little bit align to the middle and then you drag it all the way down here here so this is going to be your spine obviously it's going over the text so you can move it a little smaller here we can move this a little to the right and for the spine you can change colors uh something like black or whatever color you like right so let me see if black works and in terms of the template you could always just lower transparency and see how it looks as an end product so you know I'm going to play around a little more so I'm going to cut to that and I'll show you the end results all right so this is the end results that I came up with it's very very simple it's not perfect it's something that I kind of just whipped up right so you probably want to spend a little more time but if you compare it to something like this right or something like this that's selling really well right it's it's pretty similar so it really depends on the topic sometimes you can have a very simple cover like this and make money from it so once you're happy the last thing you want to do is delete the template so make sure you click on the template delete it and then go to share click on download and then make sure you download as PDF print okay so now it's time to create your book interior before we do so we want to read this page real quick so I'll leave a link to this page below this video but we have to understand what is a bleed so bleed is essentially having your image go all the way to the end of the page compared to a no bleed you will see that there's a little space in between here so with journals we typically want to choose bleed because we want the lines to go all the way to the end of the page so if you scroll down a little bit click on this drop down and you can see that the page size that you need based on the uh page size that you selected so in our case we chose 6x9 so we want to create our interior uh Dimensions as 6.125 by 9.25 so we go back back to canva create a design custom size and we're going to enter this so 6.125 by 9.25 so after you click on create new design next we have to add our margins so if you scroll down a little bit here uh it has the margin specs here basically if our pages are between 24 to 150 page which in our case is 120 pages so we're here uh we have to set these inside gutter margins and the outside margin with bleed so we basically need 0.375 in is uh at least in all ends so back to canva over here and we just want to move our ruler to over 075 and you can see you can't really get it perfectly so I'm just going to put it at 0.382 which is more than 0. 375 so it is okay and then from here you want to do it for all four size but to make this easy we want to click on elements add the shape here and you can kind of do this so you created a square uh that perfectly fits this side then you want to move the square up here keep it there and then you want to copy this again so paste it two more times put it on the side put it in the bottom here and then from here you can bring the ruler down okay so that fits right there and then we can do this and finally we have this right here then you can go and remove these squares so these are our margins and just a heads up that this is just for us to see while we're making the book uh and it will not actually show up inside the book okay next we want to go and add a line here so just click on the line bring it all the way to the side and you want to lower the line weight so click on here line weight to one and you also want to lower the transparency so a lot of times we don't want a full thick black line a lot of these journals are kind of a uh kind of a gray or you know lower transparency so we're going to lower it to 50 then we're going to copy this and then paste it uh 25 times so 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 you can highlight all click here and under here it says tidy up then you move it back and grab the corner and you can drag it all the way down here okay so that looks pretty good uh there's some extra space on the top and bottom some people like to add quotes here uh per page uh obviously you don't have to do that if you want to keep it simple you could also add images on top right and in terms of images you want a black and white image so all you have to do is search black and white and there are a lot of images uh that you can add so if I look up black and white flower under the graphics there you can see that there are a ton of flowers you can add you can do black and white animals or whatever you want to add uh in my case though it's about memory so I can add like a pen or like a brain um although I'm not going to do anything I'm just going to keep it simple and just have a line journal page by the way for both book cover and interior for whatever reason if you don't like the images that you can find on canva there are other image Marketplace so you can go and purchase some images and fonts and a bunch of different things uh the best one is creative Fabrica and you can see that you know you can either sign up for the membership and get unlimited images uh inside this library or you can pay all a cart and just buy the ones that you want so if you guys want to check it out I'll leave a link below this video okay so now we have our journal page so what I'm going to do is come here to grid View and we want 120 pages so essentially we're going to copy paste this 120 times so copy paste and once you have 10 page you can copy again and then paste it until you can see that we got 120 Pages now we're going to come up here and download once again as PDF print all right so you got the book cover you got the interior it is time to upload it to Amazon KDP so if you don't have the account yet the first thing you do is sign up to KDP make sure you enter your bank account information tax information the basic stuff right so that you can get paid so once you sign in it should look like this you want to go to create here you want to click on paperback so I've gone ahead and fill out the information already but let me explain uh what to do for you so keep the language as English unless it's not English change that enter your book title so in my case it's I'm not aging I'm just increasing my note taking efficiency right so that's the title but the subtitle you want to explain the what the book is about right so kind of the features and benefits kind of thing so in my case it's funny gift notebook journal for friends and family you can look at your competitors and see what they're putting in and you can put it in uh for you as well you don't have to put the series you don't have to put the Edition for the author name you can use a pen name or your real name so it is up to you but if you want to use a pen name this is a really cool way to come up with a pen name and that is to go back to chat GPT and just ask it can you come up with five pen name ideas for this book and it gave me five pen name ideas related to kind of like you know memory right cuz our book is about uh writing things down because we're starting to forget things okay so we got Penelope Memoir Oliver remember all Lucy nberg Max Rec collector right this is the one I like so I chose this one and we got Harper pneumonic so these are amazing ideas what I recommend is before you use a pen name go and search that real quick on Amazon to make sure nobody else is using that but besides that you're good to go to use it so enter your author name here uh and for the description what you want to do is once again talk about uh what the book is about right so this book right here is doing really well and it's just a very very simple description of just one sentence or essentially just two sentences here but we can do better and it's as simple as asking Chad GPT to write a description for us once again so I ask can you write a product description for this book using the AA format AA stands for attention interest desire and action and this is a very very famous copyrighting uh format that really works in sales and marketing so just like that we got attention are you tit of forgetting where you put your keys do you find yourself blanking on names or appointments more often than you like if so it's time to embrace the humor and wisdom in notes from the forgetful mind so this is where they use the other title that it came up with so you just want to replace this uh with your actual title in this hilarious yet insightful collection join Penelope Memoir once again update the author name to the one that you chose as she navigates the twist and turns of Asian gracefully right anyways it's really good so all you got to do is copy this uh besides that updating the title uh pen name and also don't copy this part cuz we don't need that right just copy the body text paste that in here and you can also a bold italicize underline spice up the the look of it as well but that's all you need and for this section just answer the question in my case it's no primary Marketplace is amazon.com for the category you want to choose up to three categories so just choose the ones that are most related and we have to click on low content book here because it is a journal so for the keywords it's as simple as typing in seven terms that are relevant to your topic so in my case it's a journal for more so seniors right so it'll be journal for seniors um memory Journal I guess or journal to not forget stuff and something like that you know you want to fill out uh seven boxes of this and then click on SA continue so the next page you can keep this as published without an ISBN black and white interior with white paper uh you can change your trim size if you have a different size for me it's 6x9 and then we're going to do bleed right with matte finish it is up to you but typically most people do like a matte finish cover instead of a glossy finish and I do like that too so next you want to upload your PDF of the manuscript here upload your book cover so next you want to answer this quick survey on did you use AI we technically did use use AI but it was more so for idea generation right it wasn't to make the manuscript it wasn't to design the book cover you know it was just the idea of the pen name and the title so in this case you can say no if you start writing the whole book with AI like you know with a bunch of text and stuff then you would just say Yes uh it's not an issue even if you say yes though uh so next you want to click on launch previewer so this is a previewer unless you see a message saying there's a error uh if you don't see that you should be good to go and this is how the interior looks like so make sure you approve it here then save and continue all right so for the last page uh keep it at all territories keep it at amazon.com and then for the price I recommend you just look at your competitors and price it competitively right so journals are typically priced at $5.99 $6.99 $7.99 around there so I'm going to start with $5.99 but as I get more sales as I get more reviews I might increase this a little bit so the last thing you do is click on publish your paperback so as you can see here it'll take up to 72 hours but they're going to review the book and once it's good to go it'll be live on amazon.com and that is how you create a journal for free and start selling it on Amazon KDP but in case for whatever reason if you don't want to go through the hassle of making the book yourself and you just want to pay somebody to make these kind of journals for you then all you have to do is go to Fiverr and you can search for something like create KDP journal and there are a lot of gigs uh that's willing to create a journal for you for very cheap like this one's going to do it for 30 bucks but to save you some time and also hassle finding someone I'm going to leave a link to some of the services that I personally work with uh below this video all right guys so that is how you create a journal once again and you can see that the potential of this could be really good right you can start making some money here and you can start building this business so as you saw earlier my personal results uh with my new account I'm in multiple six figures with my first account I made multiple six figures a year plus I sold it for $820,000 and that is how I've made over 1.6 million total from doing this business so now that you have a book published on Amazon if you want to learn how to Market this book so you can get reviews and sales then watch this video next because it is a complete tutorial on how to exactly do that

Channel: Sean Dollwet

Views: 59,404

Keywords: self publishing, amazon kdp, how to make money online, amazon kindle publishing, amazon kdp publishing, paul marles, low content book publishing, low content books, low content books kdp, low content kdp, low content publishing, no content book publishing, no content books, kdp income report, kdp revenue, amazon income streams, dane mcbeth, mikkelsen twins, kdp niche research, kdp low content, KDP tips, Publishing Life, Audiobook Publishing, write a book with chatgpt

Id: b9v3IPzJ24g

Length: 20min 17sec (1217 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024