Journals and notebooks
sell very well on Amazon. So in this video, I'm going to
show you how to create a journal to sell on Amazon KDP for free. Which is ideal if you want to
start your own journal business. But why would you want to do this? Well, as I've just said,
they do sell very well. And in fact, last month, as you
can see here, I received $4,333 in royalties from the sale of my
journals and notebooks on Amazon. Now there was some ad spends there,
which was $869 60 cents, which means that my income from my journals and
notebooks in June, 2021 was $3,463. And that's not bad considering that
June is normally a quiet month. And normally the sales of all these
types of books will increase through to the holiday Christmas period. Also they're great if you want to create a journal,
a personalized journal, that you can purchase and give away
as gifts to friends and family. Or, if you run a club or you have
your own business, you can also create journals and notebooks for your
customers and participants to buy. Now, earlier this year, I did help
a business, an alternative therapy business create their own journal, which they had their customers purchase
from Amazon which they then used as a, kind of a health diary log notebook. And so you can see there's quite
a number of opportunities there. Now, who is this video for? Well, it's for those that
are just starting out. And are wanting to create
their own business. It's also useful for those that
have already tried this process, but have come across some hurdles and
have not managed to quite get there. If you've already published, you
know, quite a few journals, you know, a hundred journals or so, and
you're familiar with the process this video might not be for you. Unless you want to pick up some
tips and tricks, which I'll go through during the video. Now, this is a business as an ideal
business that you can do using your laptop, using your computer from
home or anywhere else in the world for that matter, although yet a
bit difficult at the moment with all the things that's going on. So we're going to split
this video into three parts. One is creating a cover, two is getting
the interior for the notebook and three is putting it all together and
uploading it to the Amazon KDP platform and hitting that publish button. So there's quite a lot of information
that we're going to cover, so let's get straight on with it. So the first step is creating the cover
and we're going to do this at canva.com, which is a free web based software
platform where you can design the cover. So just go to canva.com click on sign
up here in the top right-hand corner. And you can sign up with your
email address or with Google. Once you've done that, it will open up a
page, which will look very much like this. Now we don't want to hit
on create a design here. We want to click on custom size here. And it will open this box here. Now we need to put in the
width and height of our cover. Now the book cover is basically going
to be rectangular in shape, and it's going to include the space for the back
cover, space for the front cover and the bit down the middle, which is the spine. Now, the size is going to
be dependent on too factors. One is the size of the notebook. In this case, it's going to be six by
nine inches, which is a common size for a small pocket type notebook. And the other factor is going
to be the number of pages. Now, this notebook is
going to be 120 pages. That seems to be the average
number of pages of most notebooks. Now we need to get the size of this. And we need to download this
as a template, first of all. So in order to do that, we need to
go to a website called bookow.com and you'll come to the home page. And all you need to do is click
on KDP cover template generator, and it will open this page. And here we put in these details, the
width of our notebook, which is six, the height, which is nine, the page count
120 and just scroll down a little bit. You can leave these next two boxes blank. You put in your email address
here in these two boxes, click on consent to email, and then
click on email cover template. Now, when you do that, a box will
appear and it will give you the options of making a donation. But you can download it for free. Then we go back to Canva. Now here, as I said, we want to put in
the width and height of our template. So if you just open up the template
that you've downloaded from bookow.com. You will see here in the top left-hand
corner, the dimensions that we require, which is this here, which
is 12.52 inches by 9.25 inches. So we go back to Canva and put in
those dimensions, 12.52 by 9.25. Now this is a mistake a lot of people make. And that is the units here. It opens in default with PX for pixels,
but we want to change that to inches. So just go to the drop down
menu and click on inches. Now you may need to put
in the figures gain. The issue is if you forget to change the
unit, you'll end up creating your cover. When you do upload it to the KTP
platform, it will look very odd. So we now click on create new design. And here we have the
blank sheet for our cover. And what we need to do is just drag
in the template that we created and just drop it here, where it
says drop to upload your file. And just drag across. And then you'll notice it will
just click into place in the top left-hand corner and then just
drag it to fill the whole screen. Now on top of this, we need to create it's
the actual background to our book cover. So go to elements. Then find the lines and shapes section
and then just drag over the square box. Like, so, and just again, put it
into the top left hand corner, drag over to the right to fill our
area and drag down to the bottom. Now I want to change the color of this. So here we can change the color
and have these options here, or we can choose our own custom color. So I'm going to click on add new
color, and we want a turquoisey blue type color for this. And I'm just going to adjust with
this little circle here, I'm just going to move that around until
I get the cover that I want. Now, what I want to do next is
just to make this layer a little bit transparent because I want
to see the template underneath. So this box here, this chequered
box, just click on that and then just move the transparency slider. And just move it to something like, you
know, 50% or something around that area. Now, next we want to add
our graphical elements. Now Canva do supply
free graphical elements. Again, if we click on the elements box and
we've got this section here on graphics, we can click on, see all, and you'll have
this whole list of options available here. Now, most of these will be free. If you see a little box next to the,
the image, that means you need to pay for the, for the, for the pro version
or pay for a once use pro license. Now when using images or graphics from
any site you need to make sure you're complying with the license agreements. Now on canvas, they do have
a section where it says free media license agreement. I suggest you make yourself
familiar with that. It does say all free photos, music, and
video files on Canva can be used for free for commercial and noncommercial use. But I do suggest that you make sure
you are familiar with, the agreements and that you're complying with
the, the license agreement terms. So we've got these options here and you
can see they're all grouped together. Similar color themes as well. Now, if you don't like these,
there is another option. And it's an option where I get a lot of
my graphics, fonts, background images from, and that is Creative Fabrica. And here we can see they have
all these selections of different fonts, images graphics, designs. And a lot of them can be used on
print on demand products, like books. They're also very useful because
they do have a lot of interiors for sale. So today we're going to be going
through a basic lined notebook, but if you then wanted to go on to create
something a bit more adventurous, something a different, you could use
interiors direct from a site like this. And I know at the moment they
are running this special offer, it's called Christmas in July. So I presume it runs to the end of July. And you can get access to all of this
for just $1, but then will renew on a subscription basis at $19 a month,
which gives you a set access to the fonts, images, and all the interiors. I subscribe to Creative fabrica. I've been using this now for over
a year and I get a lot of my images and some interiors from there. It's very useful. And well worth it. But you don't need that because
today I'm going to show you the free option with Canva. So let's go back to our cover template. Now I'm going to use these graphics
here, the bold foliage, because I quite like the look of those. And you can see when I hover
over them it does say free. You can click on those three little
dots, give you some more information. So it's going to reduce the size of that. Put it in position on our cover. You can rotate it slightly. Now you do need to make sure it
is within this darker border. And you can just drag across,
reduce the size, rotate accordingly. Like, so Move these about, and you can see we're
slowly building up our cover here. And I quite like this is going to
have sort of a, I don't know what you would call it sort of a 1950s, 1960s,
retro, California type team, type theme, or maybe, a, tiki or tiki. However you pronounce it type theme. So I'll do this quickly. I'd normally spend maybe a little
bit more time on doing this. Now, I want a title to appear
on the front of the notebook. Now, one of the rules of Amazon KDP, is
that the title of your book must appear on either the front cover or the spine. So for this, it's just going to
be a notebook and that's going to be the title of our creation. So we're going to put
notebook on the front cover. If you didn't want to do that, then you
could put notebook a long the spine, which is this vertical, area here. So in order to put our title, we're
just going to click on the text box, left hand side here, and you can search
through all the different fonts available. I'm just going to click on this one here. And I'm going to get rid of this top
bit where it says a gift and we're just going to keep this particular font here. I'm going to reduce it in size. I'm going to double click on it and
write notebook, click on side the box and then just drag it into position. Then move our graphics or images
just out to the way slightly. And I'm going to change
the color of the font. So click up here where it says text
color, and I want this pinky type color. Again, you could choose
any color you wanted. I'm going to choose this pinky
type color, which I think will go well with all the other colors
and the color of our notebook. Now, our background is transparent
so now what I want to do is just click on the background. Click on our transparency box here,
and then just turn the transparency back up to normal or a hundred percent. And there we have the basic
cover of our notebook. Now here's something else you
can do, which is quite cool. If you look on the left hand
side menu, you can click on styles and they've got all these
different color combinations here. And you could try and see what your
notebook looks like by changing this font and color combinations. And you can come up with some
quite cool looking creations. So there's lots of options there. So you can really explore your
creative urges if you like and create something quite unique and colorful. But I want to go back to where we were. So I'm just going to undo what I did. And there we have our cover. Now the next stage is we need to download
that to our computer as a PDF file. So, top right hand side, click on download
where it says file type in this box. Click on pdf print and just
click on download and that will download to your computer. Now, what we need next is the
interior for our notebook. If you see here. This is a graph paper style interior,
but what I'm going to show you is going to be a plain lined notebook. Now, just a small note, people
often ask me, are people using notebooks or journals anymore? Well, I can categorically say yes. One from the sales that I get of
journals and notebooks, plus two, I mean, I personally use these all the
time, they're handy to carry around with a pen, you can keep them by the bed. You can just put them in your
pocket, take them out with you. Great for making sketches and notes. I use them all the time,
especially these very small type field notes type notebooks. So where do we get our interior from? Well, I've got this free option for you. If you go over to my Gumroad shop,
I'll leave a link below in the description to that, as well as
the link to the, Creative Fabrica website that I mentioned a moment ago. You'll see, I've got all these
options here for various things, mostly keywords, but we've got
this lined paper option here. If you just click on that and just scroll
down a little bit, in this box here, you can name a fair price or put in zero. Click on, add to cart. You may need to set up an account
with Gumroad and then it will give you the option then to
download it to your computer. And that will be a PDF file of
120 pages of lined notebook paper. So now we've got our cover
and we've got our interior. It's now time to put that all
together by uploading it to the KDP platform, which is part three. So if you go to kdp.amazon.com, you'll
see here, you have the options to sign in, if you already have an Amazon account. Or sign up if you don't
have an Amazon account. And people from most countries in the
world can create an account on Amazon KDP. And normally you will need to
supply something like your bank details to receive payments
of any royalties you make. So once you've done that, all you need
to do is go to your KDP dashboard and here you have the options of clicking on bookshelf reports, community or marketing. And you want to click on bookshelf
and it will take you to a page which looks very much like this. You then click on plus paperback or add
paperback, and I'm going to quickly run through filling out all the options here. Now I normally leave language as English. In book title, we're just going to put in
notebook because that appears on the front cover of our notebook. That can be whatever you choose, as I
said, as long as it appears on the front cover or the spine of the notebook. Subtitle, just put
something descriptive here. I'm going to put retro styled
colorful blank lined notebook. We can leave this
option, the series option. We don't need to put anything there. We don't need to put anything
in the edition number box. And when it comes to author you fill out
the first name and the last name boxes. Now you need to produce something
original, an original author name. Now I use pen names. You can use your own, if you want,
but I suggest making something up. So what should we put here? We'll put in retro press. Now that's just something I've made up. There might already be a
publisher with that name. Again, it doesn't matter, but I would
suggest, you know, whatever you do choose, just do a search on Amazon
to make sure no one's picked it. I say it's no big deal if you do, but you
don't want to go infringing particularly on a, maybe a trademark publisher's name. So, but I'm just going to pick
this cause that's just come up from the top of my head. You can leave the contributors blank. And then here you put a description. So I'm going to put in a
colorful, retro inspired six by nine inch notebook with 120 pages. Now that's a very short description. I'd probably add in some other details
just to make it sound a bit more attractive, a bit more appealing. If you like, this is almost
like a little sales letter. Then scroll down a bit further
publishing rights, click on I own the copyright and I hold, hold necessary publishing rights. Here are the keywords. Now these are words that will
help your book or your notebook or journal get found when someone
types in the Amazon search bar. Now choosing keywords is
quite an in-depth process. Now I've done a video on how I use
keywords, which I'll leave a link to down below and in the top left-hand corner here. I suggest, you know, when it
comes to doing the keywords, just take a quick look at that video. There's also another video prior to
that, which will be linked to, in that keyword video also, which will give
you the full outline of looking for good keywords and using them properly. But if you're just starting out, I
wouldn't get too worried about it. And in fact, I'm going
to show you what I do. I'd probably put in
retro notebook journal. Who could this be for? Mom, Dad. What could it be? It could be a present, gift, gift idea. What are some other keywords,
maybe Tiki, blue foliage. And you can fill out
all these keyword boxes. And you just want to use words
that are related to your book and also put in some buyer keywords. Keywords that people would
use when searching on Amazon for products like this. So again, I've put things like
present, gift, idea for gift ideas and that type of thing. If it was for your business or club,
you could put in club, you know, details or your business areas,
you know, it could be alternative health, therapy, that type of thing. Now we come to the next box,
which is choose categories. Now you've got a lot of options here. So many options. And there's no shortcut around
this other than going through all the different options here and
looking for something that's most appropriate to what you've created. So here we might look at
non-fiction ,body mind and spirit. You know, I might put in something like
general there, might click on design. Click on decorative arts. That's just a quick example. What I suggest doing is going through the
categories in a little bit more detail, to find something that's most appropriate. You won't usually find something
that's exactly about what your notebooks about, but just create
or just pick two categories that do sort of pertain to your style, the
type of notebook that you've created. Then click on save. Next adult content. No. Click on save and continue. Then where it says get a free
KDP ISBN number, I click on assign me free KDP ISBN number. Publication date. You can leave that. Print options. Now, most notebooks are, have a black
and white interior with white paper. That's the cheapest option. And most common option. If you did want to create a color interior
you've got that option there as well. The problem is with a color
interior, it is more expensive. So your profit margins will be a lot less. And you may find you have to price
your book to a point where it's not very competitive on Amazon. But for most cases, click
on the black and white interior with white paper. We come down to the trim size here. This is already populated
with the six by nine inches. But if you click on select a
different size, you have got these other common sizes there. Or you could put in a specific
book size, if you've created something unusual bleed settings. Now this sometimes confuses a lot
of people and understandably so. Again, I've done a video on
that, I'll leave a link to that in the top left corner. For this, the lines are going to
go from one edge of the page to the other, which means this book has bleed. So we click on bleed. Now, cover finished. This is entirely up to you. You've got the choices
of matte and glossy. I actually quite like the matte finish
and I choose that for a lot of my books. Now, if the book cover is black
often that can look better if it's glossy, because it doesn't
show the fingerprints as much. But for this cover, I'm
going to choose matte. Now we come up to the manuscript and
that's the interior of your book. And that's the lined, the PDF lined file
that we downloaded from my Gumroad shop. So just click on upload
paperback manuscript. Find where you downloaded that
to on your computer and then just upload it to the platform. That sometimes takes a few moments. Scroll down a bit. Go to the book cover section. And here we're going to
click on this option here. Upload a cover you have already created,
which we did obviously in Canva. Click on upload your cover file. Again, find on your computer
where that downloaded to and upload it to the platform. And again, takes a couple
of moments to upload. Once that is done you'll notice the launch
previewer button turns yellow. Just click on that. So just let it do its thing and
we'll jump to that in a moment. And so it looks like this and you can
see our cover here, you can see where they're going to place the ISBN number,
that they automatically create for you. And you can click on the arrows here
to just check the interior of the book. And you can see there's no issues here. If there is issues there's normally
a little red warning triangle. And in this or on this left-hand side,
it will tell you what issues there are, if any, but this all looks absolutely fine. You can go through all 120 pages if you
like, but as all these pages are the same we don't really need to do that. Then you just click on approve. So scroll back down to
the bottom of the page. Click on save and continue. Now here where it says territories. I normally just leave
it as all territories. That's worldwide rights. Primary marketplace, amazon.com. You can choose a different marketplace. However, I sell most of my books on
amazon.com, which is a US platform. That's where the biggest market is. So I would suggest leaving
that as Amazon.com unless your book is for a particular market. It might be a one that's in
Spanish or Italian or something specific to the UK market. In which case you can change
the primary marketplace. But I always lead that as amazon.com. Now we come to the pricing,
what price to pick. Well, most notebooks and journals are
priced at around the $6.99 mark, which is what I would suggest pricing yours at too. If you're wondering, or you've
created something different and you're wondering about the price. What I would suggest doing is going
on to Amazon, looking at other books, similar to the books that you've
created, looking at what those prices are and picking something around the
average of all those different prices. So for this, we're going to put in $6.99. Now the platform is quite clever
and will calculate equivalent prices in all the different marketplaces. And you can leave them as is,
which is what I normally do. Or, if you want to have different prices
in different countries, you can go through these and change these individually. And that's it. The next thing to do is click
on publish your paperback book. It will then come up with an
option, do you want to publish this as a Kindle ebook as well? Which I would suggest ticking no
because there's not a lot of demand for notebooks and journals in electronic
form because you can't write in them. So you can see that's not
taken a huge amount of time. And once you've done that,
you're now a published author. You're a publisher. And congratulations. So this hasn't taken me a lot of
time, but if you're doing this first time around, it's obviously
going to take you a bit longer. Some people do get very nervous
about the whole process, but don't just, just do what I've shown you. Go through those steps. It's pretty straightforward. There's not a lot that you can get wrong
although initially don't be surprised if you do make a few initial mistakes. Remember all this is free, so you can
make mistakes and you can experiment. Now, if you do find yourself getting stuck
at a particular part of this process, then I do have a book tutorials playlist, which
I'll link to here, which explains some of the, the various steps in more detail. I hope you found the video useful. If you did, please do give it a thumbs
up and please hit that subscribe button. Thank very much for your time. It's very much appreciated. And until next time, goodbye.
