Hey everyone and welcome to today's video
by the end of which you'll be able to create your very own KDP
lined notebook or journal, which will be ready to upload via
the KDP platform to Amazon and you then to be able to hit that published
button and become an online publisher. Now, if you are already publishing
and creating your own books, you may find some tips and tricks
here to streamline and speed up the process. Now, the way I'm
going to show you is quick. It's condensed down into relatively
simple steps and best of all, it's free. Now combine that with the fact that it's
free to upload these books to Amazon and free to store them on Amazon. It makes the perfect online
business to get started with. Now, if you do decide then
to take things further, it's a great way of building a
second income o.r like I've done, and many viewers on this channel
have done build a full-time income. And in fact, this business allowed me to
quit my job back in 2020. Now I did do a similar video
to this about a year ago, but things have changed
on KDP and on Canva, which is a software platform
we're going to be using today. So this is an update to that video and
things have actually become a lot easier or I think they have anyway. Now, the reason we're going to be using Canva
is that it is a web based platform, it's free to use and it's relatively
straightforward to use as well. The learning curve is quite short.
So, we're going to create this book. It's going to be a six by
nine inch book with 120 pages. Now you may ask why? Well that's because most of the lined
journals on Amazon are six by nine inch is with 120 pages. So step one, we have to create our cover. And for this, we're going to need to
download a template from KDP. Now this template includes
the area for the back cover, the front cover and the bit down the
middle, which is a spine. So first of all, when need to go to the KDP platform. Now it is free and relatively
easy to create an account there. Now in the top menu, click on help.
On the help page left hand side menu, click on format, your paperback.
Just scroll down where it says, download a cover template,
just click on the link there. It will then take you to this page
where we need to enter some information. So binding type, paperback, interior
type, black and white, paper type, white paper, page turn
direction, left to right, measurement uni,t inches, interior
trim size. As I mentioned, this is a six by nine inch book. So
that's what we're going to click on. And page count. As we mentioned, 120. Then hit calculate dimensions. And next, what you want to do is
click on download template. And this will obviously download
the template to your computer, which when you open will
look like this. Now, the important numbers
we want are these here, where it says the overall dimensions.
And you want to make a note of that, which is 12.52 by 9.25. Next we go to the Canva homepage. Again, it's free to open a
free basic account here, and I'll leave a link to Canva
in the description below. So you can either click on, create a
design and then click on custom size. Or you can just click on custom
size. Now this is very important, and a lot of people do
make a mistake here. What you want to do is click on this
box here and change the unit to inches. If you don't do that, the
template won't come out, right? And when you try to upload
it to KDP, it will look odd. And then we put in those
numbers for, from the template, which was 12.52 by 9.25.
Click on create new design. Now, what we want to do is drag our
template that we've downloaded into Canva. So in the left hand side
menu, click on uploads. Wherever you downloaded
those templates to, just drag the .png version
of the template into the upload box. May take a few
seconds, but once it's uploaded, just drag it into the white
box that we've created. And then just drag that to
the top left hand corner. It will click into place and then just
drag down into the bottom right hand corner, and then just click on
the lock symbol in the top right. Next, left hand side, click
on the elements then where
it says lines and shapes, just drag the square over into our book. Now this is pink at the
moment. Don't worry about that. But what I want you do is just drag that
to the top left hand corner and drag down to the bottom margin of the
book and then just drag across. And what we want to do is drag
across to that second dotted line. So we may need to increase the size of
our image just to get this in the right spot. So you can see here, we're just
dragging across to that dotted line. Then we can change the color of this box
and we're going to change it to black because the back cover of our
book is going to be black. You can choose whatever color you want. Now I want to make this rectangle that
we've just created transparent for the moment. So top right, click
on the transparency button. And then just adjust that
down to around about 30. Just lock that layer as well.
So just click on that lock icon. So next we want to create
the front of our book cover. So in the elements tab on the left, you have many choices here
of images and graphics. And also you're not limited
to the graphics here on Canva. You can go to sites like
Creative Fabrica or Vecteezy, which are the two sites
that I commonly use, but you've got many different sites
like Envato elements, design cuts, designbundles.net, and you can use images and graphics
from those sites and drag them across to the upload box here on Canva and use
them on the front cover of your book. Today I'm going to be using images from
Canva itself, and these are free images. I did a search for stamps, becasuse I want to create a stamp
type themed notebook. Again, you can create whatever
type of notebook you want. Now when using images on Canva, you'll notice some of them have this
little gold crown with the words pro written next to it. Now you can use those If
you do of a paid for pro account. What I'm going to show today, you can use the images
from the free section. Now, if you do have a free account, but you
are desperate to use those pro images, you can pay for them individually, or
you can open a subscription with Canva. Now, when you do find an image you like
you'll notice if you just hover over it, you've got these three little
dots here. If you click on that, it will give you some
information about the image. But this section here is related
to the license of the image. And you can click on this
for more information. And it will take you to
the simple dialogue box, which tells you about the
licensing of images on cCanva. What I recommend doing is
then clicking on this link, which will take you to the licensing page. It'll tell you the differences
between the free and the pro images. Here it says what's allowed. It says here you can use our content for
a wide range of personal and commercial uses. And this one here, can I sell products on merchandise
with my design on it? It says, yes, all of our photos fonts and graphics can
be used to create designs for printing on products like t-shirts, mugs, books and other merchandise. So how I interpret this is that
I can use these images on my books. However, I'm not a
lawyer. This is not legal advice. You need to make yourself familiar with
the licensing agreement as well and make yourself satisfied that it's okay to use
the images that you are going to use. And that really applies to any
images you use off any stock photograph websites or sites, like
I mentioned, Creative Fabrica. So I'm going to use these stamps images.
They're bright, they're colorful, and I think they'll make a good design. So I'm just going to take these and
drag each one over to our cover. You can enlarge them, make them
smaller and also adjust the rotation. And I'm going to use these images
just to fill the cover of our book. Now don't worry if your image goes over
the edge of the book or goes over that transparent black rectangle, we created. Do bear in mind that if you do go over
those aspects of the images will be cut off. I'm just going to do this, drag them. Now this one I want
under the orange stamp. So what I'm going to do is
click on position and just
move this image backwards. Imagine this image is on a layer and
we're just going to move this image under the other stamp layer. And
we're going to continue like so, just enlarging these, adjusting the
angle, moving them into position. And I'm going to cover my front
book cover with these images. So I'll speed this up a little
bit. So here you can see, I filled the front
cover with these images. Now the transparent rectangle we
created, we just want to click on that. We want to click on the unlock icon, then click on the transparency button
and just increase the transparency back to 100. Click on position
and click on to front. Next, we want to put a title on our book and
we're going to go for something very adventurous and call
our journal a notebook. So first of all, we need a rectangle on which we can
place our text so that it stands out from these images of the stamps. We want to click on the square
image and just drag that across, just dragging upwards. You can
adjust the width if you want. And then just move that around. And you'll see actually that Canva
will center it in this rectangle of stamp images, which is very useful. Now I tend to place text on
books around a quarter to a third of the way down which makes
it more aesthetically pleasing. Now in terms of the color
of this rectangle, Canva
has a very useful feature. So if we click on the color box here
in the top left, we can see here, it gives us a selection of
colors related to the colors that are already on our image. So you can create something that's
congruent with the colors that are already there. And I'm going to
go for a green color. Now in order to make this
rectangle stand out a bit, I'm going to click on duplicate,
top right hand corner here, which will give us another rectangle
and going to change the color of this. And we're going to go
for yellowy cream color. Now I want this under the green
rectangle that I've just created. So I'm gonna click on position
and click on backward. This will send it down one layer, and I'm going to click on that
rectangle and using the arrow keys, just move this up and across. Now next we need our text on top of
the green box. So left hand side, click on text. Now there are lots of free
fonts you can use here. For this I want something that matches
the type of theme of this cover. And also you can see that the text that's
already used is a type of hand drawn font. So what I'm going to go for is
this one here, where it says Kwanzaa. So I'm just going to click on that and
that will send it across to our cover. Now I'm just going to position that
and then double click where it says, have a happy and just hit delete. Now, obviously this says Kwanzaa but
we want it to read notebook. And that's what we're going to
type. Now, this is a bit large. So just double clicking to highlight
our text, go to the top here, where we can decrease or
increase the size of our font. And we're just going to click on the
minus button to decrease the size. And that is already positioned around
the center of our box. If it isn't, you can move it around and adjust
it. So that is our front cover. Now, next we're going to delete that KDP
template. So the way to do this, just left click on your mouse
and drag a box around the cover that we've created. Then
at the top, click on group, then click on position and
then click on backwards. Now this template we had locked. So just click on the unlock
icon and then just hit delete. The next step now is to download
this book cover in PDF format, which will be ready to upload to the
KDP platform. So top right, hit share, then hit download. And
then in the dropdown menu, click PDF print. And then just click on download and
it will download our book cover to the computer. So that's the first step
done, creating our book cover. Now we come onto the second step,
which is creating the interior. Now I said that the interior of the book
or the book itself is going to be six by nine inches. So one would assume that the size of
the pages are going to be six by nine inches, but that's not quite
true. And this is the reason why. Here you can see an interior
that I've created before. And what you notice is that the
lines go from one side of the page, right to the other, which means this
page has something called bleed. So we need to make our page size
actually slightly larger than six by nine inches. Now, during
the manufacturing of the book, the pages will actually be
trimmed down to the correct size. So the correct size of the page we're
going to create is actually going to be 6.125 inches by 9.25 inches. Now I've actually done a video which goes
into this and the reasons why in more depth, which I'll leave a link
to down below in the description. So back to Canva, click on top left
where it says home. Now, again, click on custom size, make
sure it says inches and enter 6.125 by 9.25. Okay, so now we've got our blank page
and we need to create our lines. So left hand side, click on elements. In the lines and shapes
box just click on the line. Then what we need to do is drag the
line it's created over onto our document and over to the left side. You'll
see it just clicks nicely into place. And then just drag over
to the right hand side. Now this line is quite
thick and it's quite dark. So at the top click on line style. And I usually turn this down
to a weight of two or three, and then we've got the color of the line. Now you could have black lines in your
notebook if that's what you wanted, but you'll find that in most
lined notebooks and journals, the lines tend to be gray. So just
pick one of these shades of gray. Now we need to create all our lines. So
just click on the line and select it. If it's not already selected now
holding down option, if you're on a Mac, or alt, if you're on Windows, just left, click on the line and just drag downwards, then click on command or control
D and you'll find that it duplicates this line and moves it down the same amount space that we dragged
it down initially. Now we need 23 lines. So just repeat this 23 times, you can create more lines
if you wish or less lines, depending on what width you want between
the lines. Now, this is quite cool. Just click on the top line
and you can drag that. Now I would leave a distance of a
margin to the top and then click on the bottom line or the last line
and just drag that down. And again, I wouldn't drag it right
down to the bottom. I would just leave a slight margin
there to take into account the page is going to be trimmed.
Now this is a cool feature. Just drag a box and
highlight all these lines, click on position, then
click on vertically, underneath where it says space evenly.
So here we have our first page. Now, as I mentioned earlier, our
interior is going to be 120 pages. So what you need to do here
at the top of the page, there is a button that says duplicate
page. So if you click on that, it will add another page. So you
just keep going through this process, clicking on duplicate page.
Yes, it's a bit tedious, but you do that until you
have your file of 120 pages. So now we need to download
this as a PDF file. Now, one of the beauties of creating
your own interiors is that you are able to modify it. So after
creating lined notebooks, you can take things a step further and
you could delete some of these lines, add in text, create a prompt journal.
You could create boxes on your page, create logbooks, all
different types of books. And I'll go through that in
more detail in another video. But for the moment we've got
our 120 page lined interior. So top right, click on share, then
click on download, drop down menu, click on PDF print, and then
just hit the download button. And that will download the
120 page PDF file to your computer. So that's our cover created
and that's our interior created. And these are both ready to upload
to Amazon via the KDP platform. And I'm going to show you how to do
that in the follow up video to this, which will be my next video. And I'll go
through entering the title, subtitles, seven keyword boxes, et cetera,
when it comes to the upload process. And I'm going to leave the link
to that video right here. Now, if I've not created that video quite yet, then it'll be my older video
on uploading to Amazon. Thank you very much for your
time. It is very much appreciated. Don't forget to hit the subscribe
button and until next time, goodbye.
