How To Create A KDP Book Cover In Canva 2023 (For Beginners)

how to create a KDP book cover in canva hey guys welcome back today we'll be doing a quick look at how you can build your Amazon KDP book covers with canva so let's get into it now canva is a free to use design tool that enables you to create beautiful illustrations for free only by signing up with your email address and Amazon KDP is Kindle Direct publishing which allows you to publish your own books absolutely for free Amazon handles all of the you know difficult parts of publishing such as printing publishing you know all of that difficult stuff is handled by Amazon all you have to do is upload all of your pages or your design and that is it so to do this to create your KDP book cover first off you want to head on over to Google Chrome and just search for KDP book cover template once you do that you will have the first link which is kdp.amazon.com slash cover dash calculator so you just want to head on over to this link over here from here you will enter your book information so how do you want your book to be printed let's say for us we're doing a paperback book cover with standard color as well as white paper and then it's going to be left to right and then I have the measurements in inches then I have my interior trim size so what is going to be the size of my book let's say that I'm creating a six by nine inch book so that is going to be the interior size of my page and then let's say I have 100 pages so once you've entered all of your information you want to click on calculate Dimensions over here and you will get all of your Dimensions so these are all the dimensions but to make this a lot easier simply click on download template never ever do a right click and save this image because this image 4 is for reference you want to download your your own customized template from here once you download that template you will find it in a zip file you want to click on that zip file and it will automatically extract the image in the form of PNG and PDF so now what you want to do is you want to head on over to Canada and once you're on canva.com you want to click on custom size now this is very essential and important to remember you want to change this from pixels to inches then you want to go back into your KDP book cover now we have the full cover these are the measurements you want to add the reason for this is because these measurements represent the entirety so the back and the front you want to make sure you're adding it like this because this is how you're going to upload the book cover design so these are the blees the bleeds are the sections that account for the sides where the paper is going to be cut then you have your safe area as well and B margins then you also have your basic front cover so I'm going to add 12.475 as my width in canva and then for my height I'm going to add 9.25 and then you just want to click on create new design once you've clicked on create new design you will have your basic little section added over here so in this section what you want to do is you want to make sure that once your canvas is loaded you just add your image so the image that you just got from the canva extractor you want to upload that image over here and once you've added your image over here you just want to align it and then resize it and it should most likely fit perfectly into your canvas so if it doesn't fit perfectly into your canvas that means that you probably had some issues with the sizing now make sure that you have your images aligned perfectly make sure you you entered the correct dimensions of the full cover over here and this will fit perfectly now a lot of you might wonder what is the purpose of adding this entire image to your canva design when you're supposed to actually design your book cover now the reason that you're adding this image is because you want to be able to work off of a area this will give you a basic idea of where you're supposed to place all of your items so what you want to do is just click on the image and then click on this icon over here which is the transparency icon and you can just make this semi-transparent so it's easier for you to navigate through and then just click on the lock button what the lock button allows you to do is that it just keeps this image in place and you can design on top of it and then at the end you can delete this image so now we're going to go into our design section and we can get started with multiple different designs I can even search for a book cover or let's say I just want um artistic house so let's say I want to use this image as one of my book covers and I'm just going to place it right over here and then I can click on see all to see similar looking images as well but I'm just gonna keep on searching and you guys can see there are multiple different options now I can choose to put the same image on the back as well but I think I want to go with something a little different so I'm gonna look for maybe a plain background for the back so what I'm gonna do is I am just gonna go into my Element Section and I'm gonna take some squares and I'm going to be placing those on the back now I want to also place like a black line on the center so I'm gonna leave that and in my colors I'm just going to select the square and then I'm going to select colors from the image that I just added now you can do this and you can also make a gradient with this so you can just click on over here you have all of your animation options as well so you don't want to animate this but we can color it like this we have default colors and then at the bottom we have gradients so you guys can see you have multiple different gradient options as well and you can select your own colors and you can do a quick gradient by adding two blocks like this so I'm just going to add these two blocks over here and then I'm going to choose a different color that I'm going to copy and paste and now I'm also going to make this slightly skinnier choosing a different color and then I can choose the transparency of each color that is present on top just so it has like an interesting effect and you guys can even Choose You know the gradient sections if you want to uh you know not have any harsh lines if you don't want any harsh lines at all you can just go into the graphics and pick out these kinds of gradients and then you can place this gradient over here move it up like this or you can even choose this gradient or you can select multiple different colors so we're going to place this like so and I'm going to click on layer and I'm going to click on send backward deleting this from here making sure and backward like this like so and then I'm going to change the gradient colors to the colors that are present within the front cover so just using these now I have my gradient that is similar I can maybe add the yellowish color or I think I want to keep the blue one like this yeah I think this looks pretty nice you can even add more gradients on top just so the color Blends a little better you can add this kind of gradient in the center just to make it uh disperse you know you don't want to make it appear super harsh so I'm going to click on send backward and then just place this over here you can click on edit and edit the color but I think I like this kind of lined gradient as well so once you have your book cover ready now you might be wondering how can I work with the spine now I can just do the transparency like this of my items that I've placed as my background items and now I can see my little spine section so now I'm going to search for lines over here click on see all and you can go into elements as well or graphics and you have multiple different line options so let's say I have these three lined options and I'm just going to rotate this to 90 degrees place this like so or maybe something a little more creative let's say I want to go with these little lines I'm just gonna do a 90 degree rotation and then I'm going to place these right at the center then I'm going to do command C command V and then just reposition these so I'm also going to flip the bottom half simply because it would align better if it's flipped so now you guys can see it connects right at the center enter like so I'm just selecting it just so it touches right at the center now once I have completed all of this I can increase the transparency to 100 and if you want to remove the original KDP image from the background you can just select all of the items that are present on top and then you can group them and lock them then once you have placed all of your images at least when you group them you can click on layer and click on send show layers and then you have your initial layer that you locked you can unlock this layer from here and then you can just simply delete it and then it will be removed now from here I'm going to go into my text section click on ADD title and then I can place the title of my KDP book right at the center of my first section you can enter your copyright information obviously once you've separated your sections you have easy idea of where what's supposed to go so let's say I just want to add let's say last life is the title so I just place that over here and just to make it a little more interesting let's go back into elements and once we go into elements we can add a background or you can search for cloud and just place that behind your text like so just so it's easier for your text to be visible or place any kind of block once you've completed the design element just click on share on the top right click on download and download it as a PDF now once you've downloaded as a PDF you can upload it into Amazon KDP and your book cover is ready so I hope you guys found this video helpful if you did make sure to leave a like And subscribe and I will catch you guys in the next video

Channel: Tutorials by Manizha & Ryan

Views: 16,606

Keywords: canva book cover tutorial, kdp book cover design canva, canva tutorial, how to create an ebook in canva, canva for beginners, low content books, create kdp cover in canva, how to create an ebook in canva 2023, canva book cover, how to create an ebook for free, how to create an ebook, book cover design using canva, ebook cover canva, canva ebook cover, canva ebook cover tutorial, book cover design canva, how to create an ebook cover in canva, book cover design

Id: Z8QZhJnIY4Q

Length: 11min 8sec (668 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 26 2023