How To Create Amazon KDP No Content Books FAST & FREE! - How To Make Notebooks and Journals for KDP!

welcome back to my channel if you want to learn how to quickly and easily make no content books like notebooks and journals completely for free then this is the video for you if you are new here welcome my name is caroline and i make videos to help you master your mindset and make money online so that you can build a life you love if you do enjoy watching videos like this please take a moment to subscribe i appreciate every single one of you who does take that couple of seconds to click the subscribe button and don't forget to click the bell so that you do get a notification whenever i upload a new video just like this today i do want to show you how you can make no content books like notebooks like journals for free because maybe you're new to no and low content self-publishing and don't have the budget to invest in professional graphic design software like adobe photoshop like adobe illustrator and indesign or maybe you aren't even sure if you want to do low content book publishing long term and just want to dip your toe in so to speak in the low content book publishing pond and so using free software to start with is a really good place to begin and see if this business is actually for you in this video i'm going to be using canva to show you how to create a notebook or journal and the reason i'm using canva today is because it has quite a lot of inbuilt features like stock images and fonts that are going to be really useful so you don't have to go off and collect images and fonts from all different websites and from different places they are all located within canva if you haven't already go and create an account for canva canva is free to join and you do get some images and fonts to use as part of the free membership they also have a pro version and you can consider upgrading to this membership if you do want to get access to more images and more fonts or if you want some more specialized kind of features things like having transparent background in your images but for now the free version is sufficient so i am now logged into my own canva account and to create your notebook or your journal within canva you are going to have to create two documents so you have to create one document which is the cover and a second document which is the interior and i'm going to start with creating the interior so for this interior i'm going to simply make a lined interior for a notebook i'm going to create a six by nine inch notebook which is a fairly common size for a notebook and in this case i'm going to create a notebook where the lines go right to the edge of the page so this is where you'll need to add bleed to your interior margins so a book where the lines don't go to the edge of the page and there is some white space between the line and the edge of the page that has no bleed and a book where the lines go right to the edge of the page has bleed so when you create a book where the lines go right to the edge of the page and therefore has bleed you do need to add some extra dimensions added to the margin and if you're a little confused still about my explanation of bleed and no bleed you'll see in a second once i start creating the interior what i mean when i say the lines go right to the edge of the pages so basically to account for bleed we need to add 0.125 of an inch to the top the bottom and the outside margins now that information is available on the amazon kdp resource website if you need to find out more information about that so we're going to create a custom sized 6.125 inch by 9.25 0 inch document now the simplest way that i know how to create lines in canva is just to add some body text so because we want the line to go off right to the edge of the page i'm extending the text box out and then i'm basically just creating lines by using my shift key and the underline button on my keyboard now it's okay that it's gone off the page this is what i mean by a line going right from the edge of the page so from one a one edge of the page to the other there is no space between this line and the end of the page so that's where your line is bleeding off the page and that's why we add those extra margins now notebooks generally don't have dark black lines in them they're usually a little bit lighter so we'll adjust the color to a bit of a lighter gray now i'm reducing the size of the line by adjust adjusting the font size because i own a lot of notebooks and they're generally formatted pretty much the same so i went through quite a few of my notebooks and counted how many lines in general or on average are on a 6x9 notebook page and the ones that i counted had about 23 to 25 lines so i'm going to try and fit 23 lines on this page so let's just see if i can if i can get that right now all i'm doing here is clicking and selecting them all at once and then copy and pasting so i don't have to keep doing one line at a time let me just count how many we've got there one 23 24 so they're a little bit smaller the lines have a little bit of a smaller gap in between each of them than the notebook that i looked at of my own that i own but that's fine 25 lines is completely fine and totally normal but obviously if you want less lines or more lines in your notebook you just adjust the font size here which creates a smaller space between each line okay so there we have our first page in our notebook our lined notebook it's as simple as that and so now we need to create the remaining 120 119 pages that are going to go into this interior now on the free version of canva you can only create documents with up to 100 pages in them so if your notebook is only going to be 100 pages that is fine if you do want to create something with more than 100 pages 120 like i'm going to do now or more then there are two ways that you can do it the freeway which i'm going to show you now or obviously if you upgrade to the pro version of canva you'll be able to create bigger documents but on the free version what we basically do is we just basically duplicate the page so i'm going to duplicate this page until we get to 20 pages so there we have the first 20 pages in our notebook so i am going to download this part of it we want it as a high quality pdf because amazon kdp do have guidelines or not even guidelines they're rules about how high the quality your document has to be so you need to download it as a pdf print okay so that's the first 20 pages done and now we're going to make up the remaining 100 pages and then we will merge them together to create one big document to be uploaded to amazon now obviously this is a little bit tedious and a bit boring to watch so i will speed this up until i get to [Music] 100. [Music] okay so now we have a hundred so we will have two documents one of 20 pages one of 100 pages so i am just going to download this one as a pdf print as well and i didn't rename the first 20 pages but that's okay and download so now we will go off and merge those two together to create our one interior okay so now we just need to find somewhere to merge our two pdfs and so there are lots of free tools to do that i just did a search for free pdf merge and i'll just pick the first one because usually the first one's the most popular and it has a lot of votes that it's a good program to use so i just selected the two pdfs that we created in canva and they are now uploading and we just want to arrange and combine them and there we've got a notebook interior with 120 pages so that is the interior done simple as that took about five minutes so now we need to create our cover so we go back to canva and we need to create a new document but we need to know how big our cover needs to be so the covers are a little bit more complicated there's a lot more calculating of the dimensions for covers they have margins trim size the actual cover size and things like that so basically as with everything you can get it all from the amazon kdp resources website and you can just go there and download a cover template and that will make sure that we can create our cover the correct size so all we do is select our trim size which is basically the size of the book we're creating which is a six by nine inch we have 120 white pages download the cover template this is basically what the cover template looks like now not only that we also need to know for canva what dimensions the cover actually needs to be including all the trim size and margin size that needs to be added on to our cover template and again this is something that we can just download from the amazon kdp website it's called the setup calculator so this here the paperback file setup calculator we just download that it's a excel file and so what we do here is we enter what our book is going to be so we're going to have black ink with white paper it's going to be 6x9 but you obviously have the option to change that if your book is different and our book is going to be 120 pages it will give you the manuscript with no bleed manuscript with bleed and the cover so in this case we're trying to find out the cover dimensions and this is how the dimensions of the cover need to be set up we need to enter the total dimensions of the cover into canva so we need to go for the largest size here so we want the cover height 9.25 is the cover height and we need the total cover width so 12.52 inches so that is the size that we need to make our template in canva so again we go create a design custom template 12.52 inch by 9.25 inch and we create a new design and so this is where you can just start to get creative if you are just creating a simple kind of notebook with some sort of patent cover nothing specific in terms of the niche as in it's not going to target cat lovers or people who love sloths or unicorns or anything like that maybe you just want to make like a classy looking or elegant type of notebook and so you can just search here for a pattern you might not even know what you're looking for but you can just search for a pattern and then you can sort of drill down from here when you see what you like and it gives you suggestions here so if you decide that you do want to create a striped pattern you can click on that and it will give you striped patterns and things like that what you need to do is go through if you're on the free account which we are doing right now you just need to look for the ones that say free if they say pro obviously that means you need to upgrade to the pro version of canva but you can just search through see if something jumps out at you that you think will be a nice cover unless of course you've got something specific in mind so i like marble covers they're very popular they're really sort of on trend and in fashion and sell quite well on amazon and sometimes you just need to put them on and just see what they look like in larger size because obviously it's hard to see on this small thumbnail what it might look like you can always just add a few different patterns or images until you find one that you like and then you can just delete the ones that you're not going to use now personally i like that one so that's what i'm going to use it's kind of got a little bit of gold sort of flick color in it which can be quite nice quite popular and i just seem to like this side better for the side that's going to be the front so basically this right hand side here is the front cover and this left hand side here is the back and yeah i just sort of like this for the front cover because you're going to have some text here and i don't want the text to get lost behind the pattern here so that can go on the back cover now we head over here to text and same with fonts as with images there are some free and there are some paid so you'll have to go through and find the ones that you like that fall under the free version of canva you could even do something like this and just even use that as the name of your notebook if you are doing more of a journal or something like that you don't have to name your notebook notebooks all the time and even though that these fonts have different types of fonts and text within them you don't have to use the whole lot so you could just say delete this and just use that part of it you don't have to use every part of the text one thing that you will want to do is just head over and upload your template here because you want to make sure your text here isn't centered to the whole document you want it centered to the white part of this page here because that's going to be your front cover and then you can just play around with the colors and see what works best on the background that you have [Music] [Music] so you don't always have to create a notebook with basically a title of notebook so if you wanted to create something a little bit more niche the female entrepreneurial empowerment type of niche where people like to call themselves boss babes or boss lady or something like that these notebooks are quite popular you could put boss babe like this on the front or something similar this is just a quick idea off the top of my head and then all i would do is just keep adding this little template back over the top just to see how it's looking because you don't want it to be off center or out of alignment or too close to this side or too close to that side and you can just add a cute little image if you really wanted to underneath and then just match it to the color of the text make it really small just try and sort of line up where the center might be and that could be a really cute kind of cover for like i say female entrepreneur you can leave it like that if you want to or if you do also want to be able to have notebook on there as well all we would do is add the word notebook generally spine font i keep pretty simple so we want to get the degree as 90 and then it's straight and then we want to add this back on so that we can see where we need to position the font so obviously it's really big at the moment we need to make it a lot smaller because it needs to fit into this white space so what i want to do is make the text box the length of the page and then center it so that way the text is right in the middle of the spine of course you can put it up here or down the bottom or wherever you want it to go i generally like mine to go in the middle and that way when you set up your book in kdp you can use boss babe notebook as your title because when you set your book up your title has to be whatever is written on your cover or spine so then we also need to download this one as a high quality pdf and that's all done so now you have two files you've got your cover pdf file you've got your interior pdf file and that's where you upload into your kdp account when you're uploading your notebooks and the great thing about it is now that you've got that interior created you don't have to do that again so now you can just create a multiple notebook or journal covers if that's what you are wanting to do if you're wanting to focus on notebooks or journals now you can just go ahead and create covers until you're ready to move on to a different type of low content book or until you feel like you have learnt enough about low content and no content self-publishing to decide whether you want to continue doing it or not or if you decide that you do want to advance a little bit more and move on to some more professional types of graphic design software like photoshop or like illustrator or anything like that so using canvas a really good start just to sort of see if you like it and see what your design skills are like so as you can see you can easily create notebooks and journals for free in canva there are other free graphic design softwares and programs that you can use but you will find canva is most commonly used for beginners to know content book publishing and for those who don't have the budget or don't want to spend that money on some of the more professional graphic design programs and people love it because it does come with all those inbuilt features like the stock photos like elements and fonts if you would like to be able to save a little bit of time by creating interiors that are more than 100 pages without having to create multiple parts of the interior then merging them all together or if you do want access to more premium images and fonts through canva then you should really consider upgrading to the pro version there is a link in my description below for you to sign up to canva if you don't already have an account with them and give it a try you can also try the pro membership of canva for free for 30 days hopefully this video has given you the tools that you have been looking for to be able to create no content books like notebooks like journals for free if you did like this video and you would like me to keep making videos like this let me know by giving this video a thumbs up and if you do want to make sure you don't miss out on any more videos that i make like this then don't forget to subscribe

Channel: Self Publishing Central

Views: 93,832

Keywords: how to create no content books, low content book interiors, no content book publishing, no content books kdp, kdp notebook interior, kdp no content books, no content books, no content books amazon, low content book publishing, low content book publishing canva, low content book publishing kdp, canva tutorial, canva kdp interior, canva kdp cover, canva kdp book cover, canva book cover tutorial, canva book cover, kdp journal interior, kdp journal tutorial, kdp free tools, kdp

Id: F2aUnzFiFq8

Length: 21min 33sec (1293 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 21 2021