So you've created your book, you've done the cover and you've done
the interior and you're over at KDP and you upload the interior manuscript. You upload your cover file and you
click on launch previewer and you wait, and you wait some more. And then
up pops the print previewer. And you've got the cover
here, which looks fine so far. And you've clicked to look at the interior
and it won't let you click approve. And you see the dreaded red
warning triangle and this red error there. And when you hover your
mouse over the interior of the book, it does come up with this pop-up text, which gives you an idea of
what the problem might be. And also under where it says error. It also gives you an idea of what the
problem might be,.but the issue can be interpreting what it says, and this can apply whether you're
doing fiction, non-fiction books, creating no content and low content books. And often the problems arise
out of a couple of main things, which is what we're going to cover
in today's video on getting your book formatted in the correct
way in the first place. So hopefully you don't get these errors. So if that sounds something useful
to you then please follow along. Now, if you've not been here
before, my name is Paul Marles, and I do videos on how to
make it, keep it and grow it. And that's your money I'm talking
about. If you do like videos like that, then please do give it a thumbs up, hit the subscribe button and smash
that notification bell to receive notification of when I
produce more videos like this. So what we're going to cover is the
formatting of the cover of the book, which will be quick and the interior,
which will be the main part of the video, because that's the main thing that a
lot of people run into trouble with. And that's what causes the main
issues when uploading that book. So let's get straight into it. Now, we first want to decide on what
size our book is going to be. Now the most common size of
many books is 6 by 9 inches. If you're creating larger books,
it could be non-fiction books, or it could be things like puzzle books,
handwriting, books, coloring books, the most common size of those
tends to be 8.5 by 11 inches. Now you can do smaller books, sort of 5 by 8 inches, which is also a common
size for fiction and some non-fiction books because they're a
better size for putting in the pocket. However, the only slight issue with
that is obviously if it's smaller, you'll have more pages. If you've got more pages it does
actually cost more to produce, which cuts away a bit at your
profit margin. So the book, the example today is going to be
a book that's 6 by 9 inches. Now, in order to create your cover, you could do it all within
KDP by going over to the KDP cover creator. And you find
that within the KDP platform, where in the section where
you upload your cover file, you can click on use cover
creator, launch cover creator, and this will take you to
the Kindle cover creator, where you can create your own
cover within the platform itself. The only issue is it can be very basic. You don't have a lot of the
flexibility that you have if you're using image, editing software, such
as Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, Inkscape,
Gravit Designer or Canva. And those are the most popular ways that
a lot of people do create their covers. So that's exactly what
we're going to do today. And this is how I create my covers.
So what we need, first of all, is to know what our actual cover size
is. So this will include the back cover, the front cover and the bit for the spine. And also we need to allow
for something called bleed, which you don't really need to
worry about at the moment. Now, the quickest way to get a template for
this cover is to go over to a website called bookow.com. So you
click on Createspace, KDP, cover template generator. You scroll down and you put in the
dimensions of your book. In this case, we said 6 inches by 9 inches. And
then the number of pages for this, I'm going to use 120 pages, which is
the most common for things like in, um, no content to low content books. But obviously that's going to depend
on the type of book you produce and the number of words you've written.
But 120 pages for the moment, then you put in your
email address, repeat it, click on the tick box to consent
to email, the cover template. And you will be sent a templates.
That's looks like this. And the important information we
need is in the top left-hand corner, which tells us our page layout size, which is 12.52 inches by
9.25 inches in this case. And so we could go over to our
image editing software today, I'm using Affinity Designer,
but there are many out there. You can use a platform like Canva
or other software like Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, et cetera. And you would set up your page
dimensions with those dimensions, from the template. And then what you can do is just
drag in the template that you've just downloaded and position that on the page. And this is useful because you can get
your content for the back cover and front cover within this red
or pinky colored box. And you can align it also
within that box so that, you know it's going to look good
when it's on the actual book itself. And it also has
a space there to put the, any writing you may have
on the spine of the book. And when you've done all that, you can then just switch off that
layer for the template or just delete it. And then your book your cover is
then ready to save as a PDF file and then upload to the KDP platform.
We're onto the interior now. And this is the bit that can
cause some confusion. So again, decide on the page size, well we've
already done that, which is 6 by 9 inches. Then we have to decide on whether
the pages are going to have bleed or no bleed. And this is determined by what
content you have in the book. So if you have images or content
that goes right to the edges of the page, this is called bleed. But if the content doesn't and there is a margin around your
content, then this is called no bleed. Now, even if just one page in your
book has an image or content that goes right to the edge of a page, then the whole document will
need the bleed settings. But if it doesn't, then
it would be no bleed. And in which case the size of the page
that you would create would just be the size of your book. So it'd
be 6 by 9 inches. However, if it does have bleed, then we need to increase the size of
our page so that during manufacture, it can then be trimmed down. So if you are placing any images or
graphics that do go to the edge of the page, then do remember some
of that may be trimmed off. So how do we decide on what
size our page should be? If it does have bleed? Well, we put an extra amount at
the top outside margin and the bottom. So we need to increase
the page size. And for this, we add 0.125 Inches to the top, 0.125 inches to the bottom
and 0.125 inches to the side. So our page becomes 6.125 inches by 9.25 inches. And you would add this amount
on whether your book was an 8.5 by 11 book or a 5 by 8 book or
any other size for that matter. So when it comes to upload in your book, this is where you put the
bleed or no bleed settings. Then the second bit you need
to take into account is the margins. Now you can imagine
if you created a book and
the content of the book, whether it's writing or table or images went right up to the edge of the
page, it would look a bit odd. So we want to have our
content within the margins. So if our book is no bleed, we would have to have our
content within the following margins. And this would be for 24 to 150 page book. So the inside margin or
gutter would be not 0.375, the outside margin 0.25 inches,
the top margin 0.25inches. And the bottom also 0.25 inches. Now the actual margin size is going to
be dependent on the number of pages in the book. But if you go to the KDP help page
and I'll leave the link to this in the description below,
and you scroll down, you can see there is a section on margins, and you can see that it is
dependent on the number of pages. So if there are more pages in the book, then the actual margin
sizes would be bigger. But what happens if our
book has bleed and our pages are actually bigger? Well, what we need to do is actually increase
the size of our margins to add on that bit, extra for the bleed. So now the inside margin
would remain the same at 0.375 inches, but the outside
margin would be 0.375 inches, top margin 0.375 inches. And the bottom also 0.375 inches, because we're basically
adding on the amount for the bleed, to the amount for the margins. Now, what you can do when setting up your
page in your image editing software is you can add a box for the margins.
In the case of Affinity Designer, you click on document set up,
and you've got this box here, which says include margins. You untick that little lock and you put
in your inside margin that we've just mentioned 0.375. And we put in our outside
margins of not 0.25, and we can just copy and paste
that to the other boxes, click on. Okay. And you'll see, it'll
provide us with this box here. And as long as our content
is within that box, then we're all good to go.
And when we upload our book, there would hopefully be no issues. Now, the KDP help section does
also provide templates for pages and how to customize these pages. It tends to refer to opening
the document in Microsoft word. But that's probably more useful if
you're creating a written book rather than the no content and low content books. So that covers the main areas that
most people have when uploading their books to the KDP platform. And it covers those main areas where
Amazon or KDP reports to you that there is an error and doesn't allow you to proceed
with the upload of your book. Now, this video is going to be added
to my book tutorials playlist. So if you're interested in becoming
an author, becoming a publisher, creating your own publishing business,
then watch this playlist here, which will take you through
all the various different
steps on creating your own books. Thank you very much for your
time. It's very much appreciated. And until next time, goodbye.
