Hey everyone. And
welcome to today's video. Now this is a particularly exciting
one because KDP hardcover books have arrived. That's right. You can now create hardcover
books on the KDP platform, which you will see here when
you log into the KDP platform. But not only that you can now also
easily convert your paperback books into hardcover versions. Again, you can see here when you log into
the KDP platform and that's what we're going to be discussing today. We're going to go over the
features of these new books. And also I'm going to show you a quick
and easy way, using free software, how to convert your current paperback
books into hardcover versions. And there are some important steps that
we need to consider when we do this, but we will go through
these in a moment. Now, what sort of books are
these useful for? Well, you could convert any of your books into
hardcover versions and it's free to do so. So why not? But the sort of books that
may be particularly suited
to this version are things like journals, planners,
diaries, five-year journals, five-year planners, the sort of
books that people like to keep. And also some types of log
books would also be useful for this version as well. Particularly things
like, you know, accountancy ledgers, business log books. Those sort of books that businesses
people need to keep for longer periods of time. But I think, you know, a lot of books would be suited
to the hardcover version. And I think many people would
like to choose this as an option. And the beauty of these types of books
is that you can now spread yourself further on the Amazon KDP
platform and hopefully, you know, make more income, which is what we're in
this business for. So let's get to it. Now in the KDP help section, there is a description of
these new types of books, and basically they are called case
laminate hardcovers. They are hardcovers, but don't have the soft paper
dust jacket that some books have. Now they are available in
only five trim sizes. However, the most common sizes of 6 by 9
inches and 8.5 by 11 inches are available. Books have to be between 75 to 550 pages. They're only available on six
marketplaces at the moment. That's the US, UK, Spain, France, Italy, and Germany. They're not yet available
in Canada or Australia, but I'm sure that will
come along in the future. And there are some important
factors to consider like the title, cover size and print costs, which we'll go through when we come
to show you how to convert one of your books. So let's get straight on to it. So when you've logged
into your KDP platform, you'll see this option here to create a
hardcover from your existing paperback cover. Now, the example I'm going to show you today
is a lined notebook from a video I did recently on how to create a basic
lined notebook and upload it to the KDP platform, which I'll leave a link to above here
and also in the description below. And that's very useful if you are
starting out in this business and wants to learn how to create one of these books
and get it onto Amazon and become an author publisher. So the first thing
to do is click on create hardcover. And when you do that, you'll see that KDP has filled out all the options on this first page for
you. So all the original keywords, categories, title,
subtitle, and description. Now in the keywords you may
want to add in there, hardcover, hardcover books. So people, you know,
who may be searching for hardcovers, have a greater chance to finding your
book. Now, when it comes to the title, what KDP recommends you doing
is keeping the same title so that the hardcover version
is listed alongside the paperback version as an option. Now,
when it comes to the subtitle personally, I would probably keep
that the same as well. Some people may be tempted to put in
hardcover there, but for the time being, I'd probably keep that the same just to
make sure that your book does get listed alongside your paperback version. So in
essence, I'd keep everything the same. Add into the description that it's a
hardcover book add in hardcover to the keywords, then click on,
save and continue. Now you
will need to click on this, assign me a free KDP ISBN because
these hardcover books will need a different ISBN number to the paperback
books that you've already published. So we'll click on that,
click on assign ISBN. And then we scroll down to the print
options and we're going to keep this as black and white interior, because we're going to be using the same
interior that we used for the paperback versions. That doesn't change as long
as it's the same dimensions as those that are allowed becasue if we
click here on the different sizes, we can see there are only five
different options available. So if your book is not one of these sizes, then you would have to change your
interior to conform to one of these five options. The book that I previously
published was a 6 by 9 inch book. So we're going to stick
with 6 by 9 inches. The bleed settings would remain
the same. This is a lined journal. So we're going to click on bleed.
And we've got the two options, the same as the paperback options
of matte and glossy cover. I'm going to stick to the matte cover. I don't know if any of you guys
have ordered any of your books, but I actually prefer the matte cover, but I've heard that if the
cover is very dark or black, that glossy might be better because it
doesn't show up the fingerprints as much. Now, as I said, we're going
to use the same interior. Now, the interior I used when creating
my line journal was the free lined paper interior that I've
got here on my Gumroad shop, which I'll leave a link to in the
description below. You can click on that. And that is absolutely free to
download. It's a 6 by 9 inch, 120 page interior. So you just click
on upload hardcover manuscript. And when you click that button,
uploaded it from your computer, just wait for it to upload. It
normally doesn't take that long. Now, once that has uploaded you
now come to the book cover. And this is one of the changes in that
the dimensions of the template of the book cover have changed
from the paperback version. Now you could launch cover creator
and create it on the KDP platform, but I'm going to upload a cover
that I'm going to make myself. So now we need to upload the cover
file. Now in that previous video, I created the cover in Canva, and
that's what I'm going to show you today. Now Canva is free for the basic
version and that's exactly where I created my previous cover, which
you can see here. This was the, the old 6 by 9 inch version. So
when you create your account, or if you already have an account, go to the top right-hand corner
and click on custom size. Now we need to know what the size
of our template is going to be. And KDP has now created a custom cover template to creator. So if you click
on the link in the KDP help section, it'll take you to this
cover template calculator. Now previously I used to do all
this on a site called bookow.com, but you no longer need to do that. You can get all your template
sizes for the book cover from KDP for both paperback and
hardback versions. So for this, we're going to do the hard
cover. So we click on hardcover. Interior type is black and
white. Paper type is white paper. Page turned direction. Now
this initially fooled me, but for normal books it's called
left to right. So choose that one. Measurement units we want
inches. Interior, trim size, choose one of the five options,
which is six by nine. Page count 120. Then click on calculate dimensions.
And it tells you the dimensions here. But what we want is to download the
template. So go ahead and click that. Now here on the left, we have the
template for the hardcover cover book, which I've downloaded. And on the right here is the old
template for the paperback version. And you'll notice some differences. One is the hardback version
is larger than the paperback version and this pink border, which
is the sort of the bleed border, if you like, is larger
than the paperback version. Now the cover will have to go right
to the edges of the pink border. But all important contents,
like, you know, some images, writing will have to stay
within the pink border. And also the other differences, the spine is slightly wider
or thicker as well. Now, if we enlarge our template and
look over to the right-hand side, we've got these dimensions
here, which is 14.034, inches by 10.417 inches. And that's important figure
we need to know or use in creating our template. So let's
go back over to Canva. Now, normally when you click on custom
size, it will say px for pixels here. And this is a mistake
a lot of people make. You actually need to change that two
inches and then put in those dimensions that we've just mentioned. So 14.034 by 10.417, and just click on create new design. And here we have our blank template. Now what you need to
do is click on uploads. You want to drag in the template we've
just created to the upload section. So just find where you've
downloaded the template to, and just drag that across
into the upload section. Now you can see I'd already done that. And then just drag that
across into the blank area, move that into place. It will nicely click into place and
just drag to fill the whole blank area. Now, what you'll need to do is have open
the previous paperback version of the cover you've created. Now, if
you just click on the background, press command C or control C to copy, go over to our new page and just
command V or control V to paste. And again, might need to move that into position
into the top left-hand corner or whatever, and then just drag into position. And we need to drag down a bit
just to cover the whole area. Now we want to make this a bit transparent
because we want to see the template underneath. So just turn
down the transparency, just
to a touch to, you know, 50 to 60%. Then if we go back to our
cover, we now, holding down shift, want to select all these
graphical elements like, so. And then command C or control C to copy, go back to our new cover
and command V or control V to paste. And you'll see, we've
got all these elements here. Now you could move those so that
the art within this pink border, which this just appears to fit. And you can adjust the
sizes of those if you want. So we'll just drag that and make
sure it is within that pink border. If it is outside that pink border, you may get a message from KDP,
when you try to upload your book, that there is an error. Now, what we need to do is click on the
background to the cover, again. Click on our transparency
and turn that back up to 100. And now we have our cover template. Now you could add some text down the
spine if you wanted to. For this, we're just going to leave it as
is. Now. We want to download that. So top right-hand corner
click on download. File type is PDF print. That's the high quality print. So click on that and
just click on download. You could delete that template that
was underneath the cover layer. So once that's downloaded,
go back to the KDP platform, click on upload your cover file. Find
where you've downloaded the book to, double click on it and
upload it to the platform. That may take a few moments
depending on your internet speed. So that is now uploaded. You can leave this check box blank here
because we're not uploading our own ISBN barcode, then click
on launch previewer. And this will show us a preview of
what our book is going to look like. And again, this can take
sometimes a few minutes. Now, while that's doing its business,
I just want to make small note. Some people may say, well,
why not take your old cover, put it over the new template
and just stretch it into place. Well you may find that there's issues
in that the lettering may become distorted. You may find some of the
graphical elements or writing
may not stay within that pink border. So it's better to create the
new background and put the front elements if you like, redo it and put that within
the pink box on the template. So here we have now in the
print previewer our book, and we can see all the elements
are in the right place. We don't have any nasty red warning
triangles or anything down here on the left-hand side, which
may indicate a problem. We can then turn over the pages
and look at the interior. Again, no red warning triangles, no issues
down the left hand side menu to note, which I wouldn't expect
anyway with this interior, because I've used it on lots of books
and so have many other people as well. So you could go through all 120
pages if you want. I don't need to. So I'm going to click on approve. So now we come down to this section of
the summary and this is going to be one of the big differences and is going to
affect how much you sell your book for. And you can see the printing cost
here is quite high. It's $6.94. Now for a paperback version. I think it was in the region
of about $2.20 to $2.40, something like that. So this
is a significant difference. So you're going to have to factor
that in when you price your book. Now at the moment, there's not going to be that many
hardcover books or notebooks, journals from KDP published on Amazon. So it's going to be difficult
to, to get that price right, compared to other publishers. But
we'll come onto that in one second. So we just click on save and continue.
We're going to leave this selected, all territoriesworldwide
rights. Primary marketplace. I always choose amazon.com. So
now we come to our list price. Now it says here, minimum
price of $11.57. Now, if we take into account that normally
for notebook had sell it $6.99, these look to be about $4.50
more expensive in printing costs. So you're looking at
probably somewhere around if, you know, if you're going to make the same profit
somewhere around the 12 or $13.99 mark. So enter that and it should
tell us what our royalty is. $1.45. So we may look
looking at even more, $14.49 to get our royalty up to
about the same amount. Maybe even $14.99. So that's probably more in the
region somewhere between $14.49 to $14.99. So, whether there is a huge
market for notebooks, this type of books at this price
we'll have to wait and see. But again, for certain types of books,
this may be,you know, a really good option
that people will want. And I normally just leave
these other options here as is. I May round up or round down
some of the numbers here. So in the UK £10.86, I may
just change that to £10.99 and same for the Euro prices as well. And then it's just a case of clicking
on publish your hardback cover. And you've now got the
hardback version. Now I, haven't got an example to show you of a
listing at the moment where it shows you the paperback version and the hardcover
version together. But as I say, it's free, there's no harm in doing it. And it just gives customers
that alternative option, which may increase your chances of
getting a sale. So it's all new. Give it a go. Let me know in
the comments, what you think, let me know in the comments if you do
have any issues, do have any problems. I'll be looking a bit more detail at
creating one of these books and doing a video of uploading one of these,
new hardcover books as well. Thank you very much for your time. It's very much appreciated if you are
new to publishing or want to watch that video, where I created that notebook and
interior and uploaded it to Amazon, then click this video next, where
I run through it in detail. Again, thank you very much for your time,
much appreciated. And until next time, goodbye.
