Number tracing books for kids are
very popular on Amazon and sell very well, making their publishers a
lot of money. So, in this video, I'm going to be showing you how to create
your very own interior for a number tracing book for free. So you can
get into starting publishing these, self-publishing them on Amazon, and hopefully creating your
own passive income. Now, if you've not been to this channel before
then welcome my name's 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, the number tracing niche is
all part of that overall big homeschooling niche. And in fact, I did a recent video where it
was one of my top seven niche picks of 2022. And in
my most recent video, I looked at this niche in more depth,
looking at the market and the trends, looking at those all important keywords. And also just giving you
some ideas about how to get and create an interior. But in this video, I'm going to go into more depth
on creating your own unique, and that's important, unique interior that can
use to upload to the KDP platform to create your own
book. So what waiting for? Let's get into it. Now, if we have a look at the
interiors of some of these books, we can see that basically they consist
of numbers in this dotted or dashed font, which kids can trace around and
practice writing these numbers. Some books also have the
numbers in words as well. They're more aimed at the
slightly older age groups. And this is an interior I actually
downloaded from Creative Fabrica, which is my go-to site for
images, fonts, and KDP interiors. And you can see here again,
we've got this same format. We've got an image just to decorate the
book, make it look more interesting. What I'm going to show today uses images
that actually helps kids count as well. And we've got these sort of
handwriting lines with this dotted font. Again, that kids
can trace around. As I said, we're going to be doing this for free. And so we're going to
be doing this in Canva. So head over to canva.com, you
can create your own free account, and I'm going to be using a
free account today to do this. Once you've done that, go to
the top right hand corner here, where it says custom size,
and you'll click on that. This is the important bit here
where it says px for pixels. Change that to in for inches. Now most of these books
are 8.5 by 11 inches. So that's the size we're
going to be using today. So I'm just going to enter those numbers.
And we click on create new design, and this will give us
our blank document. Now, before we go creating on this single page, what I would advise doing is
just clicking on add page below there. Now, in order to
create one of these interiors, we're going to need three
basic components. Those are, the linned interior. Those
are the lines on the page. We're going to need a font, a dotted
font that kids can trace around, and we're going to need an image or
images that make the book look a bit more interesting and that kids can
use alsouse to count with. So first of the interior,
the lined interior. Well, if you go over to my Gumroad shop and
I'll leave a link to that below in the description. Have a scroll down, or it
might be at the top, but go to this here, which is the number
tracing keywords product. Now this product contains all
the keywords for this niche, which will be useful and helpful when it
actually comes to publishing your book and getting your book seen. But it also contains a couple of bonus
components and that's the interior file or interior template,
if you like, for these pages. And when you download them, you'll notice that there is a .svg format, I and a .png format. Now we need to use the .png
format. That's very important. So go ahead, download the interiors from
here and then go back over to Canva to our blank page. Now what
we'll need to do left hand side, click on upload. And then, from where you've downloaded
your lined interior, what I want you to do is
just drag that across into the upload section. Like, so. Then what you need to do
is just drag that file, that you've just downloaded
onto the blank page. Now, if you move that towards the top corner, you'll see that it expands
automatically to fit the page. And this has the margins already set. Now, on this first page, what we're going to do is have a blank
section at the top where we're going to add some words and images. So what we need to do click on
elements on the left hand side menu, then on lines and shapes.
You can click on see all, but we want this square here. And then just drag that
over to our blank page. And then position it over some of the
lines. And you can just move that across. Now at the moment, this is a gray color. So click on the color swatch in
the top left and just click on white. So just click on
that white box again. And what I want you to do is top
right hand corner, click on lock. Now let's go with the numbers.
Now to make this more interesting. We'll we won't go for number one
or two. We'll go for number three. Now what we need to do, left hand side click on the text
box and in the search text box type in student, and this is going to give
us these two fonts here. One is the standard c anva student font, and the other is the
canva student font dotted. Now you'll see here, we've got
this where it has a little crown, and if we hover over
the crown, it says pro. That's for people or people that have
actually signed up for a pro account on Canva can use these components
that have that little crown. And I think it's something like $10, 10 US dollars a month to
sign for the pro version. It gives you access to
some extra features, gives you access to extra
graphics and images, that sort of thing. But
what we're gonna do today, you can do with the free account.
So click on the canva student font, first of all. And what you can do is just drag to
make that a bit larger and then just double click to select it all and type
in the number three and just click outside the box and then click on it
again and just drag that into position. Now we need to hold our left mouse
down and just drag downwards so that we increase the size of this number
so that it fits within the lines. So what we want to do now is
just double click on our number, click on the text color box, and
then we'll make this a gray color. Now, what we need to do is follow
this on with the dotted font. So an easy way to do this is
just to click on the number, hold down your option key on your
keyboard, left click on the mouse, and then just drag. And we'll see here, we'll do this at about where it says one. And then we'll repeat that process
again, where that little number says one, just so they're roughly spaced
apart equally and once more. And the next thing is just double click
on each number, click on the fonts here, click on that student dotted font. And then just holding down
shift, click on all the numbers, go to the font color, and we're going
to have this in a lighter gray. Okay. So that would be our first line.
Now down to the next lines. Well, the easy way to do this
is holding down shift, click on each number in that line, and then holding down option
left click on the mouse, drag that whole lot down. And you can see
here, it puts a box around everything, and you can align these
up with the numbers above. And we can repeat that as we go down. And so that would be the first
page. Just reduce the size of that. And what we can do is,
like we've done before, go to our upload section drag in
the lined template onto the next page. And again, holding down
shift, click on all the numbers, holding down option left click the mouse. You could drag those down onto the next
page and just move them into position. Because normally you'll find that
most of the books have sort of the first initial page with an image and
numbers. And then the next page again, will all be the same numbers. And you
could mix this up if you wanted to. You could remove that number
three, the solid number three, and just drag across a dotted number
three, and then repeat as you go down. So that would be two pages of a
book and you can see it's pretty straightforward. Now when it
comes to this blank section, what I want is to write number in, in words and to put some images in there. So we're just going to go over to
our text box, left hand side again, click on that. And we're going
to use the student font again, and we're going to enlarge this box and
we're going to type in the letter or the number three in words. And then we're just going to position
that and enlarge it. Now that's in black, which is quite bold and I want, so I want to change the color to
a slightly lighter gray. Okay. Next for some images. Click on elements
again. And then in the search box, I'm going to search for bird.
Now what I suggest doing, because this is for young kids, just
having some basic simple images. So I'm going to scroll down.
Now, I know what I'm looking for. Cause I've used this image already.
And it's this image here of a, looks like a duckling or something
like that. And you can see, it hasn't got a little crown on
it so we can use that for free. So it's just a case of dragging
that across, onto our page. Just going to reduce the size of
that and move it down here. Now, in terms of using images and publishing, using them to publish your
book and the licensing. Well, what I suggest doing is going
over to the Canva licensing page, where it tells you everything that
you can and cannot do with the image in terms of commercial use. And I think you'll find that
what I'm showing you today, you can do commercially. But I
suggest wherever you get images from, whatever source you do, make yourself
familiar with the licensing agreement. So that you're satisfied, you know, what you can and cannot do
because it is your account. And as part of this business,
it is your responsibility. Okay, so we've got our duck here or duckling. And I'm just going to move that there.
And I'm going to just hold down option, left click of the mouse and just
drag. I'll put another one there, make that slightly smaller option, left click of the mouse and just drag
this one into position here and reduce that size ever so slightly. So now
you can see, we have our page set up, we've got our number in words, and we've got these images here,
three birds that kids can count. Now you'll notice that this is in color. I think if you publish with color
images and keep it as black and white, Amazon will publish
that in black and white. But what I prefer to do
is just change my images to black and white. And that's easy
to do. Just click on our image, top left here. We've
got these color boxes. These are the colors used in the image. Just click on the light colored
image and just click like so, and convert this to a gray image. Now you can do these for these other
birds, but to make this quicker, I'm going to delete those option
left click of the mouse like so. Okay. So that's our first
page and I think you'll agree, that was relatively simple
and quite easy to do. Then what you would do is carry
on filling out these other pages, then go onto the next page. Now these
books have number counting, you know, one to 10, one to 20, 1 to a hundred.
Some of them, as I mentioned earlier, combined the numbers and also combined
the tracing around the actual words of the numbers. So you would
go through creating more pages, adding your page in da,
da, da, creating these. Then what you would need is the PDF file, which you will then use to upload
to the Amazon KDP platform. How to do that. Top right hand
corner, click on download file type, click on that down arrow and choose
this here, which is the PDF print. Now at the moment, it says
all pages in brackets four, obviously when you've created
your interior you'll have more pages than this. So PDF
print, all pages download, boom. It will download the
PDF file to your computer. Now none of these images or interiors
goes to the edge of the page. So when you are uploading this to KDP, this will be a no bleed interior.
And as I mentioned earlier, all the margins are already set. So you
don't have to worry about that either. So this is pretty simple. Now I
want to show you one more step. If you want to make this interior look
a bit more advanced. Now for this, we're going to use Keynote or PowerPoint.
Today, I'm going to be using Keynote. So what I want to do is click on download, click on png, where it says suggested then
click on this down arrow, where it says all pages
and click on just page one. So that's the page we've just created.
Click done.. Click on download. So this is going to download
a PNG of just that one page next, go to keynote. Or as I said,
you can do this in PowerPoint. Now set the page size. In
Keynote this has to be in points. So it's 612 by 792 points for a 8.5 by 11 inch page. In PowerPoint, you can set it in inches. Left
hand side here, just click on, copy then paste. And you can do that a few times to create
the pages that are going to make up the interior of your book. Now that interior that I've just
downloaded that one page in .png format, I'm just going to drag across onto our
blank page here and just move that into position so it's centered.
Usually clicks into position. So what do I want to do
with this page? Well, if we go over to Amazon, you'll notice here that these
numbers have these arrows, which shows kids and adults the
direction with which to use the pen or pencil stroke. And a lot
of these books do have that. Now some books don't. So if you didn't want to do it and
just leave it as a very basic interior, you can. But if you wanted
to spice things up a bit, I'll show you how to add
those arrows. So in Keynote, we're going to enlarge our page so we
can concentrate on our solid number here. Next click on shape and
in the top right corner here, we've got this pen icon. Click on that. And what you do is click
either side of the curve here and then move the pen to the
center and then just drag and it'll form this nice curve. And then
you press escape on your keyboard. Now over on the right hand side, you'll want to click on this
format button and click on style, and then where it says, end points. This is the first point of that line. So we're gonna click on that little dot
and then the end point of the line will be an Arrowhead. So click on
that. And then increase the, the thickness of the arrow and
we'll change the color to a lighter gray. And there we have our arrows. So now all there is to do is to add
the numbers. So the first stroke, number one is this first curve here. So we click on the text box at
the top there, double click that, add in one. Now that's going to be a bit large
and I want to do it the same shade as the arrow. And then we can
reduce the size of the font also. And then just drag that over to our arrow. Then using option, holding down the
left mouse key, just drag down here, double click it and type in two. So now you can see it looks pretty good. Now you could leave the
other numbers as is, but if you wanted to move those
components that we've just created down, holding down the shift button, just click on those different
components that were just created, holding down the option
key, left mouse click. Holding down or holding
down the left mouse. You could just drag those down and again, holding down in position and
you build up your page like, so. And then let's move that to the top.
And then you would go on to page two, download the .png file from Canva,
drag that into Keynote. And again, you could add any embellishments,
arrows as you like. This way you would actually be building
up your interior then in Keynote or Powerpoint. And it would just be a case of going to
file clicking on file and exporting as a PDF. Now, a lot of these books
in terms of numbers of pages, they tend to have on average
around 80 pages. But you know, you could do one with less pages or
you could do a book with more pages. That's entirely up to you. Now, if you are a complete beginner at this
and have not created or published your own book yet, then what I suggest doing is going
to my book tutorials playlist here, where I run through all the
process of creating a cover, uploading a basic lined interior and
cover to KDP and going through the whole upload process. in total. If you want to
watch that video, where I look at the, the niche, the number
tracing niche in detail, then click on this video down here.
Thank you very much for your time. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button. It's very much appreciated
and until next time, goodbye.
