Whether you're creating low
content books or written work, getting your book rejected or KDP
not even letting you get that far due to in the previous
stage is a real pain. And it's frustrating because a lot of
the time it's difficult to even tell what you've done wrong. Well, in this video, I'm going to tell you what the
biggest issue is and give away a free resource that will hopefully stop you
running into to these problems in the future and allow your book to be
properly formatted. Sound good? Then let's go. Now, if you've not been
here before then welcome to the channel. 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.
And if you do like videos like that, then please do get a thumbs up, hit the subscribe button and smash
that notification bell to receive notification of when I produce
more videos like this. Okay. So what is the biggest problem? Well, based on all the comments
and questions I get, it's around the formatting of the
interior of the book. And in particular, the margins. You see in order
to get your books accepted, your main content has to be within
this invisible boundary on the page, or you get these errors appear when you
hit the launch previewer after uploading your cover and interior designs. Or sometimes it just comes as a
rejection after hitting publish. The problem is these margins
are invisible and the size varies depending on the page size,
whether your book has bleed or no bleed, the page numbers, and whether we are looking at
odd or even numbered pages. That, is the left page or the
right-hand side page when you, when you're looking at the book. And when you get the error
message on the preview, it's often difficult to
understand what it actually means. I know I have difficulty,
but that's probably just me. So to solve this problem, I've created these margin templates and
I've been using them for the last two years. And I'm going to give them away to you
and are free to download from my Gumroad shop, which you can find in the
link below, in the description. And hopefully they will stop you making
these errors in the first place and save you much of your most
valuable asset, which is time. So I'll show you what they
are and how to use them. So first of all go to
my Gumroad shop. Again, the link is in the description below. And here is what the
sales page looks like. Here are the templates
where you can download them. There are eight in total and
they are books with 24 to 150 pages, which covers most books. They are for dimensions 6
by 9 inches or 8.5 by 11 inches and for books with bleed
or no bleed. And you can see, they are designed for the left, which are
the even numbered pages and the right, which are the odd numbered pages. So let's take a look at an example. Now this is going to be for six
by nine inch with no bleed. Now, just a quick recap. Your book has no bleed if the
content like this here on the left does not go to the edge of the page. Or it has bleed if it has
a pattern or images that go to the edge of the page,
like this one here. Now, the sizes of the pages with bleed are
slightly bigger than those without bleed. Now, if you want to learn
more about bleed and margins, I'll leave a link above to a
video I recently did on this. Now for the example I'm going to show
you in a moment I'm going to be using Affinity Designer, but these
templates can be used in any image, editing software, such as Adobe
illustrator, Photoshop, Gravit Designer, Inkscape and also Indesign
and Affinity Publisher, and also free web based
software, such as Canva, which I'll show you a bit
later on in this video. And they can be used for both
written content and low content books. Now in this example,
I'm going to show you today, I've downloaded the
templates we're going to use, and I've created this blank page, which is 6 by 9 inches. Now, first of all, we're going to do the left-hand side page. Then I'll quickly show you about the
process with the right hand side page, which is very similar. So
we've got the blank page here. Now you need to find where
you've downloaded the PNG files, the .PNG files. So here they are. And it's just a simple case of dragging
them across into your image editing software, and then dragging
them into place. Now, in order for your page
to be properly formatted, the content has to be
within these margins. That is within this pinky red border. So what you need to do is take
your content. In this case, we're going to use this
running log interior example, just command C or control C to copy, go to the page with the template
on and just paste and then position it wherever you like within
this pinky red border. Now, if you were to do something like this,
I'll enlarge it and move it over. You can see here that the content
overlaps this pinky red border. Now, if you were to try upload
this to the KDP platform, you would get the error saying that
the content is outside the margins. So you need to adjust the
size and adjust the position. You can use your arrow
keys or just drag it, and you can be left
with something like so. So we can see here that the content
is within this red pinky margin. So then all you need to do is
just click on the template and you can untick it to hide it, or you can simply just
delete it like so. And there, we have our first page and we know for
a fact that this content is now within the margins. So if we go to other page, which will be the right-hand side page,
we just go through the same process, find our template. And here we
have here, the the right template, no bleed 6 by 9 inches. So we just drag that one across
and drag that into position. Again, find where your content is that
you want to put in the page, copy, go to the template paste, position that wherever you want
and you could increase it like so. Probably a better way to do it, to
make sure everything is consistent, is go to the first page you've
created. Just click on the content, copy that, then go to your
other page, paste that, and just using the arrow keys or just
dragging, just move it into place. Therefore, you know, that the content within the
margin is the same size on both pages. And again, just a case then of deleting
or unticking the template so it disappears. And there you have your two
pages and you can then, or what I do, is copy each of those pages into
something like Keynote or PowerPoint to create the whole 120 page PDF file. I've shown you how to do that in a lot
of the videos where I do go through creating interiors. But this video is purely about keeping
your work within the margins. Now, what about a page with bleed? So here we have a page that we've
set up with bleed. Now, as I said, pages with bleed are larger than
pages with no bleed because the pages will actually get trimmed
at the edges. So for this, for a 6 by 9 inch book with bleed, the page size will be 6.125 inches by 9.25 inches. So I've created this blank
document with those dimensions. So again, we go to the files that we've downloaded
and here you can see the correct one. Here is the right page template bleed 6.125 x 9.25. So here I've given you
the sizes that the pages should be. So that will help you in setting
up your own individual page size. Now I've pick the right-hand side here. You could have the left
hand side template as well, depending on which page you are
actually creating. And again, just drag that into position. So now all the content should
be in the center here. Now, what I'm going to do is just
tick that to make it disappear. And I'm going to put in a
patterned background on the page. So we'll go to this example
here, just copy the pattern, go over to a blank page,
paste it into place. So this is what your page would normally
look like. Now this is a pattern. It could be images or whatever. And remember some of this is going
to get trimmed off around the edges. So I'm going to turn back on the
template and just drag that to the top. And so now any content we want
to put on top of that page, that's not going to be trimmed off,
we need to keep within these margins. Now I'm going to use an example of a
recent coloring book interior that I created. Again, if you're interested in watching that
video on creating coloring book interiors, I'll leave a link above and
also in the description below. And a guest is going to take this center
component command C control C to copy, go to our page and just paste
that into place. Now, again, that's pasted under the template.
So just drag that to the top. Now, as we can see here, this is far too big. So just pressing command or control and
clicking on the mouse we're just going to reduce the size of that. And what we want is for this to be
within again, this pinky border. And there we have it. We have our content
that we know is within the margins. And like before, we can
just click on the template, either turn it off on the
layers panel or just delete it. And there have your page, which has got bleed with
the content in the center, which is within the margins. So this is vital to get your
book accepted at the launch preview stage. And after publishing. Now I said I'd show you
an example with Canva. So let's head over to Canva
and here we have the home page. Now you're going to click on custom size. Now I want to tell you something that
a lot of people fall foul of and is the units here. Most people put
in something like 6 by , but it's in pixels. So you want to change that to inches
because what will happen is you'll create it with the pixels. You'll come
to upload it to KDP and it will, it won't look right. You'll get all these errors and you
won't know quite what you've done, but that's one of the biggest errors
that people tend to make in canvas. So we're just going to put in 6 by
9, click on create a new design. And like before it's just a case
of dragging the template into our page. Like, so. Now for this, you might have to drag it into position
and then just drag the corner down to fill the page like so. And then you
can put your content within this border. And like I showed you with the image
editing software you can just delete it afterwards. Now, as I've said, you can do this with written
content as well as low content. So if we just go back to the
template,.I've just copied
some Laurem Ipsom Dolor text, and we'll just paste that into place and
you can move it wherever you want and just drag, increase the
size, drag it into place. And that way you will make sure
that your text is within the margins and you won't
encounter any errors. And we can deletethe template again, and there you have the text
properly aligned within the margins. So that should stop you getting those
errors at the launch preview stage, and also after publishing your book. Now, if you're a beginner at
this or a seasoned hand, then watch this video next on what I
think are 10 great niches to publish books in and make money online. Don't
forget to hit the subscribe button. Thank you very much for your
time. It's very much appreciated. And until next time, goodbye.
