Creating your Book on Canva - How to Successfully Create and Sell Your Self-Published Books on Amazon - Part II
And in other words Step #3 - Creating the book (Hurray!)
Now that we have the illustrations ready, it's time to create our book!
For this purpose I've used Canva. You can use the free version as well, and there's no need to use the paid version. I've been using Canva for different tasks and assignment; creating Birthday party invites for my kids, as a Resume builder, creating creative posters, and more. When I started working on my first KDP book, I read different articles abotu the topic. There were different software recommendations for the actual book creation. Before trying anything new, I opened Canva and started testing it. It worked like a charm. Let's go through the different steps together.
I created two separate files on Canva:
The content - the manuscript as it's called on KDP
The book cover
The Content
One thing to decide on before selecting the illustrations for our book, is how many pages we want to have in our book. My approach is - as many as possible (within limits, of course). I want people who purchase my book to enjoy having different options, to be able to start coloring one illustration and move to another if the first one didn't 'flow' well. For my Mindfulness Adult Coloring Book I decided to create 80 illustrations; I had so many ideas for Mindfulness prompts, and insights to share that I just had to create all those (and more) illustrations. It was also a great Midjourney exercise.
Remember - the minimum number of pages for a KDP book is 25.
Before we open a new Canva file, we need to decide about the size of the book. For this purpose we get great guidance from Amazon; they created a template generator based on different factors. Check the video below where I'm going through the different steps. Very simple.
At this point we need to create a page for each of our illustrations. As mentioned above we will be using Canva for this task.
Note - for each of the illustration pages we're creating, we must have a blank page. This means that after each illustration, we will have a blank page to prevent the coloring to show through. The paper used on KDP is thin thus we need to use this approach. In the case of my book, I had 80 illustrations which meant I needed additional 80 blank pages. The template I'm sharing already has this built-in.
Creating our Canva file
The first Canva file we will be creating is the container of our illustrations.
It will consist of:
Page #1 - Book Title
Page #2 - Introduction: it's optional but I believe it provides a more personal approach especially when creating an adult coloring book.
Page #3 and onwards: Your illustrations. Make sure you have a consistent design and you keep the pre-defined borders (more info in the video below). Later on when you upload the menuscript to KDP, this will be critical to the approval of the book upload into Amazon.
Let's start with a simple walk-through of the process of creating the file. Follow the below video for a clear path.
The page boundary dimensions i'm using in this file are: width - 7.58 in / height- 10.28 in. This is based on the file size of 8.5X11. When you embed the illustrations you've created, increase their size as much as possible within those page limits and position them at the center of that page as I show in the video below.
Go through this process for each of the illustrations you would like to embed in your book. Make sure to locate the illustration in this place as the previous one in your book. In the short video below I show how I duplicate the page to facilitate a simple creation of a new book with a new illustration.
doing this until you have all your illustrations uploaded.
Now we need to add the blank pages as explained here. In this video below I show you how simple it is to add a blank page on Canva in between the illustrations you already have in the book.
Continue the above process as much as you need to populate your book.
When that's done, add your book cover. You can follow similar design as mine below, or choose a different one, as long as you keep to the boundaries of the page.
You can choose at this point to add a personal introduction as mentioned here, or skip it. Your call.
The Book Cover
Your book cover is very important to the success of your book. The more interesting, different and appealing it is, you will get more potential customers to take a second look at it.
There are two main parts to the process of creating your book cover:
Design your book cover
Create the book cover file using Canva
Designing your book cover
As we did with the illustrations, we can do here - go to Midjourney In this case, I wanted to test ChatGPT 4 after making some attempts on Midjourney. I preferred ChatGPT this time over Midjourney.
I used this prompt:
'Design an enticing cover image for an adult coloring book dedicated to mindfulness. The image will have a white background, should radiate vibrancy using a specific color palette: Indigo (#4B0082), Orange Red (#FF4500), Yellow (#FFFF00), and Sky Blue (#87CEEB). The primary subject should be a detailed and captivating Giraffe. While the Giraffe should be the dominant feature, consider integrating elements that allude mindfulness. All elements should harmonize together in an intricate and mature design that appeals to adults. Set this colorful imagery against a solid white background, ensuring the design pops and captures immediate attention for potential coloring enthusiasts.'
Create the book cover file using Canva
Now that we have the image, we can move to the final step of creating our book cover (and closer to uploading it to KDP!).
To create the file on Canva, I went back to to the template I downloaded from KDP.
As the overall dimensions were 17.484 in X 11.250 in I created a file size of 17.5 in (rounded) * X 11.250 in.
The below image shows the different elements of a typical book cover.
The Barcode part is generated by the system thus make sure any text you will be using doesn't reach the area of the Barcode as the latter will block your text.
Now you should have two files:
The content - the manuscript as it's called on KDP
The book cover
You are now ready to upload your book to the KDP platform. These two files we've just created will be in the center of that process. Check out the Creating a KDP Account & Your First Book Upload post to master the process.
Send me a message using the box below if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions.
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