Artificial Intelligence to Write, Design, and Publish a Picture Book Today!

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Nick. Welcome to this comprehensive course on how to publish a picture book today using Canva and kVp. And the publisher of 21 books, 11, which I've published in the last six months, utilizing the exact same methods I'll be teaching you today. It's fun, it's fast, and it's addicting. By the end of this course, you will learn how to create a beautiful POD picture book that you'll be able to publish on the Amazon bookstore. We'll go step-by-step. You can follow along or you can watch the presentation at your own. Will. I give you all the techniques, all the tools, and all the websites to utilize in order to make this process easy as possible. What I wanna do now is run through this sections of the class to help you get started. In the first section, I'll teach you about the structure of the book. We'll go over terminology, overall book design and layout. We'll then talk about why the cover is so important to the sales of your book. Then I'll show you how to use your original artwork. Or if you're just starting in your art career, utilize the artwork found in Canva or some other free download sites. Finally, we'll do a deep dive into the kVp software and show you step-by-step how to navigate the KT P site to print and ultimately sell your book on the Amazon bookstore. Then for our class project, we'll be discussing all the things needed for a great cover design. And then you'll be able to choose your artwork or photographs and typography to create a stunning book cover that we can all admire and comment on. Can't wait for you to get started. Let's jump in. 2. Write a Story Using AI with Canva! "Just Added!": Hi everybody, This is Nick again and I got some really exciting news to share with you about a new feature that's still in Beta. But Canada is letting us try it out. And it's in the docs button, which is right here. And we're going to click on that. Actually, we don't even need to click on it because right now we have ducks. But if you haven't clicked on it yet, click on docs and bring up docks here. And basically like word built into Canvas. But it's got this really cool little feature called magic rate. The way we access magic rate is we click on this plus and we click on magic rate and gives you this little box called magic rate. Now what magic grade is, is it's an AI form of helping you create your own story or passage or paragraph to get it, to kind of give you a, an inspiration to write better or to write more. Sometimes we get stuck, right? That's inevitable. If you become a writer, you're going to be stuck sometimes. And so what I'd like to do here is just say right, a funny story about a teddy bear ups. On his way on his way to school. He has lost his owner and is looking for her, right? Simple stuff. The more description you add, obviously the more personalize your story will. And then you just hit Enter. And with a matter of seconds, it will create a little story about your teddy bear. This, I recommend this strongly if you're helping a child to write and they don't know where to start. And it's just a great place, great thing for them. Now. Now, saying all that I do love to write and I do encourage you to write your own stories, but this is a great way to maybe inspire you to do more, to do a better job of the way you lay things out. It's very organized. And I've done this a few times now. And it's really, really cool. And with the free version, you're, I think you're limited to 25 stories, but if you have a pro version or an educational version, you can have unlimited use of that. And the only caveat is with memory with the educational account, you can't do anything commercial with that. I think the reason for the education is just to get kids and even students up to college, I believe, get a free account to get used to doing other things you could do in Canva. So this is a great thing, a great feature and benefit of Canva. That's going to make a lot of people happy, especially people who are stuck. So enjoy. 3. Quick Guide to Templates: One thing we haven't just talked about is book covers. We'll cover is your first impression on your reader. What is the book about? Will it grab their attention? One of the greatest things about Canada is its extensive. I mean, we're talking hundreds of thousands of templates in Canva. And they also do book covers. And they also have book layouts as well. So if you're unsure, if you are wanting to do a children's book, you're not really sure how to set it up? I have a whole thing. I'm gonna show you in a second on how to do that. But let's look at book covers first. Here we just type in book covers in the design area. That's the search engine up here, we just type in book covers and see what it shows us. They have book, kid's book cover, Book Creator cover and never really played with that. Let's see what this shows us. Pretty cool. They give you all these possibilities for book covers. If there's something in here that you like, you just choose one of them. This is a horizontal book. And there's some other similar styles of books that you could do. All you do is click out, change your title. If you'd like this, if not, you can keep looking. Another thing I'd like to do is if I go into, back into the search engine here. This is only if I'm doing a children's book. I type in storybook. Storybook is going to give us a ton of templates. You can see here you can take any one of these. And if it has a crown, that means it's pro if it doesn't show on your screen, if you're looking at it right now with me. It might not show, you might just show you the free ones. Apply all pages. You can look at this. You can change the expressions on the faces. You can change out the people that kids, they have a different poses, boys and girls, different items that are in the book. Then you can change out what you want. Remember, it's very easy to do that. You just go to your elements. And if you're doing something on turtles graphics, remember this. You couldn't even do static only. And then you have your turtles and you can replace them here. By looking at the artwork and changing the text. You can also change the font. We talked about that. Click on that and that's that. Let's go back to the home button and type in book cover. And if you're doing a fiction, some really nice covers. A cool one, The yourself. Some of them I wouldn't consider great design like a book of agriculture is weak. But the be yourself one is a great cover. Remember all of the graphics, if you have the pro account can be used. This person that can be used in your cover just changed the title, your name, and that's your book title. It's fantastic. I mean, some of these book covers are really, really good book covers. All right, thanks. I'll see you in the next video. 4. Production and Layout: One of the first things I always do, and I make sure that this is selected. I go to my file. I want to make sure that show rulers and guides available to me. I have that checkmarked show margins which had just talked about in the last video and show pretty bleed, which I think it's important to show that because if I didn't show that, you can see how it's changed now just 8.5 by 8.5. I did this little part right here. This was not this artwork was done in Procreate. And then it's important. When you're doing, you can choose all of your artwork here. We talked about this before. You can type in, let's say type in cake. And you have all these different cakes. I want to make sure there's no animations where I do a go-to this and I select Static only play my filters. And now you won't have any of those animations. Which if you're doing video, that's okay, but not when you're doing a print book. If I bring something in, Let's pick this one. And if I zoom in on this picture, you can see how good how crisp lines are. You never have to worry about resolution with Canva. I've never had an issue with the resolution. It's always high-res images, which I love. And it's, you can either use the graphics is, is, what I would suggest is just modifying it a little bit to your own use. Because remember, Canada is, there's millions of users and if somebody is using the same cake or the same character, your book is going to look like someone else's book. So my advice to you is to use original artwork when you can hybrid, when you can mix the two together, or you can also use their graphics without modifying it. Now the thing that they, one other licensing stipulations is that you can't take like you can't take this graphic and resell it as your own because it's not yours. You have commercial usage of it to put it in your book with, along with some other images to make it your own. But don't just put that in there and say This is mine. And I never, whenever I write a book, I never say illustrated that I'm using Canva artwork, just straight Canva artwork and never say illustrated by nickname Belsky because I didn't illustrate it. I just say a book by negative Belsky that way. This one is hybrid book. There are other books that I have that are not hybrid. But if you look at the graphics, very simple book for kids, I just combined like this one has 1234566 elements in it plus the text. This one same thing, but this guy is the backgrounds. One thing grounds, one thing that trucks, one thing that ones. There's like five or six elements. And it's mostly a Canva artwork. But it's combined of combining illustrations from other areas. And some of the artwork might be from Pixabay. I use Pixabay and we'll talk about that in the next video. I use Pixabay is one of my free sites of where to get some other artwork. That's essentially without going into too much detail here. That's essentially how my book is laid out. When I go to print it, I need to have a high-quality print PDF. I go to my share button. This is a new latest version, will have this giant share button. It's a lot less confusing than it was before you just hit share. And then you want to make sure that you go to Download. And you want to make sure that this, even though it says suggested that's wrong, I want to go to PDF print. I usually choose CMYK for my print. Then I go to here with kVp. When you're doing a book, do not include the title page, title page, the cover, because the cover is actually a separate image, a separate file that we need to upload. And I'll show you that in a second. I would do select all except for the cover. Then I hit Done and it saves me a high-res PDF. Then we take that PDF into GDP, which is in the next section. 5. Royalty Free Art Choices: Everybody, welcome back. We're gonna be talking about artwork now this is the fun part, right? Where we get to add our own artwork. We can upload our own artwork using the Upload, going to uploads and choosing your own artwork. Or we can use elements. We talked about elements before, we just type in a keyword like dogs. We can find either all of the different photographs or graphics for dogs. And they're broken down into the photos and graphics. And here's a cool little trick. Appear in the search box. Next to dogs. There's a little X and then after x, there is some parameters for searching for the files that you want. You can remove the animated ones, which can take up a lot of space. You might want horizontal versus vertical. Pro versions versus free. I just like to click on free because both, because I don't think either one is limiting. So you want to include as much as you can. I've never done the color before, so let's say I just wanted to yellow images and see what happens. That's pretty cool. Not that I would never do that, but that is something that's pretty cool. It seems like you could add your own colors. Let's say you only wanted brown or black or white. And then you could do that as well. So those are the different parameters for searching. And that's Canva. Canva just gives you, especially if you're a paid version, a paid account holder. It just gives you unlimited graphics and photographs. Now, Canada works with a lot of apps. One of the ones that are built-in to this as Pixabay. Pixabay is an app that gives you a royalty free and free usage for commercial use of high-quality, high DPI graphics. And you're not limited to photographs now the ones that are included in the Canada program, I'm going to see these are looking at unlimited as far as what they give you. You're much better off going to the actual site. Now if I go to pixabay and I start there and I just type in something like dogs. It's going to give you, the first part here is just sponsored. But here it's gonna give you illustrations, photos, Vector Graphics, which is like Illustrator. Illustrations, videos, music, sound effects. Some pretty amazing what they give you. I found a lot of great graphics here and some of the graphics or even grouped by different characters. So for instance, this one has a bunch of different animals all grouped together. You can use this as one image if you'd like those, and you want to incorporate those into your artwork, which they're really cute. And what I usually do is when I grab something like this, I'll modify minds so that let's say I have this and then somebody else, ten other people download the same file. You're going to have the same kind of characters, but they are very cute. So you can download that and you just click on Free Download. It's a donation. You can just donate what you want and you don't have to. It's totally up to you. And the great thing is you don't have to provide attribution is at all. But if you want to do that, that is up to you regardless. So that's Pixabay. The other one that I use is Pexels. Pexels is another site. It's getting bigger. It's pretty much a sister city. Sister city. It's a sister site of Pixabay. And it's just gives you more alternatives, more and more variety. And the same type of thing where you can put you can type in dogs and that type of thing. Unsplash is another site. I think besides including these three plus Canada, you're going to have an abundance of graphics that's used from all royalty-free or free. If you can't draw this as a perfect, perfect avenue for you. If you can draw and you want to incorporate some of these ideas into your own, that's another great way to do it. I sometimes will do a hybrid of the Canada drawings and my drawings to make it more personal. And so those are just some of the artwork opportunities for you, for your books. I'll see you in the next video. 6. Hiring Illustrators: Alright, I'm back. I wanted to talk a little bit about buying illustrations. And there that can range from anywhere from $25 a page to a $100 a page. It could be per project, it could be partial book. Concepts are all kinds of things. For I've always illustrated my own books and I felt like I have a little bit of talent and I will just utilize that talent and do what I can with the books that I have, the illustrations that I have. But for this book, and this is the Chinese version. But for this book, I did hire two different illustrators. One to help me with some concept, that concept art, making sure that my artwork was consistent. And I spent a little bit of money. I found him through a friend and he did a very inexpensive spend about an hour with me and helped me to refine my character to make it more uniform. Then I actually went to fiber. I was going to hire tremendous illustrator through Fiverr. And I just couldn't afford him. And I was thinking about doing a Kickstarter, which I don't really talk about in this class, but it's a raise money for one of your books. But I decided not to do that. But I did hire him for some background art and this is some of his work back here. This is from him. Is he a nice watercolor Technique? And he actually did two pages for me. And there's another one. I mean, his artwork is just, I would love to have a book done by him. He's, he's an amazing artist. And through fiber, What's great about places like Fiverr Upwork. But these types of places, and also you can find them, find illustrators through Facebook as well. There's groups of you can contact them and they usually have a standard contract. What I like about going into places like Fiverr and Upwork this they have a standard contract that you can examine and they're pretty much all the same the way it works with those types of Ed. Most illustrators, not all illustrators do this, but most illustrators do like a work for hire. So you contract with them for either per book or per page. That's a lot of artwork. For instance, I have a friend who's a 300 page graphic novel and he was able to negotiate a price for twenty-five dollars a page. So he showed me his contract. It's a basic work for hire or contract, which means that the artists will do all of the work and as soon as he gets paid, he will release the original files. And these are usually PSD files or high res images to the author. And then they can do whatever they want with those books, meaning that they can take them then and use it on the e-book, a hardcover posters and that type of thing. They basically own the artwork and the artists just gives away the copyright. Now, not everyone does that. They don't like to give away their artwork. They might ask that in exchange for doing this, they would like their name on the book, and most authors will do that. So they're getting paid and then they get some notoriety. And why did they do that? Well, it's saying that this is the person who did it. And then maybe that might garner some more work for them down the road. And that's really built in the contract. You have to negotiate that with your illustrator. And I think it's a fair thing to do as an illustrator myself. It's a lot of work. I know for a fact that this took me over two years to illustrate getting everything right, making sure that it was up to a place right, wanted and felt comfortable releasing it. Well, in the past video I showed you about the other sites you can use. The other problem with those, of course, is cohesion. Finding characters of the same. We found that one graphic, the head, all the same animals, but that's only one pose. And so that's something you have to think about. What's important to you, how distinct, distinct Do you want your book to be? So this, each Illustrator has their own style. And so anyways, that's pretty much how that is now the high-end artists typically won't work with new authors. They usually work with a publisher. They get, they get contracted out. For a book. They might get $10 thousand at $15 thousand for a book. And then some get percentages of royalties, some don't. And that's just based on the contract and what the illustrator wants. You can go online, you can go on and see what you can get. Twenty-five dollars to $100 is pretty much the average going rate that's hiring an illustrator. 7. Book cover designs: Alright, let's talk about book covers. The best way to use Canva for your book covers is to take advantage of their templates. They have an extensive list of templates and copies of books that you can use as basically as a template not you want to use the exact book cover because they're remember there are millions of users and they might come up with the exact same cover. But here's a list of vertical covers on her children's book covers. And you can see that there's a bunch of really great designs here. You can use this as a foundation for your book cover. Let's say we're going to take this one. Good, Mr. White. Now, something that's very important that we have to do, remember this is the cover, but we still need a back cover. So when we're preparing that file for print, we need to have a front and back. But this is a great place to start to get it kinda get a feel for what's out there. This is a very simple design. 12347, or eight different elements here. It's a great font. It's a fun font. You can put your name, you can go over here and go to effect so trivially like and you can change the curve on this. Now you can actually make your curve rounded more or down like this almost incomplete circle. That's one of the effects of the text, which is really nice. You can also add a background if you want to do that. You can also do that here. The, a lot of things you can do to play around with this and you can change out the elements. If you don't think that snowman, you can change out the elements, create your own snowman, but it's a great place to start. Let's take a look at the re-size. It see what size this is now. This is 14 by 23. It kinda makes me feel like this might be a poster, not a book cover. But what we wanna do is take this and we could even do a copy of everything. Let's do just do that. Let's do a copy. Let's go back home. And let's create a design custom size. And we might want to make sure this is inches. And we want with SB want 17. Remember, this is based on my book size. You can have any book size you want. And then create a new design. There's the background and there's some snow there built into it. Or we added some snow and then you can just go ahead and put a little blurb down here. So let's just do that for the heck of it. This is my book. And some more pictures, possibly, maybe a picture of you and a little bio view. And remember we need to have, go back to elements. And that's it. That's how we would start a fresh new design. Now you can take all this stuff out and you can start on your own. You have plenty of choices here. You could do something with one of these pre designed things that pop out. This could be, this could be a headline for you, something like that. You can change it out. It's very easy to change out all of the text. And you have everything available to you. Remember just to do those, to go up to the file and make sure all those all three things are checked so that you can have a great place to start. And that is book covers. 8. Book Terminology: Welcome to the first section of book design. I want to show you a couple of books, probably a few books that will demonstrate to you what a paperback looks like. This is actually a paperback van has really not much inside at all. It's called a ruled notebook. I really did it as a test. I wanted to see how well they came out. This is a matte finish and you can tell the difference between a matte finish and a glossy by seeing how this one has a lot of sheen, a lot of gloss on it. And this one doesn't have anything. The mat is really nice. It's got a nice feel to it. Nice texture. I think you can just make that decision when you would probably want to try it yourself to see the way they feel. I like this one as well as the glossy, the glossy. What I liked about the glossy is the colors really pop. But let's talk about parts of a book that you'll need to know when we're talking about color, especially there is one term that's used which probably doesn't make a lot of sense to you, but it's called bleed. Bleed is when the color goes off the page. This book is a full color bleed. The color goes on all four corners, meaning that it goes off of the page. There's no white area at all. So when the printer goes to print this into cut it, they want a little bit extra and what the file size to be a little bit larger than the book size. This book size is probably a nine by six, maybe a little bit smaller than that. But the printer will cut here on the edge and we want the red to be on all of the edges. I chose to have a green on the spine. This is called the spine, this part right here. And this is also called perfect bound. Perfect bound means that it is kinda like a 90 degree angle. You see how that looks. Also because it's FEC writing is allowed on the spine. So let's say you're doing a bunch of these and you wanted to stack them side-by-side. You will be able to do that and you can find your book that way. The thicker the book, the better chance you will have to have writing on the edge. Now there are a couple of cases that well, printers will try to make it work. This is one printer. I don't know how they did it, but you can see how small that is. It's almost probably a four-point text. It's tiny. And they were able to put printing on the edge. This is not if you can see that it's not perfect bound. It is glued. All of the books today, especially from kVp, are all glued. And so that's just the way they're put together. You're not gonna see whenever, if you ever see a book that's got that has three staples on the edge? You might see that with a really super thin books that's called saddle stitch. Although this is not perfectly flat, perfectly square, it's hard to show you in the camera. Anyways, this is the glossy, this is the mat. Some other things we need to know about the book is we talked about the bleed. This is called the trim. Wherever we cut, the printer would cut the edge would be the trim, the spine. When you open the book in the middle, this middle part is called the gutter. The gutter is important because most books are not printed flat. They roll up like this and like this. And so it's very important, not so much in this case, but in another one I'll show you in a second. You don't want the the pictures or the text to run too close to the gutter. Because when it's curved like this, people won't be able to, kids won't be able to see it. Or whoever is reading your book won't be able to see it. We also have an area outside and the edge right next to the trim. We call this area, this white area. The margin. Now this margin is about, I would say it's about a half of an inch. When we go to the actual book production part in Canva, you can see Canada actually gives you a pretty healthy margin. And we're going to show you more about that a little bit later on. So why would we have a margin around our area here? This is called this area here is the live area. Let me get let me get the other book to show you what I mean. This is another book. And do you see how the artwork goes into the central part here, the gutter? This is okay because this artwork is just a continuation of the grass that goes across the page. But I purposely made sure that my text did not go into the gutter and then give it plenty of room here. And here as well. You want to keep your main artwork close to the middle, which is considered your live area. And I'll I'll demonstrate this in Canva. I believe it's the next video. Now this book was actually not produced by kVp, this was produced by lightning source. Which is owned by Ingram Spark. And it's night and day differences. The quality of the printing. It's almost like it's not glossy. It's a very thin paper. The colors, although it's very vibrant here, when I'm looking at it, you can actually see some of the gradations of the paper. And so it's just not as good. Let me pick a newer book so I can show you what I'm talking about. Here's a book that has, it's almost like a semi gloss. It's kind of like either call it semi gloss or a satin finish, where it's kind of like a half gloss is not super glossy, but the color, the paper quality is much better than the other one. It's got a little bit of a shine to it. And by the way, this is Canva artwork. This picture right here, which is really cool. I made a combination of about, I believe I have about one to three, maybe four different images to create this page. Again, I'm trying to keep artwork away from the middle. Most of it will be on the inside. And if you look at that, I am able to do that. I have the main focus in the live area. Live area. And the Texas specially is right in the middle. That's important to me. And that I don't do page page numbers. You could do that if you'd like. This is a book that has more artwork. This one actually on this page. I don't know if I did this for all of them. I think this is a Chinese version of my book. I think this version has, it looks like maybe a quarter of an inch margin all the way around. And so sometimes I do that. Sometimes they don't. But you can see where the live area is. Live area. Also, let's talk about the back cover. Now when you go to submit your page, your book, you will have a manuscript which is the inside part of the book. And then you'll have a cover, which is a second file. And the cover will be flat like this, so it'd be double the size. If this is an 8.5 by 8.5, then your cover will be 17 by 8.5. But on the back, you need to keep, not only will you need to keep area for the artwork to have a margin here. You also need to keep this area relatively free of artwork. Now this worked out, okay. The dog is over here, and this is where amazon or kVp will insert your ISBN. If you so decide to go with Amazon to get a free ISBN, ISBN and barcode for the price. It also tells you who the publisher is. I think there's some other information there as well. That's parts of a book. I know there's a lot to it, but I want you to be as intelligent about this as possible so that when you're talking with somebody else, you're sounding like, you know what you're talking about. This is the hardcover. I wanted to see what the construction quality of the hardcover. This is in Beta right now. They're not really, Is not up and running. I think only a few people get to do this. But the quality is outstanding. It's a really high-quality construction of this book. It looks really good. This is the same thing. It's just a rule book. I think it's 120 pages. Anyways, I wanted to look at the construction. I really liked this a lot. The only downside to the hardcover on Kitty P is they're really expensive. And so if you're doing a large quantity or if you're doing a Kickstarter or something like that, you'll probably want to get a larger quantity either here domestically or overseas. One more thing, this part of the book and a hardcover, these are called end pages. You can, when you're going to print an, a traditional printer, you can get the end pages printed. You might see this on some books. They'll print some time design and the n covers, it is an extra charge. And also, in addition to that, with a hardcover, you can also get a dust cover. Kvp does not provide dust covers. That's it for book terminology. See you in the next video. 9. Preparing Your Book Covers for Print: All right, welcome back. This is the cover. Now the covers a separate file that you will need to upload into the KTB software. You'll have your manuscript, which is the file we just saved in the last video. And you'll have your cover page. You want to make sure that the cover of your page, of course, is on the right-hand side and the back will be your little blurb about your books. And I like to include more of my books. If they liked my book, they have access to my other two books as well. You want to leave an area of about two inches by one inch here. For the ISBN, ISBN will be incorporated into the book by kVp. If you decide to go with a free ISBN, if you have your own ISBN, you'll need to include the artwork into this artwork. And you will get that biochar, which is my identifier is let me type that in for you. My identifies.com at biochar and it's a great site. Even if you don't buy your ISBN through them, they give you a lot of information. I think you can even register your copyright directly on that page as well. That website. I have actually bought ten back in the day. I think there were $25 each. When you buy lots of ten, you can buy all the way up to 5 thousand. And they really come down in price, but when you're buying only one, it's about $125. But the good part of it is you could sell your book either on Amazon or iBooks or Barnes and Noble or other, pretty much everywhere. You can use that as a universal ISBN, the ISP, and that comes with the kVp software. You're limited to Amazon, but it's free. If you really want to publish a book and use the least amount of money, get the free version of Canva. Print on kVp, which is free, get a free ISBN. You have a free artwork, you can pretty much produce a book for free. A lot of people are doing it this way because there's no upfront costs. It's considered print on-demand and it's a lot easier to manage. This is the way I went. I started with Ingram distribution. I'd had my books and Costco. Lot of headaches, a lot of little fees I had to pay which cannot came unexpectedly and it was a more of a hassle for me. And now that I'm getting older, it's just makes sense to do it this way. I don't have to worry about inventory. I don't have to worry about anything. All my artwork is located in Canada, which is nice. And it's just a nice system. This is the same at the same rules apply, I have everything checkmarked. Obviously. It's a little different because I'm setting up as one big page not to Pages. And let's just the way I do it. And then you just find the halfway point. Best way to do it is this one is because it's 8.8751 page. That's my middle point. If it was 8.5 by 8.5 inch book, obviously it would be 8.5. So that's that. And then it same thing, share. Make sure that it's a print quality PDF. And then go into the next video and you'll see in kVp how that all works and how we need to upload that and how that works together. All right, so I'll see you in the next section. 10. Class Assignment: For today's assignment and for the class assignment, I'm gonna have you make a cover using Canva. Now the previous video, a little bit of some of the covers that I did. Here's some more. This is the little blue marker. I want you to use Canvas. It doesn't have to be a book that you're doing. In fact, I prefer that you don't do a book you'd be doing because it's not copywritten yet. Unless it's been copywritten, then that's okay. You can use the large text, you can center the text, you can add graphics to it. You can use a background just like this one. This is we use a background and you can use a background from the elements as well. You can take artwork from any of those places that we've talked about, any of the free sites. Mostly I want you to do it from Canva. I want you to grab something from Canva, especially using some of the artwork that we showed you earlier. I want you to create by combining graphics into some kind of recover. Now you have a choice. You can either do it where you're doing, just the cover or if you want to get bold and do both of them, we can do that as well. And that's, that's the, that's the assignment. You can do any size you want. The picture book that I've been doing is 8.5 by 8.5. But again, you can do any picture you want. You could do full bleed, which is when the color goes off of the page. This is a full bleed. Something like a half a bleed would be this is a book that is probably considered a half bleed. Bleed on the bottom and it's bleed on the side. And the rest of it is white. Fight. This whole book has 0 bleed. There's a wide margin. You never go off of the page. You could do that as well. Your book cover. But get creative and I hope you have fun using Canva. And if you want to use original art, but just be careful, make sure you Copyright your work when you post it. And also, just have fun. And I'm looking for a cover then please posted below, share your work. I like to see what you come up with. 11. Printing Details on KDP: Okay, we've finished our artwork, we finished our production. Now we're going to talk about printing and distribution. I use Kindle Direct Publishing, which is kVp.amazon.com. It is an Amazon company. I used to use create space, but greed space was purchased by Amazon. Now, kVp does a pretty good job of printing. I've had some issues with them most recently. But overall, I would say 90% of my titles or maybe even 95% of my titles of 0 issues when you get an account. But I strongly suggest is getting a separate account from your personal account. That way, you can set this up, can look at business. You have your account, and you can set mindset up as an LLC because I have original artwork. Then I have to give them my EIN number and my banking information so that they know where to send me money. And that happens every month I going to get a check from not check against direct deposit from Amazon or kVp. And I get royalties from the different, different sites that I sell. Two can have your could open up some more markets and you will get a royalty from each one of those markets. So I get one from.com, which is mostly associated with the US. I get some royalties from Italy, UK. This is your dashboard into kVp. The bookshelf is where I am right now. You can create a new book here. You just go to create the kind of updated this recently to show you how to create the eBook, we'll actually cover that a little bit later. Paperback, hardcover. I've, I think I've already showed you a copy of what the cover looks like. It's really, really well-made. It's in beta right now. But it's probably gonna do some more of those. It is kind of expensive. I hope they bring that down in price. Otherwise it's prohibitive. Series is a brand new thing. Two of my books are in a series, actually three of my books are in a series. I did a little angry marker. That's the emotion series. I have the marker colored markers series. And I think I have one more. I can't remember what it is. And then Vela is a new, it wasn't beta. Think it's fully operational nodes. Serialized stories are basically chapter stories where you get one episode of that time and then they have a cliffhanger and then they buy the chapter. I think that's how it works. I haven't done that at all. I really haven't done the hardcover. I did a test and the hardcover and we're gonna, I'm gonna show you that little angry marker. I decided that I'm going to change the cover because I think the cover artwork looks too much like a crayon. Want to change that to a marker? I came up with a new cover. We're going to change that then allows me to get into the into it and edit it. Right now you can see I have Kindle e-book on top and I have paperback below that these two are linked together. It gives you an opportunity if you look at these three dots, you can edit the book, e-book details at an e-book content and the e-book pricing, blah-blah-blah. And you can unlink your book so there's no reason to do that. You want to make sure that they're linked to them. There's a reason why they should be linked. When you publish your book. This is what most people do. They published a book and they also published an e-book. And then when we talk, when we do e-books, we'll talk more about this in detail. But you have I think it's per quarter. I think you're allowed five free days to offer your book for free and use that as a promotional periods. So please download my book, let me know if you'd like it. Review of feed like this gives them a chance of reader is considered a verified purchase because they're downloading it even though it is free. Hopefully they'll write her a nice review for you because they are linked. The paperback is considered a part of that. So anything that you're looking for, a paperback and not an e-book. The paperback will show the number of reviews. And I'll talk about this a little bit more later. I'm going to go in here into the print part and we're going to look at the first screen. And this is pretty straightforward. It's just a form, you just fill this out. You fill out your what language you're doing, the name of your book, subtitle. If you want. By the way, once it's published, you can't change your title of your book. Once. While you're working on it, you can change it to your heart's content, but once it's published, you've submitted it and they've accepted it, then you can't go back and change it. This is part of the little marker emotion series. I have one book in there now, which is this book, and I have another one on its way. This is for the additions. If you make major changes to your book, you can, you've got to create a new edition. There's a lot of, there's a fine line there of what is acceptable as far as changes in a book. You'll probably have to bring that up with Amazon. I think it's a case per case basis. I've never done it. A second edition. I don't think primary author is yourself or your pen name. If you have, you can do contributors. You can have Illustrator, editor forward all this other stuff. You can add them. If you're somebody that didn't wrote a forward for you, this is a great opportunity to see Stephen King did afford for you. Definitely want to put him in there. And then any credit, contributions, etc, can go there. This is the description I show you a little bit later on in this course, how to write a really good the description. If you do own the copyright, definitely want to click that. If it's public domain, which means that the information that you found is public domain. You would click that. Then here you have your keywords and there's some great graphics, great videos later on and I'll share with you on how to do your keywords and keyword strings. Then we also have our categories. Categories are limited in the kVp site, there's some tricks and tips that I'll share with you later on how to expand this. Because right now you're only limited to your limited to two, which is a real bummer. Categories like look at this as very limited what you can do. So I'm not going to go too much into detail now we'll talk about that a little bit later. This, because this is a large print book. I went ahead and click that. And then this talks about adult content because this is written for children. There is no adult content. I'll save and continue and then go on to the next part. 12. Writing Great Descriptions and Keywords: A better description. These are just some simple ideas on how to get your description read by your target audience. And that is the first we want to make. Who is the book for? If I'm doing a book on bullying, I don't want to say people who are, who have been bullied. I wanted to say parents who are dealing with bullying in school, how to talk to your child of a bullying. These are the types of more specific things that you want to write about. Then what are the benefits and then list them, have bullet points. I'll show you an example of that in just a second. Then. Use bold and underlines when you want to get the reader to come in and look at something that get their attention. But be careful, Amazon sometimes will flag you if it's over the top, so you want to be careful with that. Then finally we have a call to action. I would say, I would say 80% of the people don't do this. If you look at most of the descriptions in a book, even I don't do this and I should do it. Pick up your copy today by clicking the Buy Now button at the top of this page. It's a simple call to action, or make a difference in your child's life by buying the book today, you'll see you'll get instant satisfaction or whatever the CTA could be. It could be that respect. Let's look at an example really quickly. I pulled this book, the happier human. You can see he's got a nice headline. Really big. He's got 53 habits, which is pretty cool. Then what does he do? He has some bold text at the top here. Then here where he's got the benefits, he list there's quite a few benefits, but he's got this bullet point. But not only that, but because he's got so many benefits, he does this grilling great design Technique is you do every other line in bold. You might see this. Sometimes people do it. If you're looking at an infographic, you'll see that one colors like yellow and then blue and then yellow and then blue. It helps the reader to just better on the eyes to read it. It's easier to read and you don't get lost. So that's a great technique. He goes even further. He has down here he has editorial reviews which is great. And the middle a little blurb about is about himself. Well, at times there will be. See if he's got this has got above the author. You could click on his name and there'll be some more information about him, but also something that he didn't do. Well, maybe he did not sure. Is that you can do something called, remember we talked about this before. A plus content. Content is going to enhance your book description area. Here's some examples of some things you can do. You can add pictures and pictures about who you are. It's a great way to enhance your book and really showcase some of the things you have, maybe some other books you have. And these are all considered modules that you can add to in your description. So it's really nice, it really grabs their attention. But I think you have to do is you have to apply for this. I don't think you can just do it. I may be wrong on that. I have to double-check, but I think that is a no-brainer. I think everybody should do this. That's that. Let's go back real quickly to the happier one. I want to talk briefly about categories. We've talked about categories a little bit in the kVp section. If you remember correctly, the categories you're limiting and you're only allowed to use two categories. I'm Katie people, that's really not true. It is true in the GDP software, but in reality, you can actually have ten categories. If you look at these categories, these categories are definitely not in that list that we saw in kidney P. So these were added by the author. What he did was he contacted kVp. And the way we do that is we just go to the KT P site. And the very bottom it says contact us. You can contact them by email. And you can list all of the sections are the categories that you want to add to your book. Now, you won't always get what you want, but it gives you an advantage over somebody who's just doing straight. The categories that are found in the Amazon. And it's probably going to help you rank a little bit higher in your category. And if you get a high-ranking, you have a better chance of selling more books. Keywords on the front of the best keywords. This is what we're going to let Amazon do the hard work, hard lifting for us, heavy lifting for us. It's a really simple way. All we do is we go to the book and Amazon Books and we type in bullying. And then it's going to populate with the most popular search keywords or strings that people are using to look for bullying. You just copy and paste. You just use these right here for your keywords. It's a really simple way to do it. And Amazon won't let you down because they have an extensive search that they keep track of. So those are some little tips about categories, descriptions, and keywords. 13. Printing Content on KDP: Okay, welcome back. We're back in it. Kindle Direct Publishing. This is the bookshelf interface. This is the area we talked about, ISBN. Isbn is in the back of the book. Every book in existence has an ISBN. This will assign you a free ISBN number. The only caveat is that you have to use it. You can only sell it on Amazon if you have your own ISBN, which we talked about in a previous video, you would just click down here, use my own ISBN. And what's the reason why you need to do this is because they'll automatically generate an ISBN and barcode and placed in the back of your book. If you use your own, then you'll need to input that that artwork onto your page, onto your cover page so that when it goes to print it has a valid ISBN. Now that's, it takes a little bit more in that because you have to go to my identifier's dot com and insert all of your information and how much you want to charge for the book and then all that is created. I think a barcode is created for you. Then you can download that from the bulk or site publication date. I always put just the date that it comes out. However, if I published this earlier than that, I would put an earlier date. Just be careful that you're not putting any false information in there. You have four choices of paper. There's some optimal page sizes that will reach more markets. And I don't know why I choose. I think it's the standard for picture books and a half by 8.5. A lot of my peers do this as well. And it suits me fine. I like the feel of it. It's nice and big, and that's my size. It is full-color in the inside. Kvp does a great job with printing. It looks really good. There's only occasionally at some times where I've had some issues. But overall, it's really good. This does have a bleed. We talked about that earlier and I choose glossy for all of my picture books because the colors really pop. For my nonfiction if it's just plain white text, I use a map, the finished for that, this is where you would upload your paperback manuscript. Here it is. It's a big long, crazy number. As long as you're not changing the title, you can change the cover. This is the best part. You can launch your viewer. This is a nice little preview here and you can see where there is trim and the bleed on the here on the left has a quality check if anything is in red, then as that is an error that you need to fix. A lot of times it's simple things like the text is too close to the trim. Or maybe it's a low-res image and they'll flag you. Just have to go through that. Here's what I was telling me about the me see if I can make this larger. There is the ISBN that is given to you. So you don't need to keep that space open. It's like two inches wide by one inch tall. Alright, so this is the cover. Remember this is a second, this is a second file. Second file that you upload. I'll text must be completely inside the guise of content. Image is supposed to extend the edge of the page, makes sure there are no white gaps. So that's very important. In the next video, we're going to show you the price, how much it costs. 14. Determining Your Rights & Pricing: All right, This is the third and final part of the KT P site. This is printing a paperback book on this third part of it, which is the paperback rates in pricing. I always click all territories worldwide rights. Because why not the most amount of money? Now let's say you, let's say you created a book and it's translated in Spanish, or it's translated into Portuguese or whatever. And that's intended for the Portuguese market. This is when you'd go here, you'd go to ES for Spain or France, Germany and so on. And that would be the primary marketplace. I actually have a book that I'm contemplating making. The UK. It is a book that I'm doing that's written with British slang. We'll see how that works. I think I might do it. It's not going to hurt me. And I think it'll be a really big hit. I'm gonna do that. Then here's Amazon.com, suede shoes. This is what the breakout of the pricing, the printing. As long as the printing is between 24 pages in 40 pages, it will be 365 and they take 40%, but still, you're just seems like 30 get paid for the printing and they're getting paid for their getting a royalty payment as well. I have my royalty based on 899 is still kind of expensive, but the minimum I can charge a 608. I also sell my book in other countries. And here I don't even touch this because this has generated automatically. If I want to charge more money, I can do that. But I don't really mess around with this at all. That's the pricing. Then you have 72 hours for which the turnaround, which is sometimes it's a day, sometimes it's an hour. I've seen really depends on how busy they are. Here's where you can request, request proofs. You will get a book with proof, proof, proof all over it. You can't sell it. Then you publish and you wait for your response. And that's pretty much it. It's really nice. 15. Go Publish Your Own Book!: Hello everyone, This is Nick and this is the conclusion of this Greek course. I covered a lot. I hope you've found a lot of value in it. And it's something that you will be able to go out and publish your own book. Now, you have all the tools in which to do this. And if you follow the guide step-by-step, you remember you can always come back and look at it again. I can't wait to see your cover designs in the class assignment. And also, I would love to see your book. Please let me know if you publish a book using my system. I would love to know about it and share it in the community. And maybe we can support each other. Maybe we can look at each other's stuff and give each other pointers. And that's the idea of this community has just helping each other and happy to be here. Thank you so much for taking my class. See you next time. 16. Bonus: New Tool In Chat GPT for Writers: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the class. This is a bonus section for Chat GPT 40, and we'll be introducing a new tool called Canvas. And I hope this will help you with your writing much better than the actual free version of what is available to you in just the regular hat GPT, both in the four oh version and also the plus and 3.5 version. But now in four oh, we are able to use this new tool called Canvas, and I will be showing that to you in just a few seconds. So here is our typical page as far as what is available to us when we open up Chat GPT. This is, like I said, a free version, but it is the most recent latest version called 40. And so with this free version, you can see I already have a thread going on my left hand side over here, and you can see that this is actually a very, very long thread, but there are some personal things here that I want to keep personal, and so I'm not going to show you my entire thread, but it is about 50 or 60 articles and chats. And so what's great about the thread is it kind of keeps a memory of what you've already done. So if I were to just say, I'm not going to do it, but if I were to say, write a British mystery novel for me or write a British mystery summary. I wouldn't even have to tell you my title because it would go back to the thread and kind of pick up where it started in the past and just take that information and go through and give me my summary. So that's a really cool feature. I love the thread. I don't believe the free version of Grock does that, and I don't know of any of the other AIs that do that, which is a great feature. But the reason we're talking today is it's a little bit more advanced, and down here, you can see that there are some things you can do, you can attach files, which are other information that you can present to CHAT EPT to take a look at. You can search the web or you can view the tools. Now, the tools, I'm not going to talk about this one or this one, but we're going to talk about Canvas. And that's specifically for about writing and code, and we're going to use it for writing. So if I click on Canvas, all I have to do is just click on this, and you see the word now it's highlighted. And you know what, I'm colorblind, so I don't know if that's blue or purple, but just bear with me. But so now the tool is activated, and we won't see the tool fully shown to us until we type something. So if you want to just type, and I don't worry about prompts really anymore. I just go ahead and talk to it as if I'm talking to you right now. I kind of create a conversation with Chat ChiPT and I find that just more it's easier, first of all, for me, and I don't have to worry about prompting structure. I don't have to worry about what should I say the right way to say? I just talk to it as if I'm talking to my friends or writing partners. Down here at the bottom, it kind of gives you kind of a I wouldn't say they're prompts, but they're just basically starters. And you can sometimes it will say, you know, help me write or summarize this. But you can see here, if I say surprised me, it writes that, but we want to get now, we're going to say something really simple. Tell me about water in a brief paragraph. I mean, I'm going to make this really super simple. And then I just Enter. Now, watch the dashboards going to change slightly. All this on the left will go away, and my threads are gone, but now it's telling me, on the left hand side what basically what I asked it to do. And the right hand side, again, it's a very simple paragraph. But here are some of the great things we can do now. We can go in now and we can select words or pardon me. We can select a word. We can make it bold or italicized or let's say we wanted to go back, let's undo that. Just hit I tell usize again or hit Undo. I and let's say this is our title. Now I want to make that bigger. I can go in and go to AA. I can give it a bigger heading. And I'll change this. Of course, something you couldn't do before. You can actually make corrections and copy and paste. I can now write directly into this. Again, it's a very simplistic, I wouldn't even say a word processor, but it does give you that same type of feel. It's I mean, obviously, word and other types of word processors are going to give you much more healthy and abundant set of tools. But this is so much nicer. So now we can go in and, you know, very simple stuff here. I say, I don't like this. I want to make this another paragraph. I can make a paragraph. Let's say I don't like this whole sentence, I can just remove it together and delete it. And so it gives me a little more control over what Chat EPT is going to give me. So sometimes, you know, you can ask for, give me a 30 page summary of what water is. And it'll give this huge thing you have to scroll through and dig through everything. Now, here we're doing kind of think of it in bite size information. I can even go in here and say, you know, I love water. In all its form, all its forms, right? So now I'm adding to it, now I can take that. You know, so don't always take what they give you. You can go in. You have more control over what they give you. You can take this now and go back and ask. Now I can take this back. I can copy it and paste it here and just say, make this funnier. You know, and then it's gonna do the same thing. It's gonna come back here, and it's going to give me a more funny rendition, of course, of what it just gave me.