Canva for Entrepreneurs : Create an eBook Cover

1. Introduction: in this lesson, we're going to be creating an e book cover and e book cover is a very important piece of graphic design because it is typically the first thing that someone sees whenever they're choosing an e book or an actual book in the marketplace. Your E book cover is going to be competing with other e book covers, and this is true if you're in a physical bookstore. So you really want to make sure that your book cover or you're a book cover stands out. First, I'm going to show you some examples of some great e book covers that are found on the Kindle store and around the Web. These have great graphic design principles such as composition, color, typography, space and a whole lot more. After that, we'll get right into camera and start using the tools and features within the program to create your very first e book cover. I'll show you how to navigate the program and even use um, pre made templates that will make it easy for you to begin creating your own cover. After that, I will show you how to save out this image into multiple formats, so that you can have those images ready whenever you begin distributing your own e book cover. This can be a J P G form, a P and G form or even a pdf if you are putting your e book together in pdf form. Finally, after the class is over, I do ask that you upload your image to this course so that others can see what you've created. It's a great way to get feedback and critiques both from me as an instructor and from other students, and it's great motivation getting your images out there in the world. So without further ado, let's get started. 2. Examples of eBook Covers: Before we start designing, let us go ahead and take a moment to look at some e book covers just so we can get some design inspiration and kind of take a look out there at what different types of e book covers there are. Now, of course, you're gonna want to make your e book cover towards your branding or your idea for whatever it is that you're making geared towards your business. So there's a wide range of different types of books and e books and based on what type of category or nature in is going to determine kind of how the book who looks because a book on e book cover that's on business might look different than any book cover on culinary. So what I've done is I've just gotten to Google, and I typed in e book cover In here. You can just see some examples of some different types, and you see everything from basic with just some text to ones that use images, stock photo illustrations. So there's a wide range, and what I recommend you do is you type in your niche and then e book cover. So if you're doing safe food, you could say food E book cover or culinary e book. Cover that ways. You can kind of see what's working in that category or niche that you're in or, you know, business E book cover money E book cover If you're doing anything like that, Ah, course, the other great resource for doing this is on Amazon. So I've gone to the Amazon Kendall store. And when you go to their e book category or when you go to the Kindle bookstore, they have a lot of e book categories on the left hand side, and they keep breaking them down more and more so they'll have romance, cooking, marketing, business, all these different categories, and then you click on them and I clicked on business and it breaks it down even more. I could look at accounting. I can look at finance green business industries investing and really get specific with the niche on men. And it's just a good idea to do this so that you can see what other people are creating, and you can see what you like and maybe used that, or you can see what people are doing and try to do something completely different so that your stands out. For instance, when we look at all these books here, um, when your books if you're putting on the Kindle store, you're going to be along other side books like this. Now, if you're just hosting this by yourself, you just want a good image that's going to stand out on your site that people are gonna have trust in that. It's good quality and they're gonna want to download safe. It's for a lead magnet or something of that nature. But if you plan on selling this e book on the store like Amazon is gonna be alongside other books. You're gonna want something that's going to stand out so that it doesn't get blended in with some of these other books here. And so you know, one of the top books and business and money is the power of habit, and this book is a bright yellow color with rich red text and images, and it really pops on the screen. It's probably more even though it's in the first place. Spot is probably one of the first ones that I would see on this page because a lot of these had this blue color and ah, lava more kind of gray or even washed out a little bit in this white background. But that yellow just pops. So it's a good idea that kind of take note and say, Okay, what do I see first, what looks good, What's working, what goes along with the niche and category. You're gonna want something that that is somewhat similar to your category because a book that looks for romance isn't gonna work for business because they're designed differently. They have different aspects to him. So go ahead, do some research, get some ideas for some designs that you like or what what you want to create, and then we'll go ahead and hop into camera and start making it. 3. Using Canva to Create an eBook Cover: go ahead and log in to your canvas accounts and will begin creating this e book cover. So I'm going to scroll down once I'm in the creative design section and go to the blogging and e books, and here we can see a couple options. We have an E book at 1410 pixels by 2250 pixels. We have a watt pad book cover if you're using that platform, and we have a candle cover if you're using that platform now, Camera is currently updating and changing some things around that we're going to take a look at in this course. However, just keep in mind that the E book used to be some basic, simple E books, such as lead magnets or things that you would sell on your website that were a little more basic. And the Kendall cover expects you to sell on the Kendall platform so it typically would have things like an author name in different things to its templates. However, let's just go ahead and click on the E book at this time so we can see what they've done now, just today they've actually made some changes to the camera dashboard, so we'll look at a couple of those real fast and also some of these new templates. So here you can see the e book covers, and when we hover over these, have the page curl. You can see the number four and what that is is it's actually providing four layouts for your e book. So here we can see the main cover weaken CIA constants template. We can see a title template and we can see your your main information template here. So they are providing mawr templates to create a fully book. Before, in the past, you would only get the cover, and you would have to duplicate and replicate any book. Now they're giving you the option to be able to come in here and easily create an e book by providing you different templates that you would use. So let's just go ahead and click on one of these and I'll pick the 1st 1 and you can see here we have the cover that we can begin changing out the information on this so I can swap out this image. Now if I just drop an image in here. What's gonna happen is it is going to fill up that frame, so this works really great. I can come in and easily just pop in some images based on whatever it is that I am talking about for this book. So maybe we come in and we drop this. If I double double click on it, I can actually move this left and right, because it's a horizontal image. Once I find where I like that, I can hit the check mark. Now you may see some changes on this lesson that weren't here before on previous lessons in the Siris. In previous lessons that I've done in camera, they have actually made everything a new menu bar at the top. So now, instead of clicking on these and having that information, you have all your options up here at a new menu bar. So this is another cool thing about cameras. They're constantly changing the platform around and finding out what works best, and this is just a lot nicer. It's easier to see everything. We don't have problems with having to zoom in and zoom out like some of the things that we had to before so we can go ahead and just start editing this information. Maybe I click on this text block. I don't want it. So I'm gonna hit the little trashcan and delete it. I can click on this text block, and this allows me to change out this text. So maybe we call, um, into the ocean something that fills that out. And, um see here we may need to move this so that we can click on these back box. Okay, so now I'm gonna click on these back box, and I'm just going to change out the color to something that is in this image. So I want to find a color that kind of makes mitt matches. Excuse me? This color palette and ah, that looks pretty good. It's pretty close. And I want dark since we're using the white text here. And then once I pick the next one, it saves that color for me so I can go ahead and just click those and pup is right in there . So now we have our beginning, um, image for our book. We may want to a Jessie's text box these blocks here, maybe make him a little smaller. Maybe even here we go. Just kind of scale those around so that it fits a little better. Um, or we would call this whatever we wanted to if I was selling a business book. I drop a business picture in here and say, Ah, you know, 10 marketing tips or whatever whatever is going with the product that you're trying to give away or so OK, so now that we have this completed, what we can actually do is we can come in, we can add a new page, and then I can drop in a contents information here. That kind of talks about copyright information. The I s bien. If I was, you know, actually selling this book address or whatever, or I can click on the next one. This is a title graphic. So this is this is great. Here. This was talking about, you know, if this was chapter two of my e book or section two of my e book, Um, so I can come in here and change its out and just say, Okay, I can click on this block, change out the colors, and basically they've just made it so easy to come in here and easily create these e books . And as you can see, um, it's just it just works really well, it already say's my colors for me so I can keep all my branding and colors the same as I go through it saved that blew that I picked earlier for this graphic. So now, just very quickly, I'm able to come in here easily. Change out some information, add information if I want to. You add text box. I can add elements so I can come in here. And if I want to add some more photos or shapes or lines, maybe I don't like that line. And I want to use a different type of line. I can do that. I can add an illustration, and if I want to pop in something that you know might look like a jellyfish or look have something to do with the ocean here, I could actually do a search if I wanted to and see if, you know, maybe there's something else that I can put in here. Um, so here's a little graphic that if we wanted to stick this in to kind of show what we're talking about. We can do that. I can click on that graphic this one. Actually, I can't change out the color. Some of the some of the graphic. Sometimes you can actually change out the colors, which is really nice. Um, but they just make it really easy to, um, come in here and just add in this constant. Let's go ahead and look at the last layout here. We're gonna add a new page by clicking on that's going to drop that in and keep that background blue border. However, we're going to select the main content information here, and this is the the information that we're talking about. So this is pretty similar to the cover. But, you know, maybe I want to change out this image. Let's go back, okay? And I can use that same blue that we've been using the whole time before because canvas saves us out for us. We can call this chapter two. Maybe this goes along with what we, ah, the main title that we just had and what we call this and had me of a jelly fish. So and here we go. Nice and easy. You know, this tax, of course, is hard to see. So let's make it white and maybe here because we don't want to cover up that beautiful looking picture that jellyfish. Let's move this down. Actually, let's just delete this and start with a new text block. I can hit t to drop in some text. I can change the color, the white. I can change the font to something a little more easier to see. Click on it on, see where this center you gotta play around with him. Let's just go ahead and open this up all the way and just fill this page up and click on that not list justification to the left. So that's a little too far over. So let's bring this in, okay? And I you know, I can go ahead and do all all of our normal stuff. I can change out the text to whatever I wanted to be. If I want to use something different here, I can and just keep on filling in that information. So ah, it just canvas such a great easy program for me to come in here and easily start creating this information, changing it out and with these new templates thes new layouts for these e books. It's really nice to have this ability to already have this information made up for us so that we can start creating these e books really easily with multiple pages of the information that we're looking for. So here you can see some different layouts. This one is, ah, magazine style. So that works really good. This one has some images main picture for its title, and then some information kind of the same thing going on here. So ah, lot of options, a lot of variations and a lot of different ways for you to be able to come in here and create these e books really easy. So go ahead and create something unique. Even if you just come up with one page the one cover, save out that information and then go ahead and send it on to me cause ah, uploaded to this course because I would love to see what you've created in what you're working on. 4. Exporting Your eBook Cover: now that we have our e book cover or even our whole e book created, let's go ahead and see out how we can actually export this out. Now the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to rename this, so go up to the top where says Click to rename your design and I'm just going to call this into the Ocean E book so we know what it is whenever we download it. Now we have a couple options here. So first of all, I'm going to go to the download button and left. Click it and it gives us a couple different options that we can do. The first is going to be a low resolution J. P. G. So if you are just going to, uh, have the e book cover and you want to share that cover on, say, social Media, the Internet or your website, you're gonna want to use a low resolution J. P. G for the small file size so that it uploads and downloads easy and loads on people's computers quickly. Now, if you are going to submit this, um, to ah, maybe the Kindle store or any kind of other places. Maybe you're even going to print this out a physical copy of this book. Then you're gonna want to use the high, high quality PNG file so that you're getting the best resolution possible for your cover. Now these air Great if you're doing just the covers, however, if you want to have these images separately, you can click on the high quality PNG or the low quality J P G file, and it's actually going to compress these into a ZIP file. And then you will need a program to unzip those that file tohave the individual images. So it's a very simple process. Most computers today have zipping applications that will allow you to open that file up and get out the individual images. Now, if you are going to go ahead and share this as a ah pdf format, say on your on your website. Or you can even submit PDF formats to different platforms, Kindle and and other publishers. You can go ahead and say this out as a PdF format, so we have PDS standard, which is going to be kind of the lower quality resolution, and then we have pdf for print, which does a couple things to make it a little nicer if you're going to print this into a physical copy. So I'm gonna go ahead and just click on the PdF standard for now. And when I do that, you see it's going to save out our design and it's going to go ahead and upload that design , uh, or download that designed to our downloads folder, and then it saves it into a nice PdF file. So if I left click on that, it's going to open up this pdf file. And now you can see I have my e book created in a pdf format that I can go ahead and start sharing. And, of course, we are zoomed in quite a bit here, So let me just zoom out. Then you can see the end of individual pages. It doesn't matter how many pages you've created. As long as you haven't purchased any ah images or templates. You can go ahead and save those out individually like that into a pdf like that, and the and you're good to go. Now. What I'm also going to do is I'm gonna show you if I click on download and I click on JP Gene. It's going to go ahead and it's going to compress ease into a zip file, and I'm going to go ahead and save out the ZIP file, and then I'm gonna upload one of these images to the course so that you can actually see what it looks like. And I recommend you do the same because I would love to see what you've created. However, you don't have to do multiple pages If you just want to create one page and upload that J p g fall, you can't. But as you can see here, it has saved it into the ocean. E book dot z i p. And that's a compressed one single file. And when I opened that file up is actually going to allow me to save this out, save out the individual images, So here I'm going to drag this over. You can see my Downloads folder. I've opened up that zip file, and here we have the individual images so that you can let's not get shown. If I left click we can scroll through and seeing. Now we have three separate J P G files in that compressed file format. So very simple. Camera makes it really easy to create. E books is probably one of the more powerful things that you can do with this program. So have fun with it. Creates something awesome. Go ahead and send it to us in the course. We'd love to see what you've created. 5. Assignment : Create Your Own eBook Cover: congratulations on completing this lesson. By now, you should have a strong understanding of how to do the material that has been presented, and it is my goal as an instructor to make sure that you have learned and have retained the information that I have shared. So if you have any questions at all at any time, please feel free to contact me directly. You can find out more about me at www dot jeremy deegan dot com. If you have a general question, I do ask that you ask that question within this course by asking it in this course. I can address that question, and other students can see that later on down the road. This will help them understand some common questions that come up as they go through this course. Now, if you haven't done so already, please leave an honest rating and any feedback that you have about this course. It helps both me as an instructor know what to do better in the future, and it also helps future students get to see what this course is truly all about. Now your assignment is to take the information that you have learned and upload the image to this course by uploading your image and sharing your artwork with the world. We can provide critiques and any feedback on how to make your artwork better. It's also very motivating to get your artwork out into the world and shared with others and will help you progress in your education and want to share more and more. So thank you so much for allowing me to teach you something new today, and I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson.