Create an AMAZING book cover for FREE using Canva

1. Introduction: Have you ever heard that wisdom? Don't judge a book by its cover, that might be really good wisdom and advice when it comes to people, when it comes to books, that wisdom is completely the wrong way round. My name is Adrian Kwan IN the best-selling Amazon author of this book from theater freedom. In this course I'm going to show you how to use the free software Canva to create an amazingly effective book cover. So many people make the mistake of thinking that a book cover needs to be really complicated, really artistic, or they need to spend thousands of dollars or hundreds of hours getting a designed. And the simple fact is that a simple book cover often is the best solution. In this course, I'll be covering what makes an effective book cover and how to create it. Marie, simply using Canva, sometimes with just literally one click. We'll be covering print book covers. So paperback and hardcover, and also ebook covers. And as a bonus, I'll show you how to create some promotional material to start generating buzz and height for your book. Even before it's published, you've ever wanted to know how to simply create an amazingly effective book cover for free. Then I look forward to seeing you on the inside. 2. What makes an EFFECTIVE book cover?: Before we get into how to actually design your cover, I thought it would be a good idea to actually ask ourselves, what is an effective book cover? From? Why do I use the word effective? For most people? The purpose of the book cover is not to win awards or not even to be the prettiest book cover. The purpose of the book cover, simply put, is to sell copies of your book. Now, if you're not interested in how many copies you sell, and let's say you're just doing a customized book for a friend or customized book for a project where, you know, there are a certain number of people who are going to buy your books anyway, and I've done those sorts of projects, then the COVID doesn't matter as much. What I shouldn't say that the cover is still matters. But maybe the purpose of the cover is not really to sell the book because a, you don't care about that or be guaranteed the sales in some other way. But if you are looking to publish a book in a public space such as Amazon, kVp. Lot of people get lost because they think, Oh, I need the most prettiest book cover out there. I need to get a professional designer or I need to compete with professional designers. And I need to have all these beautiful cursive calligraphy, calligraphic font. And it is beautiful image that a professional photographer took. And I need all, all these things. And honestly, that is actually normally extremely counterproductive. Because when it comes to the purpose of your book cover, it's to shift copies of your book. And from my experience and I think if you have a look at the Amazon kVp library, or you even ask yourself, what's the last book you bought because of the way it gravity off the shelf. It is normally a simplistic book cover that catches your eye for some reason. It's not normally a cover that has a lot going on that may be won a design award or wasn't necessarily designed by an award winning artist. Let me give you, with that in mind. That's what I defined as ineffective book cover, is to sell copies of your book to, let's say, people who know nothing about your book. If they know something about you or your famous, then that's a bit different or you have a following that's different. But I wanted to give you an example of some of the book covers that I've created and some of the book covers that I really, really enjoy. Now, my first book, which was from fear to freedom. This was the cover that we use. This cover, this book hit best-seller status on Amazon in multiple markets. It definitely wasn't Australia, in the US and the UK in two niches each, I think in the US one of the niches, niches. Niches, niches was number two, but it did, let's say, dude, well, now you might look at that cover and go, Adrian, That's an amazing Kaaba. I look back at this and I don't really, really like this cover. Now, it goes without saying that the title and the subtitle is a big part of cover. Construction will cover design. We're not going to cover how to title your book in this course. But it is super important to put it simply. You want something that is almost a little bit, Let's say controversial or something that's a bit shocking as a title. And that's why I don't really like this title was much now. And then the subtitle is a bit more descriptive. What are people gonna learn from your book? But pie dough aside, there are photos of these women and these are the women whose interviews I included in this book. I generally am in favor of putting faces on anything you want to grab attention because faces tend to be what the human eye is most drawn to. But the photos are a bit small. The color is a bit I mean, I like blue, but it doesn't really grabbed me and I think there's ten faces rather than one. This is when I was like, This is my first book. Can I thought, oh, cover, what would because I've put all these photos of these women on the cover and I looked back at it now, and I probably would have done this differently. So this is my first book, contrasted to my most recent book which I just published last week. Now, yes, this is a different beast and this is a, this is going to be a coffee table book. I was only able to grab the paperback version at this time that the hardcover version is coming from Amazon in a couple of weeks, I hope. But you can see the, this to me is much, much more eye-catching. Now, you could say, Well, Adrian, That's because the book is bigger. Yes, it's certainly is bigger by comparison. I think there's a six by nine inch. This is 8.5 by 11 inches. You could say that. You could also say Adrian Moore, the cover, the photo is obviously done by a professional photographer. And the girl on the front is absolutely stunning, which is all true. But it still to me, this is a more effective book cover because the photo is bigger. There's more focus on the eyes. There's only one image. So that immediately goes Look here, not all, maybe you can look here or loci, or loci are lucky or look here. Look at this. And then the title which you can see, which honestly on a cover like this is not so important because the images are main part, but it's Confessions of a pageant queen, coefficients of a pageant queen. Now if you don't know anything about the pageant industry, it's something that I know very well, true story. But pageantry has always been seen as potentially a little bit scandalous. People would want to know the inside dirt. Confessions of a pageant queen almost sounds a little bit, Let's say risque or naughty. And that was the purpose of titling it like that. And then my obviously my name is there, but it's very small, but I much prefer this design. And to me when I open this package, remember is on, I went, Oh wow, this cover, I really, really like it. It's amazing. I don't normally say that about my own work. Now, those are some of the covers that I've designed in terms of covers that I really, really liked and maybe more traditional covers for, let's say, I have booked at a mainly text. I mean, this book, a lot of it was images on the inside to coffee table book. Maybe you're not looking to design something like that. I understand. But let me show you some of the covers. I'll show you two covers it I've really liked of books that have done very, very well on Amazon. And I think in no small part it's due to the impact of the cover. The effective covers, not the prettiest covers, the most effective covers. Now these are both books that I have read it. This one is by Jensen chair. You may have heard of this. You are a bad ***. How to stop doubting your greatness and start living an awesome life. Now I've already said I'm not gonna go too much into how to tie to a book. Having said that, it is hugely important on your cover what your title and subtitle is. And that's an amazing title and subtitle. That being said, again, look at the simplicity of this cover. It's just a yellow background with the title in big simple to read, font, simple to read. So many people want these fancy handwritten calligraphic fonts and they look fancy, but you can't read them. Especially when you figure that on Amazon you're looking at thumbnails. I mean, this is quite large on my screen, this cover. But if you look, let's say down here, normally you're only seeing the cover like that. When you shrink some of those fancy fonts down to a thumbnail that's this size. You can't read it. It's not an effective cover. It might look really pretty and you go, I love this font and maybe you've paid hundreds of dollars for it. But to me it doesn't make an effective cover. So this, I love the fonts are large, the background is simple, it's yellow, so it's colorful. Grabbed your attention. And the font for the most part, the title is black. So again, it's high-impact. It's a simple font, easy to read. And of course, if you have the Monaco New York Times bestseller that you put that at the top. And then the subtitle. Again, it's a similar font. It's high-impact, it's not in black, but it's not In Rainbows of color, that blue, red, blue, red. And then the tight the author's name again, simple to read font just in black. I think that is an amazingly effective cover. Then this one right here is exactly the same. So the first thing you'll probably notice about this cover, I can, I've read this book you may have as well. For me, it's like it's orange. The orange background jumps out. Again. You have to think if you're trying to hit the purpose of your book, is, the purpose of your cover, is to sell copies of your book. Then imagine that all that people are saying, let's say on Amazon is a small, small, small thumbnail. And in fact, if we have a look down here, you can see down here, so small thumbnails are down here. You can see small thumbnail. You need it to stand out when it's that size. It's much easier to go. When I looked at my cover in really big size, it's huge and you go, Oh, that looks amazing. But the question is, can people see it when it's this size and certainly discover you can see it's probably even better than you are a bad as that orange really stands out. The font is not only black and simple, it bolded, so you can actually see it very, very clearly from even the thumbnail and the subtle you can't really read, but that title was so high impact, it immediately grabbed your attention. I love covers such as this colorful background, simple, simple to read. Fonts that are large so you can read them very easily when they only thumbnails. Well, let's say you're buying it. Let's say you have copies of your book in a bookstore. It's the same idea. You want your cover, you need your cover to stand out. I think a cover like that stands out a lot, lot better than my book. If you have a look at my book, Let's say this first one that I released. I don't think there's any comparison. This one to me is like, it's kind of pale blue. The font is kind of all over the place and then it's, this probably could be bolded. This just like this, compared to something that looks like that. I don't think there's any comparison to me. And effective book cover for most of us is going to be a cover that sells the most copies of books available possible. As I said, I love this cover, but this was a bit of a different story because in pageantry I have a following. So I don't necessarily need discover to sell loads of copies of the book. Having said that, I still think it will because it's really, really high impact. Coffee table book, the black and white. By the way, you could create this cover on Canvas. I should preface, I should have started, started this by saying that. But an effective book cover to me is something that's going to shift lots of copies of your book. I think the main thing is to make it high-impact, colorful, simple, simple to read fonts, large, bolded preferably so people can read it when it's a thumbnail or when they're going in a bookstore, they see your book. They can immediately see it from, let's say, 20 feet, 30 feet away, or from across the room that go, oh wow, look at that. That book is orange versus how many books up? And we're gonna say why to apply because who knows what the most common cover is. But the point is, it needs to stand out. So that's what I believe is an effective book cover. And I think that's an important thing to cover just because before we get into cover design, I don't want you to think that it's gonna be incredibly complicated, or that it needs to win a design award. Or on the flip side, if you are artistic, you know what artistic types are like sometimes and I fit into this category in some ways. You want it to look amazing, immaculate, and you're going to measure it by millimeters and make sure everything is perfect. You're going to pick this font at the end of the day, a simplistic cover. It's probably going to be more effective because it's simply grabs a person that says, this is what the book's about if you don't want to read it fine, but this is what the book's about. That to meet effective cover design, very different, most beautiful cover design, almost artistic cover design. And by the way, in Canva, it is very simple to create these high impact effective covers. If you want all sorts of gradients, graphics and whatnot. Camera on Canvas, actually a bit more difficult. So in many ways, Canvas is the perfect platform for you to create an effective book cover on. 3. The quick Canva walkthrough: Okay. I'm going to give you a brief overview of Canva, what it is. Importantly, why I would suggest using it to create your book cover because there are so many options out there. The main thing to understand from this, I'm not trying to sell your camera by any means because I'm going to recommend you actually use the free version. But what is Canvas? So Canvas is a graphics design platform. And I can actually show you this and this is probably a better idea than me talking about it. Can they is, and has gained a lot of popularity amongst people who don't know much about tech, or people who do know a lot about tech. Because it allows you to create pretty amazing graphics of all sorts without any real technical expertise. So you can see here this is my Canva account. Here I have designed everything from a podcast thumbnails, as you can see. And again, I wouldn't be able to probably to design this in something like Photoshop or a propagate graphics program. I have certainly designed book covers, if there is one over here, Here's a book cover for a print book. This is why it's sort of left and right. On the right is the front cover and on the left is a bad government. This is certainly something we'll be covering in the course later on, but you can design book covers. Let me have a look at what else is in here. There are little promos that you can do for your social media. So this is actually one that was animated. If I hit play, you can see it fades in like that. That's one interview I did with gazelle. As I said, you can do everything. You can do YouTube thumbnails, so you get the idea. This is why I'm recommending that you use Canva because it is a fairly ridiculously powerful platform. That is also pretty ridiculously easy to use. And I say that as someone who, who did graphic design at a very basic level, years and years ago, like we're talking 20 years ago, let's say. And it was so much harder back then to do 50% of what you can do on Canvas. This is what I'm going to recommend you use Canada chico of all this is that you can use pretty much all of it for free. Now, yesterday is a paid version of it, but there's a good chance that you don't need any of the PRO or paid features. This is not like one of those softwares where it says it's free. But then unless you pay your severely handicapped because it takes all the features that you need out camera is really not like that. Frankly, I don't know how they managed to make money doing it, but it is what it is. That's Canvas. That's why I would suggest that you use it when it comes to signing up for account or you have to do signing up for an account or you need to do is go to canva.com. As you can see up here, CAN va.com. And you will be able to login if you already have an account or sign up if you don't. And again, the sign-up process, you may get a prompt to pay for the pro version if you want. You can see up here plans. If you go to pro, it comes to this page where it's Canva pro and the pricing. And you can see that there's pricing here. Monthly, it's $18 a month if you pay by the year, $264.99 a month. But you really don't need that. So just sign up for an account at canva.com for free. Once you sign in, you'll be taken to a screen that looks something like this now yours probably we will have a lot less than it because you haven't created anything, probably in the past. But you'll be taken to this screen. You do have the option to download an app. Now if you have a look where my mouse is here you can see download Canva for Mac, camera, for Windows. It's also available on Android and iOS now, all again, all of these are for free. I would recommend I certainly had downloaded the app and I'll be showing you, I'll be demonstrating to you on the Canva for Windows app. I like having things that can work offline. And I liked the immediacy of when I push a button, something happens straightaway. The Canva, if you use if you use the website canva.com, you can do pretty much everything well, you can do everything that you could do on the app. You just got to deal sometimes with you click a button and you go to white, then you do something else and you go to white. And I just don't like that, I'm impatient. But if you don't want to download the app or you're unable to use the website. If you do decide to download the app, then again, they are for free and you can get it on your mobile phone. I think importantly, everything will sync across your different accounts. So if you download it, let's say for Mac and you don't look download it on iOS, let's say for your phone or your tablet, then everything you've created on your Mac will be available on your iOS device. So it sinks like that, synchronizes like that. It's a very, very nifty features. So if you want to download the app, go ahead again it for free. Now, I've just brought you back into the app to give you a brief overview. I'm certainly not going to show you every feature of Canva. Because that's not the purpose of this course. And frankly, I don't know everything that you can do in Canvas. But you can see you're out at the top. I certainly recommend you spend, let's say 20 minutes, 30 minutes an hour having a play with a camera features to see what you can do. You can see here it's got some suggestions video, you can create videos also, you can create websites on camera. You can create absolutely everything. But let's say you have, and I've not actually clicked on these before because I do, I tend to do everything from scratch. But let's say you wanted to create an Instagram posts. You click on that. It's sizes it correctly, so it's a square. And then on the side you'll see some templates. So let's say you find a template that you like. Let's say something like food, because who doesn't love food? And you can see Canvas brings everything in immediately. Now, that's all. If you wanted to upload this to your Instagram account, you can link your social medias if you want to. And you could instantly say, Oh, I want to post this to my Instagram account. Obviously, if you've linked it, your account will appear here. You can put the caption here, hit Publish. Now, if you wanted to download it separately, you click download, and then you can download it as a PNG file, a JPEG file. Don't worry too much about what these different file formats, if you're unfamiliar with them, it doesn't matter. But you can download it in pretty much any format you would need. Someone and someone. You can even print your design on t-shirts, mugs, or things like that. Now, that's how quickly you can come up with a design. And by the way, it's not just Instagram posts. This is where it gets really crazy. If you go up to here and you hit Create a design, you see the search up here. It's not just all. Do I want to create an Instagram post or Facebook posts or YouTube thumbnail. You can put, for example, book cover. Now, if you click on, you can see how many different options it has here. But if you click on book cover, will go straight into this. Notice that it's gone now into portrait mode because most book covers, obviously our portrait, as in they're taller than they are wide. And look what's happened on the left. You don't get templates for Instagram posts anymore. You get templates for book covers. And I have to say, we've covered already what an effective book cover is. Some of these book covers look pretty amazing. So if you wanted to look at, let's say, I mean, I think this one works pretty well, something like this or this one frankly. Okay. So have a look at that. I click on it once bank. There's your book cover done already. All you need to do, and I'll show you a couple of the other features, but these are fairly intuitive. Double-click here, and you could change, you could change the texts from the best selling author of another great book, right? So that's how easy it is to change the text. If you didn't, let say like the graphics, you go over to the side here, which is called elements. Now in elements you have everything from lines and shapes. So if you wanted to draw a circle for some reason, you click on this and look, it's put a circle in there straightaway. You can change the dimension if you want. I'll get rid of that. But in elements, these graphics that you can use. So I'm getting confused between the Screenshare and the actual Canva. There are all these graphics you can use now. These are all for free. If you see a crown, that's the pro version. And I think again, fairly simply put, if you pay for the pro version, you get access to more graphics. But if you're going for age and I bet all the graphics, all the good ones are For behind a paywall will absolutely not. I mean, you can see here I've used a fair few Pro graphics, but let's say you wanted to replace that graphic of an eye with one of your own. So let's put an i Free, Free, Free, Free, Free, Free all. And you can see that's paid. That's paid. That's pay that's paid. That's when we'll look how many there are for free. If you go, Oh wow, I really like this graphic. Click on it. And that looks almost exactly identical. You can use this and publish it for your own. You don't have to pay for cocky or anything like that. That's the beauty of using the Canvas platform. So again, let me undo this. But when it comes to elements, you will find in element is kind of a whole bunch of lines and shapes. Everything from lines, two arrows, two circles, squares, triangles, etc. There's graphics. If you need some graphics on the graphic of the eye. If you need photos, very often it's difficult to find photos that you can use on a book cover for free because normally to pay for copyright, these ones are all that all taken care of if you wanted to find, let's say you were doing book about parenthood like this. Then you could use that photo and look. You can move it around, you can stretch it, resize it so that it fits your entire cover. Boom, protects over the top, you're done. We'll go back to here elements. There are videos you can use. Let's say if you wanted to create an animated posts for your Instagram, there's even audio, There's charts, there's grids. This is really important if let's say you're creating an Instagram post, let me go back to our Instagram posts and I will just say add a new page. If I put in grid. Let's say I want a grid of four by four for some reason, I scroll down, click on that. And here's the other nifty feature in Upload. You get to upload all your own photos. So here are the photos that I've used are uploaded. There's a lot of pageant girls and here because that's where I work. But watch this, I can quickly grab drag, drag and let's say drag. And look at that. I now have internally greater than Instagram posts. We're using that grid. It's automatically spaced out for me and I can change. Let's say that background looks a bit funky, so I'll drag this out of the way, go back to this. And let's just say let's go with white. And now I'll drag this back in. Look at that again, I can re-size, right? I can click and replace. I could drag this in here. And you can share away. Frames are similar, but let's say those are, those were grids. A frame. If you have a look, Let's say you click this one. This is a circular one. What happens now is I go to my uploads and drag a photo in there. That happens, kind of frames up the photo and a nice shape. You can see there a nice circular shape. And if you double-click on it, you could reposition the photo, things like that. I hope as I said, I'm not gonna go into everything because there's so many features and I strongly encourage you to play with it. But I hope you're getting the, an idea, a vague idea at least as to how powerful the Canvas platform is and how easy it is to use. If we go back to the book cover for a second, we go at page. And let's go back to templates and look, look how many possible different ones there are. It's even grouped for you. This is for you. So these are the ones camera was saying and you probably like these, but let's go to the inspirational book cover. Even like a book cover like that. I mean, you could pay someone a lot of money, well spent a lot of your own time to create a cover that didn't look half as good as that. This coffee here, I think it looks cool for a female centric audience. Again, if I go up to this and let's say, Oh, I love this, but I don't want that image. Then go and find one of your own. So let's say you find an image, Let's see if I can find one that's a bit more. I don't know, like that. And click and drag it into there somehow. There you go. Now, I don't think that looks great because there's not much contrast between the text and the background photo, so I need to do something like that. But again, if you wanted to change your texts, you can including the color, maybe black. It works a bit better. Not really, but I'll drag it in here for you so you can see it. You can also change the fonts. Many fonts there. And yes, some of them are pro, the ones with a crowns exhibit, you need to get the pro account. But let's say I need a bolder font to make it really pop. There you go. Let's say it's now too small. So let's say 250 up here. And again, this is not looking great because there's not enough contrast between the photo and the title, but that's what it looks like. I hope you're getting the idea as to how powerful this is and how quickly you could have a book cover that looks like that. I think we talked about effective book covers. I think that looks amazing. So all you need to do is go in here, change your text, change the title, change the author. Obviously, maybe you change the graphic. And then Bob's your uncle. You can now download this and you've got your book cover design in a few clicks without any exaggeration, just really quickly before I wrap up this Canvas overview for you. There is one feature of Canva pro. Actually there are two features of Canva, Canva pro that you may find useful. And I will put a link below. And if you click on that link, that's an affiliate link for me. So if you decided to get pro through that link, I will get some I will be reimbursed for that. But there are two features that you may want to consider. They're by no means necessary and I'm not going to push you to buy it if you don't think these features work for you. But let's say for example, I take this image of broken who's over in Wales. And let's say I really want to use that image, but I want to get rid of the background. Canva pro. One of the big features is this background removal. If I click on this, it will go to work and you can see it's going around and going around and with any luck. It's pretty good. This feature, it will remove the background, this sort of black and gray background from programs photo. And boom, it's done. You can see that it's a move the background. So I will be able to see the color of the background through the photon. Nope, I click on this background here and I go, I wanted that color, let's say to be pink. You can see now that it's showing through programs photo that can be very useful when it comes to designing covers such as this one that I designed for my latest book, I actually removed this is naughty here. I removed the background so you can't see it through this area here and through this area here. So that could be a very useful feature. Very often you get photos that you want to use on your cover, but you don't want that background in them. Canva allows you to do that with one-click. It's not perfect by any means, but it pretty darn good. So the background remover is one. The other one that is often very useful is the re-size feature. Now if you go up to here and you hit resize, the one thing that the free version of Canva won't allow you to do easily, is let's say you are playing around with design, this design and you really like it and you go, I wanted to make it square so I can put it on my Instagram. With the free version of Canva, there is no easy way to do it. Yes, you could copy paste it. Still a bit of a hassle with the pro version, then you hit resize. And it allows you very simply to re-size. You could then turn this, let's say into Instagram bubble size 1080. By 1080, you can copy and resize, which means it would copy it to a new file. Or you can just hit resize here, which is what I'll do. And you can see It's actually even re-size had covered because all the images in this file needs to be the same one. But if I go back to here, you can see it's resized. I could now stretch this out. I can make me stretch this out here. And now I've turned that post. I mean, it's only, it doesn't look great because I butchered this. But you get the drift, the resizing. It allowed the pro version allows you to resize without having to create a new file, copy paste, etc, etc. For those two reasons alone, the background remover and the re-size feature. Canva pro could be useful for you. Yes, you get access to more templates, more fonts, more graphics as I've showed you. But I don't think those features are as needed as the background remover and the resizing feature, especially for book covers. Once again, I'll put the link below. If you want to get Canva through that link, I think you get a 30 day free trial. You can play around with it, see if it's for you. If it's not, then you can cancel no harm, no foul. I do use the pro version because I get a lot of utility from that background removal and the re-sizing feature. Having said that, you have seen how easy it is to go to the top go credit design, putting book cover, one-click. Boom, get an amazing book cover that all you need to do is change the text, change the author name, change of graphics. You can do all of that for free. And that could be it. You could have an amazing book cover done and dusted right there. So I hope that gives you an idea as to what Canada is. Why I'm suggesting you use it. How quickly you could have a book cover and amazing social media posts as well. By the way, I will show you one thing at the very end of this course where you can create some free promo material with that cover you design even though you don't have an actual physical book yet, you only have a cover. Canada has his other real neat feature where you can create a mockup. So it looks like you have an actual book and drum up some excitement for your upcoming book. But that's Canvas. If you have any questions, let me know. But I really suggest the best thing to do is create your account for free, download it download the app or user Canva website, play around with it, get used to some of the features. A extremely intuitive, easy to use, an extremely powerful, and familiarize yourself a little bit with it before we go into designing your book cover, which is what we're going to cover next. 4. How to get cover ideas & inspiration: Before you start designing your cover, now that you've seen how simple it can be, it's always good to begin with the end in mind. With that. Bearing that in mind, the best place to start is an inspiration. What's a book cover that you like, a book cover design that you like. And I know we've talked about what I believe is effective book cover design in the first video, the second video. But at the end of the day there's no objective. This is the best book cover, right? Having said that, I don't think it's good to just start designing without really having an end goal in mind. Now, two very simple ways of getting inspiration for a possible book cover. One I've already shown you. That is to go into Canva. And when you hit Create a design, literally put in the book cover and have a look at what conduct with some of these. Now for example, if you are looking at you can see it's got a different book covers here. If you were looking at creating a thrill, a thriller book cover, it will come up with these particular suggestions for you to just have a look through. And I'm not saying that you have to use one of these and I'm certainly not saying copy because obviously you want to change at the very least the title and the author. Just have a look at these and see if anything strikes you in particular. And if something does, and you click on it and have a look at it. Again, you don't have to copy this, but just bear in mind, why does this strike you? So for example, this cover design caught your eye. Is it because of the font? Is it? I mean, it's got fairly bold, simplistic font. Not too many words is it may be the bank, the begging illustration is black and white and it looks a little bit spooky. Do you like the fact that it has a little bit of a testimonial at the top, the title in the middle, and the author at the bottom. Just go through these and have a log. And again, if you go through, this is again, one of the big reasons I suggested that you use Canva for your book cover design. There are so many templates here. I'm going to bet that you'll find at least one, at least one that you'll go, you know what? That looks pretty good. So that's the first place I would say go to camera and have a look because the big benefit is if you do find something and you go, I like the look of that cover. With one-click bank. You just have to change maybe the backend illustration, the title, and obviously your author name, and you've got the cover designed already. The other place I would suggest to have a look. If you don't find anything on Canva. And even if you do a good place to look at is obviously Amazon. We're looking to publish a book on Amazon. So why don't we have a look at what's already selling on Amazon? And if you have a look, bearing in mind what I said, remember what I said about effective cover design to me, it's generally things that are simplistic and things that pop, things that are colorful and simplistic. And if you have a look at a lot of these are. So for example, I've actually read this book, The 48 laws of power, but you can see red, blue, and the word power in the middle. This is a book I'm currently reading at the moment, Atomic Habits. But the point is not what appeals to me, but what appeals to you. And you may want to narrow it down to your niche a little bit more. So let's say you were looking at children's books. So you can see here, if I click on children's books, you'll get an idea as to what covers are working well for children's book hot new releases. Do this a lot in here, isn't there? But let's have a look at Seymour. Just have a look again, you don't need to copy these, but it's good to get inspiration. So you can see obviously because it's in children's books that cover design is a little bit different. The fonts are a little bit larger. The illustrations are a little bit more kid friendly. For example, you can see this one here, the bad guys and the font used is almost like, almost like a handwriting font. And there's a big illustration here of a scarier looking shark in-between, looking in your niche at what? Working on Amazon. Then as I said, what templates are available on Canva? You can probably get a very good idea as to the cover illustration or the book cover that you're aiming for. And then hopefully using Canva, very, very simple. One-click, a few adjustments. You can get something that looks very close to that cover design you're aiming for in one or two simple clicks. Now of course, you're more than welcome to just open up a file on Canvas and start going forward. I've certainly done that in the past. But I think it always helps to have an end goal in mind because otherwise you can get yourself lost. Book cover design for hours, days and weeks, and never really come up with something that really works. So those are the two places I would suggest to look for inspiration. Number one, look at Canva, looked at the template. Another to look at Amazon. Look at your niche by all means, see what's working there. And in-between those two sources of inspiration, I'm fairly clear. You can go. Okay, I'm fairly sure you better go. Okay. This is direction I'm aiming for basic design. And even if you design the site to hire someone, a professional to design your book cover, the best thing you can give them. An example of. This is a book cover I'm after, do something like this. Change your illustration, change a title, change your author name, but this is what I'm looking for. That's where I started to get some inspiration. 5. Set up your cover in Canva: You're about to start your cover design. The first thing that you're going to want to check is what are the dimensions that my cover needs to be? And what are the formatting requirements are? How big does my cover needs to be? I mean, you don't want to design it. Design your cover, put all the work into it and then find out, hey, I've designed the wrong size. So what are the cover dimensions and what formatting requirements do I need it in? Specifically? Do I need it for example, in JPEG or tiff? Or do I need it as a PDF? Now, there are two basic branches when it comes to books. One is e-books and one is print. Print can be hard cover or paper. Beck, we'll cover print first. Now, again, assuming that you are publishing on the Amazon kVp platform. I'll show you how to do that. If you are designing for another platform, it's going to be very, very similar, but obviously you have to do a little bit of groundwork to work out the specific, specific peculiarities of your platform. But when it comes to designing a book cover, a print book cover for Amazon k0 ADP. The first site that you're going to want to go to is this one over here, which is the kVp cover calculator up at the link below its Katie.amazon.com forward slash cover dash calculator. If you just go to Google and type in KTB cover template or something, you'll find it in the search results, so don't worry about it too much. But you will come to this screen here. Now before you can really use this again, this is for print books on Amazon K ADP. You're going to need your formatted manuscript and you'll see why in a sec. But you need to select your binding type which has hardcover or paperback, also paperback for this one, interior type, is it black and white, premium color of standard color? I'll put black and white paper type green paper or white, Copic white page turn direction left to right. I'm not going backwards. Measurement units are inches and interior trim size is a very common one for paperbacks is six by nine inches. I'll pick that one there. Here's the reason you'll need your formatted manuscript because you will need to put in the number of pages and you'll see why in a second. But let's say I'll put in 200 and I hit calculate dimensions. Now it will give you all of these numbers. You can use those of you want. What I will suggest is that you hit Download Template and you'll get a zip file and it will allow you to download two things. One is an image file and one is a PDF, both of which will look like this. Now this is why I suggest you download the template rather than looking at all those numbers and going cross-side. Because this, you'll be able to download this, sorry, upload this into Canva, and then use these lines and guides to exactly position everything that you need. And then you'll be able to export it. And there you go. There's your cover. Again. You won't even need to worry about all these words. Here are the numbers. You'll be able to use this exact image as a guide. Now because it's a print book. Front cover is here on the right. Our back cover is here on the left. And in the middle is the spine. This is why you need to tell Kindle before you use this covered template generator, you need to tell it how thick your book is or how many pages your book is. Because the more pages you have thinking about it, the more pages your book has, the thicker the spine is going to need to be. And this has to be reflected in your book cover. And then here in the yellow, That's where the Amazon's going to print your barcode for your book. So this is how I suggest that you get ready to do your book cover for a print book on kVp is once again to go to this cover template generator, put in everything that you need. And again, you can change these if you're designing a hardcover. If you're doing color, whatever it is, put in the appropriate selection for yourself. Definitely put in the correct interior trim size. You might be doing completely different. One, you might be doing an 8.5. It's 8.5 inch square book and then put in the page count, hit calculate dimensions. But then again, worry too much about this if you want to be my guest. Easy thing is to hit that download template and then you will get a template that looks something like this and you'll be able to work very easily without using Canva. You'll see that what applied this template into Canva, and we'll just use these dotted lines and lines and colored areas to help guide where we wanted various parts of our cover. Now for print books on Amazon, kVp, they're gonna want you, it's going to want you to upload your file in a print ready PDF. And I'll show you in the video when it comes to exporting your book cover, how to do that. It's very, very simple, but basically, you're gonna go and design your book cover in Canva. And when it comes time to download it or export it, you're going to want to pick the PDF, the print ready PDF file format. Now when it comes to designing an evil cover or Kindle cover to actually a bit simpler because you don't need to worry about, as with print books, you've got the front cover, the back cover, and the spine. And you've seen that we need to adjust the spine with depending on how many pages your book is. With an e-book gets much simpler. Kindle recommend having a look here, 1600 by 2560 pixels, 1600 pixels wide by 2560 pixels down. That's basically a ratio or the ratio of for every one pixel across 1.6 pixels down. Then it's going to want you to export that as a JPEG file. So you go away, design your book cover on Canva using those 1600 by 2560 pixels. And again, when you go into Canva, It's super simple. I mean, I'll just show you very quickly here. When you go into Create a design, you can use custom size. Here, you hit Custom Size. And if you can see it's the most recent one I put in. But you'll put in 1600 by 2560 pixels here. And when you do do that, it will come up with a blank template. And if you put in up here search templates, book covers, all those book cover templates that we've already discussed will come up and then you can hit one of them and one of them and then body onco, you've got a template ready to go. That's how you design a book cover. As I said, it's probably, well, I think it's a lot simpler because we need to worry about is the front cover. You don't need to worry about the spine or the back cover. And you will export it as a JPEG file, or it's probably the most common image file out there. And then your export that, upload that into the KDE platform when you are good and ready. That's what you'll need to do right now if you're doing a print book, go to that cover calculator. Get the appropriate template for the book that you're designing. If it's an e-book, then using those dimensions that I've given you, you can start designing your cover right now. And in the next videos, I'm going to walk you through the process of actually using those templates or using Canva to design your actual book cover. So let's get into it. 6. Designing a print book cover: Let's start by looking at how to create print cover or a cover for a paperback book, or a hard paperback book, or a hardcover book. Now, I wanted to start with this one because it's actually a little bit harder. If you can create a paperback, you can create a cover for a print book. You're going to find creating a cover for an e-book. Very, very simple. That's because as I showed you in a previous video, when you download the template. So when we go to this page, kVp.amazon.com forward slash cover dash calculator. We are going to get the template for a print book. And remember it's going to have on the right side, the front cover. Show you it so you know what I'm talking about in case you didn't see. Remember, this is the front cover and back cover. And this narrow place here, this book didn't have many pages. That's why it's an error, but this narrow part here is the spine. I'm going to trust it. You have a formatted manuscript ready to go. If not, put some values, some whatever you think you want to put in here. And then when you do have your formatted manuscript, manuscript obviously come back to here and the word for real. But for now, I'm going to pretend I'm doing a paperback book, six by nine inch, black and white, just text. And that was my very first book that I published. In here I would click paperback. Over here I will click Black and White. Paper type was just white page turn direction left to right. It's almost always going to be left to right. Measurement units. I will put in inches and interior trim size six by nine inch. The page count was about 200. I mean, you don't want to put a rough number in there, but just from memory, it was about 200 pages. So I know I hit calculate, calculate dimensions. Remember I'm not really going to use this. I mean, it could be useful to know. So you can see all the exact dimensions that you need here. I'm gonna click this button here. Download Template. Now Amazon will go away. You'll see that you get a zip file. You want to unpack that zip file somewhere onto your computer where you can find it. Then we're going to open up Canvas. In Canvas, we're going to go to create a design rather than using any of these things up here we're going to go to import file. Now, I will try to find where I downloaded a two here it is paperback. I'm going to import the PDF document right here. Give it a bit of time. It's finished uploading. And now I can click here. He is our cover template. Now I will obviously some text here. It's explaining what this template is. Basically the black solid line, which you see around the outside here. That is a six by nine inch. The blue dashed line, which is, I'll zoom it into your continued a little bit more. Is this one here? That is where the spine is going to be folded. If you have a look at a book, then the spine folds are these two fall tier where the spine is folded or the cover is folded to wrap around the book. The white area is basically where you're going to want to put everything that must be on the cover. And the reason being for that is is this red area which they've called out of live or bleed. Now, when I created a book like this, which has all texts, and that might be is probably the most common book, sort of book that people create. You don't need to worry about bleed. For the manuscript to bleed is basically saying that you want images to go all the way to the very edges of your book. If you wanted to create a manuscript that looks something like this, where the images do go all the way to the edges of the page. That's when you start need to factoring and bleed. Bleed means we're going to stretch your image all the way to the very edges of this red area, even past the six by nine inch trim size. And then when it comes to the manufacturing process at Amazon does it's going to chop off your cover at the black line to get the six by nine inch. So you need to make sure when it's bleed that your images go actually passed this black line are past the trim size all the way to the edges. Otherwise, Amazon were actually rejected. And then when it comes to the actual trimming process or the printing process, amazon will chop off at this black solid line. Now the reason you need to do it like that, at least as best I understand it, is that printing process or they're chopping off process is not exact. There's probably a 23 millimeter margin for error. So if you were to drag the image right up to the line and leave it there. Depending on where the cover got chopped off, that finishes not going to be exactly perfect. What we need to do is make sure that our cover, whatever images we use, that at least this whole pink area here, all the way to the edges is covered by something. Now, you don't always need that in your manuscript. But every cover has bleed because every cover the images go all the way to the edge, even if, let's say it's a background color. So again, if you look at the cover of my first book, you might say, adrian, the text doesn't go all the way to the edges and neither do the images. That's true, but this background blue color definitely does go all the way to the edge. Covers, at least on kVp, always have bleed. And that's what this pink area is here. You're going to need to make sure we're going to need to make sure that whatever we do, we have our images extend all the way into the pink. But if we don't do that, the cover will actually be rejected by Amazon itself. It's software can detect that. But anything that we need to have on the cover, such as title, a subtitle, author name, or any particular part of the image. And you absolutely must have on the cover has to fit within the whitespace because otherwise there's a chance that if you put it up even, let's say even let's say here you go, Adrian. Well, that's inside the black trim line. But the printing process or the manufacturing process is not exact. There is a chance that okay, Amazon might chop off, I'll cover here, or my truck off the cover here. If we're lucky, it will chop it off at exactly the black client. But anything that you absolutely must have, and it's called the safe zone, should be in here. You must have on your cover has to be in the white area here. Briefly recap. Black solid line is a trim size six by nine inches. In this case, the blue dashed line down here is the spine fold, white area. They're calling the library, as you can see, essential images. So position logos, text and essential images in this area. That's super important if you put texts in the pink area or this red area. Again, you'll cover will be rejected by Amazon sort of order check software. Red area is the bleed. Now the dimensions on the right, but we don't need this, this template. The reason we're using it is because it's already set up to be the right size for us. The first thing I would do, start getting rid of the beta we don't need because if you leave this here, then it's actually going to be printed on the cover. I will get rid of this, but this is where Amazon is going to print the bar code. So if you have a look again at my first book, you can see here we need to leave space for a barcode. Every book published has it. So I'll get rid of the texts there, but I'm just gonna leave that yellow rectangle there for now to remind me or to show me where the barcode is. So I make sure I don't put any text or images over that area. Don't need this back cover. Only that brand cover. Don't need this text telling me the spine width. I don't need any of this. Now that I've explained it to you, if you want to keep it there just to remind yourself what the different areas of the cover are then by all means leave them there. Now, what I have is just this template with the yellow arrow. Remember that's where the barcode is going to be. If you wanted to just start bringing in text, you could absolutely do that. So remembering that on the right, this is a front cover here. So let me type this out for you. So this is the front cover here. And if I add another piece of text, this is actually the back cover over here. And obviously in the middle of the spine. If you wanted to, you could start creating this from scratch. What I would recommend though, is remember those templates that we had before, and I actually pick this one because I really liked this one. I thought it was a nice, simple, bold cover image. You need to do, I'll hit Control a on PC. I believe it's Command a on a Mac, Control a. And I'm going to copy it, control c. I'm going to select all and copy it. And then going to come back to our template. And I'm simply going to hit Control V or paste. And you'll see that it brings it all in for me. Now, there's a few different elements in this group here. There's the image, there's the text at the top, the title, the subtitle. Just to make sure that I move it all as one. I'm gonna hit group up here. Now I can move this all as one and I'll ungroup it later, but just a bit easier when I'm trying to position. So I'll get rid of front cover. I'll get rid of back cover. And remember what I remember what we discussed about the pink area. We can't have any text in the pink area. So what we'll do is we're going to resize this a little bit just to make sure that it all fits within the white. Obviously, we're going to try and center it there as best we can. I'm going to bring in a little bit more because I don't want to risk the cover being rejected. So making sure that it definitely fits in the white centered on that front cover. And there you go. That should pass muster. All the text is in the white or the images are in the white. Now if you wanted to change it, now that it's positioned correctly, you can ungroup it. And you could go in here and put whatever text you want it in here. You could change the image you wanted. On the other hand, it may be simpler for you to change it over here. The initial cover template, the one that you selected from Canva. Maybe change it here once you've made the changes here, hit Control, all, hit Control C or Command a, command C and then paste it in here. But importantly, you can change it here as well if you want to. You can put awesome title here, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So that would be the front cover done. On the back cover. You usually put just a little blurb or you could put an image there. For the purposes of what will do, I will just click some little text here. I'm not going to make this too detailed at all because I'm sure you get good what I mean, but I'll just put put some blurb about this book that might be a little bit small, it's hard to see. But that's something that cover was shrunk down a bit. But you can fiddle with the size yourself. So remember, if you want to change the font, go up to here. Maybe we'll make it a little bit bigger, just as a bit easier to see. I think that's a bit too big, but it makes it easy to see, so we'll leave it like that. And again, this is a back cover of the book. I'll try and center it just on the back cover. And this is what's going to appear on the back cover. If you wanted to put a photo of yourself or an image for the book. Again, you could get one from elements over here. You could find a photo in here. This is, let's say, kind of like a spy book. So if I put in spy into Canva, Let's see what it comes up with. Maybe use this one. I'm not trying to make a perfect cover here by any means. I'm just showing you the rough process you would go through to get this done. Your blurb would go, let's say somewhere here. Your image could go there, or you could change it around. And that's about it. This cover would be good to go. You haven't covered the yellow area here where the barcode is going to be. We have our front cover. We have our back cover. Now, if you want to, if you have enough pages in your book, the spine, remember the spine increases in width depending on how many pages you have. So the more pages you have in your book, the thicker the spine is going to be n of the spine is thick enough. You can put spine text on. That's another way of saying you put your title, your name on the actual spine of the book. The book is less than a certain number of pages. This template will say the spine is too narrow to fit any text in. This spine for 200 pages is wide enough. You need to do. Let's say, we'll put in our title apparently for this book is an awesome title. What I will do to make the texts on the spine vertical, I'm just going to hit Duplicate here. I've got a copy of this text or some title. And you can see right here that it's got this little merry-go-round or circular button there. I grab it, I turn it around towards 90 degrees. Drag it onto the spine like that. Somewhere in the middle like that. You could do exactly the same for the author, your author name. So you could copy this, paste this, and just put your name there. So that's how you do the spine. The only thing that's missing from this now is some sort of image to go. Remember, all the way to the edges, we can't just leave this red area here. Because if we do, first off, the cover would be rejected. Secondly, even if it wasn't rejected, Amazon is actually, it's simply going to look at your pharyngeal arch. He wanted red printed at the edges. It will actually print this red zone and this red area near the spine. Obviously we don't want that. In order to keep things simple, I will go to elements. And I'm going to go back to graphics over here or lines and shapes. Beg your pardon. I'm just going to pick a rectangle. Now I am going to get the rectangle all the way to the edge, bring it all the way across, pull it all the way down and you go, Adrian, That's great. It's covered everything in pink or you might like that color. But let's say I wanted to leave it as white like that. And you might notice that the graphic on the front cover and the graphic on the back cover have disappeared. That's because this rectangle is in front of them. So we need to move this rectangle behind them. All you need to do. So if you click on position here, it is, these controls here. You want to move this rectangle backwards. I mean, you could say all the way to the back. The problem is centered appearing behind that template. And again, we've got that pink area showing there. But you can move as white rectangle forwards by using Control, right square bracket, as you can see up here, with a backwards by the opposite Control, Left Bracket, there's a left square bracket. What I'll do is I'll make sure I've got that rectangle selected. And I'm going to, you can see it right there. That's perfect right there. If I bring it forward again, it starts covering The bring it too far forward or begins covering all the text and then move it back, back, back. It's now that yellow rectangle where the bar-code uses now hidden. But I don't need that anymore because I've made sure that I didn't put any of these texts in front of it. I know that this title is in the right spot. I know that my front cover is in the right spot. Now, that is good to go because I have this white rectangle at the back all the way to the edges, my cover is not going to be rejected because I didn't think fulfill those bleed requirements that I told you about earlier. What you need to make sure that at least some image is going all the way to the edge of your cover file. If you wanted to change the color, the background color of your cover, you absolutely can just make sure you've got that rectangle selected and then change it to whatever color you want there could actually look okay, blue, that looks okay as well. All right. If you ever want to make some changes and you need to make sure that everything is still in the right area. Just click the rectangle, move it out of position. Check, then bring it back into position. Just make sure it's aligned all the way to the edges. And cameras pretty good about snapping things to the edges. So there should be good there. So that is how I would go about creating the cover for a print book. A print book being either a hardcover or a paper back. If you wanted to, you could do that completely from scratch. But I've shown you how to start with our template and sort of cheat that process, copy paste it under control All to select it. Copy paste it onto the template, drag it into the right area, remember the right side. So remember that the right side is the front cover, but it's not the other way. This is not the front cover. The right side is the front cover showing you how to create this texts or the spine and how to rotate it. And remember also not to cover up the yellow area for the barcode. And then we've used our background rectangle to make sure that our image goes all the way to the edges as per the bleed requirements. You can change it as you want. You could make a much, much more complicated title than this. But remember what I said about effective book covers. It's not about winning a design award. It is not about having the most number of fonts or the fanciest want. It is about looking colorful, attracting eyes, and actually trying to keep it really simple so that you can sell copies of your book. That's the print cover. Now let's look at how to create an eBook cover. 7. Designing an eBook cover: Okay, ebook covers. Now if you watched the previous video about how to create a cover for a print book. As I said, it trickier to create the print cover than it is to create the Ebook Cover, which is, which is what I'm about to show you now. You need to watch our previous video a few times just to get the hang of it. Then by all means do that. The Ebook Cover is very, very simple. By comparison, you need to do is go into Canva, create a design. Now remembering that the dimensions that we need was 1600 pixels by 2560 pixels. That's a bit of a weird number. It's more than ratio. For every one pixel across, it's got to be 1.6 pixels down. Just think of your phone or tablet for every one inch across, roughly 1.6 inches down. That's why the dimensions might look a little odd. Please make sure it's in pixels, not an inches, millimeters or centimeters. So PX or pixels. And then we hit Create new design. Camera goes away. Here's our blank template or a blank cover, no template in there yet, just whitespace. And again, to make it super simple, Let's go into book covers, or actually it, Let's go to the e-book covers. Let's see what happens. Here we go. You can start from scratch, but why would you do that? When, if you have all these templates to start from? So depending on what sort of template catches your eye, this one looks good for a fiction book. And there you go. I wish there was more to it than that. But obviously, you change the author name, change the title, you might change a subtitle and you change your background image. But this is now done. This is a 1600s by 2560 image that you'll be able to download export. And I'll show you how to do that in one of the following videos. But this is going to be your cover for your e-book. And that's all the work you have to do. Remember, you will change. Double-click, put your name here, your title. That really doesn't look good, but you get the drift. And then you could put something here. And then remember if you want to find an image on Canva will go to photos for this probably. And let's look for sunset background, see what happens. We're trying to find one that looks good on this aspect ratio. So this one here with a bird looks okay, but that's a sideways image. This one here looks okay. So if I click on that, it will bring it in. I will delete if I can this old image there, drag my new imaging, resize it to fit my cover. You can see here that it's gone a little bit wider, so it's a little bit wider than our cover image. That's fine. Normally at the edges are chopped off. If not, you can resize it again, I'll use a different image. You can see that camera is really good at using these purple lines are showing me when it's centered horizontally and when it is centered vertically. Right there. There you go. Again, you might go, I can't really read this bottom line anymore than I agree. What I will do is I'm shift clicking, Shift clicking to get all of that. And I will move it up. And how's that covered on? Literally could be done in under a minute. And remember, you don't need to start from scratch. Why start from scratch? You have all these covers to choose from. So I'm hoping, I'm really hoping it makes sense why it's suggested to use Canva. Because you will get done in two or three clicks. What used to take, take other people hours and potentially hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars and hours to do. So. That's your ebook cover. 8. Designing a cover from scratch: I think it goes without saying, but if you go through all the templates on Canvas, you don't find one that really meets your needs, then obviously you can start from scratch. Having said that, I still think it'll be easier to start with a template and modify it. But let's say all the way back, all the way back when I asked you to find an inspiration or direction for your cover. And for some reason you just can't find a template that helped you at all. Let's go back to this book cover here. This one I said I thought was pretty impactful. I like the fact that it was a bold color on the background and it's just simple text and it's bolded text. I think that really stands out, whether it's a small thumbnail on a website or even in a bookstore. I do think once again, a lot of that comes down to the nature of the title being somewhat controversial and shocking. But let's just, for example, take this and see how you might go about creating it from scratch or something similar to it on Canvas. I won't do the whole thing because I think by now you can see that. You can see how Canvas works. But the first thing you'd probably do is go get your text. And let's say, let's just say for argument's sake, we'll use the same title. The Subtle Art of Not having. And we will put like that, I think that's right. That's the way they're headed. Organized Subtle Art of all not giving. Yes. Now on their title, it's left justified. So we go up here. We'll walk it over to the left. The font is not quite right. It looks a little too elegant and thin. I might just go to where he's railway heavy. And again, you can play with the, I like that. You can play with the font until you find one that works. So we'll go here now, and obviously we need to make that a bit bigger. Probably is a bit right. It looks a little too. The letters look a little too close to one another. If you look at the the letters here that a little bit wider, It's taking up most of the book. So let us go back to Canva and maybe you could try changing the font. But you also have these options up here. I've clicked up here next to the Effects tab. This is where you can make the line spacing bigger or smaller. Where also you can make the letter, the distance between the letters a little bit bigger. I think this is probably the font. I would change the font if I really wanted to get it closer to the way it looked. But that's pretty close right there. You've got two elements for the background color. We'll do the whole book in a bright orange, which is what they had there. And I thought that cover looked pretty good, going all the way there. And that looks reasonable. It's by no means perfect, but that looks reasonable. And then if you wanted to do things like let me just move this out of the way for a second. If I wanted to do things, I bring in bestseller badges and things like that. Just go to lines and shapes. You can bring this over here, maybe shrink it down. And you could then get your text. You could put whatever it says from the best selling author. You get the drift. I would put that in the middle. Again, if I should zoom in here, you'll be able to see that camera is really good at showing you when things are aligned. So you can see that there's some lines there to show you at all aligned in the middle. Again, I don't really like the way this looks with the best and the selling on different lines. But I'm just giving you an example from the bestselling author. You could change the be white if you wanted to. You could change the size if you wanted to. The best-selling author of x, y, z. Doesn't look like it in the middle, there it is. Okay. Whoops, there's an undo button up here. By the way, in Canada, super-important. I pick the wrong room and pick this. I'm gonna pick this. Remember the group random group button up here. I'm going to hit that. Now whenever I move it, I can move it as one. So there's our badge. I think maybe the font is a little bit too big, so I will shrink that down a little bit. You would be making again, I'm just doing this on the fly and doing this super quick to give you an example of how I would do it from scratch. But you would obviously referred to the cover that you're drawing your inspiration from. And don't directly copy it, obviously do make it your own. But within reason because there's only so many different things you can change on a book cover. So obviously if you change the title and you change your author, that's already 80 or 90% of the way there to making it your own. Then they're obviously you have somewhere where you put your author name. Some author. Again, you play with a fonts that they use here. With a fund I use look very similar to the font that I used for the title. So I use railway heavier here. I will use railway heavy there. By the way, you want all caps. There's this neat little button here. It will CAPSA will do that. But do you want it to be a bit smaller so the alternating doesn't detract from the title. Look, that's by no means perfect. But I'm been doing it whilst I'm talking to you, narrating it. And for how long it's taken me That's not bad. I would drag my rectangle back across. Look, you do the same for the spine. You do the same for the back cover. That's how you create it from scratch. I mean, with that back cover design, you can see that we can't see our badge anymore, so I would need to change my badge. Let's change it to yellow. Then. I can't read that. This is where you really just start playing around with things and find out what works. But this is why it's always, always a good idea to start with what works. Like this cover may not inspire you. I like it. The point is, go and find the book cover that you like. And you can start from scratch in Canva and get very, very close. If you wanted to use more images, remember, Canada has in its elements and in photos, or these photos. Remember, you can use all of these for free. The only exception is the ones with a crown on it, which is what you have to have a pro subscription for like this. If you need a graphics, maybe you are doing a book that you don't want a photo on the front. But like the previous curve I showed you the head an eye on it. All those graphics are in here. You've got graphics. You've got photos. Down here, you've got lines and shapes. So it is actually fairly easy to create a book cover from scratch in canva. Having said that, you saw how easy it was to create one from a template, literally just one-click. And then it's all there. I just need to change the title, the images. So all in all, probably best to start with a template and then change it until you get the way you want. But if you wanted to start from scratch, That's how you do. 9. Exporting your cover from Canva: Well done. You've done the hard part, which is creating your book cover. If you've been smart and done it the way I've showed you with templates and starting with a directional inspiration in mind. Even the hard part, hopefully it wasn't that hard. Or we need to do now is export your cover so that you can upload it to ADP or whichever platform you're going to publish your book on. Once again, we come to Canada. Let's start with the print book. So this is the cover for this book. This book right here which I produced, which is kind of like a concept program, except it's a program for a pageant. So this is a print book in order to export this, remember I mentioned it briefly before. Kvp want a PDF file. So we need to do is come up to the Share button at the top right. Click it. And we're going for download here. So we need a print ready PDF or PDF file. Pdf Print. Click on that. Don't crop marks and bleeds. Yes, there is a bleed in your cover, but we don't want to print any additional marks, so leave that unchecked. This file of mine actually has six pages. I'm only going to print the top ones, so I will just click here, unclick All Pages. Click page number one and done color space. Don't worry too much about this, but we might as well change it to CMYK because printing is done in CMYK screen colors are RGB. Don't worry too much about that. It's just slightly different than color scheme. You can say that the analog settings if you want and you hit download, and then camera will go away and do its thing here you can see the progress spot shouldn't take too long. Then obviously save this wherever you need to save it. I'll save it to my desktop. That is done. Now that image is ready to be uploaded or that PDF, beg your pardon, is ready to be uploaded. And here it is as a PDF file. So what I would need to do is when I'm uploading my book, take ADP and it asks for my cover in a PDF file. Just upload this PDF file, take ADP, and that's my cover done and hopefully I've done everything correctly. There'll be approved the first time. This is a good chance, by the way, to check everything looks right. You can see it looks to me like I've got a little bit of a pink line still over here which is not right, almost looks like I haven't drawn, brought the white rectangle all the way to the edges. So there's a good chance to go back in here. Let's find out if I can fix that. So if I go here and I'm gonna zoom in a bit and you can see probably right here, this white rectangle is not dragged all the way to the edges. So let's just fix it. Returns to show you how to fix something. All the way to the top. All the way to the edge. Again, Canva is pretty good at showing you these lines when something is snapped to the age, like you can see right there. I think that's done it now. If I have a look. Yep. Note concedes, missed again. That's because I've drawn some maybe there's some other lines in the background and Canva snapped it to the wrong line. If you need to zoom in on camera, you can do that to make sure that you can see that everything is right. Okay, That looks right now, what we'll do again, we'll go to share, will go to Download PDF, and this has saved it from before. So I'll just hit download. We'll open it up again and see if it's done it right this time we'll see if I've done it right this time. I'll save it to my desktop. Again. Overwrite it. I will go find it now, open it up. That looks a lot better. I think I can't see now. There's no white eye, there's no pink showing through at the edges of this cover anymore. That's really important. I wasn't planning on showing you one where I screwed up, but Eve, I had uploaded that to Amazon. Chances are Amazon would have detected that the cover image, that white background had not gone all the way to the edge. Probably that's better case. Worst-case is it would've allowed through. The problem, isn't that every book that was printed, the cover would've had that pink border. Print it on the edge. That's how you do the print cover. Now I'll show you how to do the ebook cover. We'll use this example that I created before. Remember the ebook covers even simpler, it's just one image and this one needs to be shared as a JPEG file. So download it as a JPEG file. So we hit Download and we find JPEG. Besides just leave it as one, as in 1600 by 2516, if for some reason you needed to double the size, That's how you do that. Leave it at one. You can bump up the quality if you want to. It's not necessary. I think it download. Again, save it somewhere where you can find it. I'll save it to my desktop. And now let me find it and open it up for you. And there you go. That's a cover file done when it came when it comes to the uploading process on Amazon kVp in it asks me for my book cover file, for my e-book. I would just upload this file and that would be it. So as you can see, it's super simple just to remember, for print books. Print books to use a hardcover or Paperback, to use a PDF print. For eBooks to use JPEG. Jpeg, save it somewhere where you can remember where you've saved it to, and then upload it at the appropriate time when you're uploading your book to the KDE platform. 10. Creating a promotional mockup of your cover: Just one final trick when you have created your amazing book cover and you want to show it off and you want to start building hype for your upcoming book. It is cool to be able to create what's called a mockup. Which means it looks like you've actually got your new book, even though you don't or you have as a cover file. And here's what I mean. So if we come to this is the ebook cover that I created before. Now Of do a few things here, bear with me. We'll make sense in a second. I'm going to add a page. This is a blank page. Now going to upload the cover that I exported before. I go to here upload media and it's on my desktop. And here's the cover file here. I'm going to upload it. You can see it uploading here. All I need to do is drag it across to here. I'm going to make it the right size, get it to fill the whole page. Now. I'm going to hit, I'm going to select it. I'm going to hit Edit Image. I'm going to go to what's called smart mockups. And you'll see here basically what this does is it allows you to put that image onto things like books, phones, t-shirts. So if you were doing a design for Margot t-shirt, you could make it look. Actually had the real t-shirt or mark in your hand even though you don't. Here's one for a book. If I just hit this book, watch what happens here. Now. It looks like this person in the background. It's holding a copy of our new book. Now the only thing is it looks like it's maybe extended a little bit too far to the edges so you can fiddle around here fit. That doesn't look so good because that's cropped up. The edges could custom here. And I might just see if I can shrink it down without it looks like it may not be the best fit just because it's an e-book cover. But I might be able to fiddle around with it to make it look a bit better. There are other options here as well. So let me undo this. Let's hit Edit Image again. Back to Smartmockups is someone gonna scroll down. You'll see all the different options for books. Let's see if we can find one that fits our cover a little bit better. Because in book one, book two, book three, Let's try this one. Looks pretty good. It still looks a little bit the topics a little bit too close. What you could do if it doesn't fit completely the way you'd like it is to do a slightly different version of the covered just with different sizes. Maybe resize it so it's a little bit shorter in this case that it fits on this cover a little bit better. But that's a mockup. You can now go and share that on your social media. And it looks as though you've got a brand new copy of your actual book, even though all you've done is create a cover and you can start building up hype for your actual book. Now the reason I had you upload be downloaded version of your cover in the first place is because this is the actual cover here. If you try and create the mockup from this image here, what happens is it only uses whatever part of the image you can click on. And unfortunately, even if I hit control a here, if I hit control doesn't actually let me edit the image. So I can't get to my Smartmockups. And i've I just hit the background image, it edited image, and then do a smart mockup. What you will find is that it only puts the background image onto the mockup. It doesn't put the title. That's why I had you re-upload. I know it sounds a little bit convoluted, but that's why that's done a few. That sounds something funny there, but it could work here. So that is how you can create a mockup with your new book cover. If you wanted to put it on a phone, you could certainly do that as well. If for some reason you wanted to put it on a t-shirt or a mug. You could do that too. Nifty way of promoting your book before you actually have a copy of your book in your hand or on the Kindle Store. And building up some hype. 11. Conclusion: That's about it for this course. Thank you so much for watching. What I would really like you to do now is to go away and actually create a cover. It's one thing to watch. A course like this will especially a course like this and go, yes, that makes sense, yes, that makes sense. I can see how Canada would be really good for creating a cover. I can see the power of the templates and things like that. But you learn entirely at a different level when you actually go away and do it. For me, I'm all about making it as easy as possible for you to publish a book. And I keep saying this, but I know so many people who want to publish a book, but for some reason they get stuck. And very often they get stuck on things like the cover because they assume that to create a great cover for your book, you need to know about Photoshop or be really artistic and looked at the fact is, it's so amazing what you can do with literally one click of a button as you saw when I click from the Canva template and then boom, there was, there was my cover straightaway. What I'd really like you to do is go away, create a cover. You can share it with me and I can give you feedback, or you can share with me in the project section of this course, if there is one posted, get some feedback, and then get started or continue going on you're self-publishing journey. When it really comes to books. I mean, you hear the saying all the time, don't judge a book by its cover. I got news for you. That's exactly what we do. And we also say substance is more important than style. But initially style is more important than that WE applies to books and books. No one is going to pick up your book. Unless I get, again, as I said, they know you or your famous, no one's gonna pick up your book to see, to discover how amazing it is on the inside. Unless the cover and the title catch their attention in some way, go away, create a cover shared with me and we'll give you publish it as an Amazon book. Share that listing with me. I'd love to have a look, see what you've got enough to give you some feedback if that's what you want or just give you some praise if that's what you want. In the meantime, if you'd like to connect with me, you can hit to my website, Adrian jay Kwan.com or put it below. I cover a few things, such a cell publishing. The main thing that's probably going to be of importance or interest to you is I put a lot of the Canva templates that I work with on a special member's area on my website and you can get access to that for free. There's no charge for that. And you can actually get templates, not just for covers, the covers that I created in Canva, but actually templates for entire books such as children's books or children's coloring books. I mean, if you've got a 200 page novel or full-color coffee table book, you generally don't create those in Canada, but for the simpler books that I create, I share with you the templates that I've used to actually publish real books. And then you can take those templates and download them, import them into Canada, edit the text, edit the title, the author, the cover image, whatever it is. And then Bob's your uncle, Adrian, jQuery.com. As I said, Go away, create a cover. Let me know how you go. If you have any questions, you can always email me on info at Adrian jQuery.com or connecting with me through this platform. But in the meantime, I hope you enjoyed this course. I guess the best thing you could do for me if you have, is to leave a positive review. But more so than that, I hope you got a lot of value and you saw how easy it is, how easy it was to create an effective book cover. I look forward to seeing what you create.