How to publish a children's book on Amazon for FREE using Canva

1. Introduction: Have you ever dreamed of becoming a self-published author or would you like to be able to put a customized book together for your child or your loved one. My name is Adrian. Back in 2017, I published air best-selling Amazon book called from fear to freedom. And in this course, I'm going to show you what so many people have been asking me, which is, how did you get published? Now, it's not complicated, It's not a complicated process, but it can be quite finicky. And if you don't know the ins and outs, you could write the best book in the world and never get published. Which to me is a great shame. In this course. My promise to you is we're going to get you to being a published author, a self-published author on Amazon or Kindle, kVp, Kindle Direct Publishing. As long as you follow along step-by-step, you do the class project. And then from there on, the best part is you'll be able to take the lessons we learn and apply them to other book projects, whether it is large, full-scale, full-color yearbooks, something like this. Whether it's a traditional black and white paper back, this is from fear to freedom that hit number one on Amazon. Or whether it's something else. Whether you want to take this seriously as a business or just produce a really unique, cool, customized gifts for friends in children, for loved ones. The world is going to be your oyster. Let's get into this. And as I said, my promise to you that if you follow along, you'll become a published author on Amazon or Kindle, hopefully within 24 hours. So let's get to it. 2. Your project = get PUBLISHED!: Okay guys, for the class project, we're going to be very hands-on and you are going to publish children's book. And it doesn't have to be a children's book, but it is going to be an 8.5 by 8.5 inch full color paper book to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing platform or kVp for short. So I encourage you the way I've laid out this course is to be very, very hands-on. So I actually recommend that you follow along in real-time. Pause the video if you have two or certainly pause between the classes and do the steps that you see me doing, do them in real-time. I think that's the best way that I can guarantee that at the end of this course, you will be published versus if you watch all the classes, but don't do anything. If you watch all the classes from beginning to end and then try and come back and do the project. It's not gonna be that easy because there's a lot of very finicky things that you need to learn when you're publishing as a first-time author. And they're not really common sense things like bleed, margins, text being in the right place, images being in the right place. What colors can you use? What colors can you not use? What paper, what covers? So I don't want you to get frustrated. And this is where a lot of potential authors sort of give up. They get the manuscript done, they do all that stuff or the creative work, which I think is a hard work. And then they get stymied at this point of getting published because it's not maybe as intuitive or as easy for them to understand as simply writing a book. And to me that's a big shame because if you have the talent to be an author, to put out that creative work, then let's get you published. So if you follow along step-by-step, I can pretty much guarantee that you will have a book just like this published two kVp by the end. And I say this because I literally published, printed this book to the KTB platform just last week for the soul purposes of this course, I know it works. Now. You don't have to make it a children's book. You could put whatever copy you want in here. You could make it a unique gift for a loved one. You can make it the story of how two of you fell in love and lived happily together forever and ever after. I think on that it's very important to note as well, the lessons you learn from this course are applicable to whatever self-publishing you want to do from this point on, whether it is you want to publish a nonfiction paperback book, it's about a 100150 pages or so. This is a first book I published back in 2017, then went on to hit number one on Amazon. The lessons apply to that. If you want to publish a giant full-color yearbook, something like this, then you can absolutely do that to same lessons apply, just maybe a little jump up in the creative and the copy. Or if you wanted to go for the full Hogan publishes his one volume to volume mega project that I did that had 160 interviews with women around the world, then you can absolutely do that too. Yes. Whilst the project that you're about to do is maybe appears simple on the outside. Don't be fooled. The lessons you learned from it are going to put you in a really good position to start or to further yourself publishing career. So once again, I encourage you to do it in real-time and do it with me. And if you do that, then I can promise you that we will get published because that book, that template. And by the way, I'll put the template in the project area that got approved by Kindle just last week ever worked for me. It will work for you. What I want you to do, what I encourage you to do is once you have published, you get that email from kVp from Amazon saying, congratulations, your book is available for sale and you're able to do that. You add a charge for it, get royalties from it, upload it to the project gallery with a link to the actual listing on Amazon so we can all have a look. And obviously if you have any questions, ask them in that area, and I will do my best to help you out. But that's what this project is about. So do it in real-time and I can pretty much guarantee will get you published. You will be a published author on Amazon potentially earning royalties, or that's what you want to do within 24 hours. So let's get started. 3. Set up your free KDP account: Okay, Your first and super easy step to take is to set up a case ADP account. Kvp is Kindle Direct Publishing. Now, Kindle is run by Amazon and kVp is where you're going to upload all your files, publish all your books right now and in the future, hopefully, e-books, paperbacks, hardcovers. And the good news is if you have an Amazon account, which most of us do, then you can use the same email to create a KDC account if you don't have one already. So you just go to kVp.amazon.com. Hit Sign Up here. If you don't have an Amazon account or if you do already have an Amazon account, hit Sign-in, use those credentials to sign in and then set up your account. Now, it is super easy and I'm not gonna walk you through it because it really is just information such as what's your address, your banking details, so you can get paid. And then there is some information that's context or country-specific, which is namely the taxation information because you're gonna get paid hopefully. And Amazon needs to know how much money you should keep as text tax withholding of that depends on which country you're in and also whether you're registered for certain taxes, such as here in Australia with GST and obviously I'm not a tax professional icon. Give you that information. Go to kVp, set up your account. I really want you to do it now because it's one of those things that if you set up the bulk, you have all your manuscript, your images ready to go. Then you hit Katie Ping, you going to go to credit an account. There's just too much risk of you stopping right there. And what should be the easiest step? I want you to do that right now I hit the KT P.amazon.com. As I said, use your Amazon credentials to sign in. It should be super easy if you have any questions, just put a comment below or send me an email and I'll be happy to help you out. 4. Write your manuscript: Okay. You've set up by now, hopefully you're KD PPE account. If you haven't set that up, go back and set it up. I don't want your authoring career to be derailed because you set the, you left the most annoying task to last. So go set up that KTB account. The step we're going to cover here is writing your manuscript. Now you might say, Adrian, That's a little weird. What are you talking about? I thought this is a children's book. It is. But you're still gonna have words in it. And look, because it's a simple children's book and I have it right here. So in the example that I have here, you can see it's really just one sentence per spread. A spread being two pages are left page on our right page. And to be honest, when I was mocking this book up for you, I just wrote it as it, as it came sentence per page. But if you want to make your manuscript a little bit more coherent than that and you want to plan it out. I highly, highly recommend that you go to a Google document or a word processing document and do something similar to this. You can see here that I've put each sentence in a bulleted list. Now, why have I done that? That's because as I said, each spread, at least while I'm showing you to do it in this, in this instance. And of course, once you've mastered the basics, you can change it to suit your needs. But each one has a sentence and an image. And that means for every sentence basically there's gonna be two pages because for every sentence There's an image. It's just a simple way of keeping track of how many pages you're actually going to have in the finished book. Now, Kindle has a minimum page requirement of 24. As a new can't have fewer than 24. I guess you could put in 20 pages and then have four blank pages. But let's say you want to take, take advantage of the full 24 more is okay. By the way, there is a maximum limit which has several 100 pages. I'm assuming you're not gonna be doing that with a children's book. But we want to hit 24. To hit 24, we need a minimum of 12 sentences, because for each sentence we're also going to have an image. So 12 times to being 24. You can just see I've used a bulleted list here. And for each bullet point, I have portfolio for each number in that list. I've put a sentence. Now, when we're writing the manuscript, the bit that will trip you up is there's no real technical term for it. But what you have to understand is that this is the inside cover. Of course is nothing printed on the inside cover. This is page one. Odd pages go on the right. And the first page doesn't have a corresponding image because this is the inside cover, so this is page one. Then obviously you turn the page, page two or the even pages on the left. And all the odd pages are on the right. And for this example, I'm putting all the sentences on the right. So all the sentences, war P on the odd pages and all the images will appear on the left pages. Why this is super important for you to understand is because every book starts with a page one and doesn't have a corresponding page on this inside cover. This is not paid to you or this is page one, page 1 tenth to appear by well, page one appears by itself. And then you have a recurring pattern of page two, even page on the left, odd page on the right. Turn again. This is now page for even page on the left, odd page on the right. For the example of this book, I am putting all the images on the left. So the even pages and all the sentences or the manuscript or the copy on the right or the odd pages. This is super important for you to realize because when it comes to creating this document, this one that I've put as number one is what is going to appear on that page one by itself. And for me, I've put a dedication that you could put a title there, put whatever you want there, but just be aware that that's going to appear by itself on the opposite to that inside cover. So maybe an easier way just to visualize this for you would be page one is that is right here as the dedication. Page two is actually going to be an image, page three, which is here is the title. And then you'd get into the manuscript proper. So all right, on page four, remember on the left side we're going to have a white images. Look, you can flip it and put all the images on the right. That's completely up to you. But the principles remain the same. I think it's good when you're starting off in this authoring journey to put the word image in there just to remind you that there is not just words and the images have to be fitted in somewhere. And this will actually make your bullet point count, your numbered bullet list count actually be exactly the number of pages you're going to have. So if you see here, I'll just put image. Image. This is what it looks like at the end. This is a complete manuscript for this book. Again, you can see that first page. Again, it's a page that appears by itself at the very front, opposite the inside cover. I put the tip, the dedication there. And then after that it's a repeating pattern of images on the left, the even numbered pages, and then the sentences or the copy on the right. So this one happens to be the title of the book with my name there. And then again on the left image on the right, once upon a time there was a young girl named Savannah. And this is how I recommend that you script out your manuscript. It's just a bit easier I feel to write the manuscript out in one go rather than trying to create it as you're creating what we'll be doing. The next step, which is creating the canvas Document, trying to create on the fly. I don't think the manuscript will flow as well. I know you're probably not looking to win a writing Prize for this book, but it still makes it easier for the manuscript to flow. So this is how I recommend that you script it out. You can see it goes all the way to the end with that again, image on the left. And in the end she wanted the pageant and made her mom proud. That's on the right. And then I've just put the end or at the very end, you can see that's an even paid, so that doesn't appear on the left. It's not so important how you end the book in terms of how many pages are leftover. It doesn't matter whether you ended on the left page or right page. What you will generally find. You can see that here. The end is on the left as it could, as I said. And then Amazon tends to put in some blank pages. You can see there's a blank page, blank page, blank page. And then it's a barcode on the back. And a little thing they put by Amazon, which has manufactured by Amazon.com.AU, Sidney, New South Wales, Australia. That's because to actually print a book that are a certain number of pages that have to go into it. I believe they need to be multiples of four. I won't go into the maths here. But basically it doesn't matter on what number page you end. Amazon will probably put in some blank pages at the end, however many they need to. And then the last page will be a page like this. Basically what I'm saying here is that you can't really have your book and with the end and had that and have that be the very last page facing the back cover. It doesn't really work that way. It's more important that you begin at the right way. Remember that page number one is by itself facing the opposite cover. And then all even pages on the left or odd pages on the right. And script that the manuscript in a document. You can get the flow so that you're aware of how many pages do I actually have, as you can see here. So 24 pages in total. And that is the minimum that's required for our document. So pause this course now, go and write up that manuscript and then hit Play again when you've got it done. 5. Layout your book in Canva: Let's get into the nitty-gritty of how to actually use Canva to set up your book manuscript. And the good news is this is actually going to pick up pace a lot. It's going to actually become quite quick. So here we have the Canvas app. Remember I said I recommended downloading the app versus doing it on their website. If you do it on their website, it's gonna look very similar to this. But you're gonna come up to create a design. I want you to come up to create a design. And you'll have all these different options, but I want you to skip them and I want you to hit Custom Size here. Now, we're not worried about px, which is pixels with designing a book. And our book is 8.5 inches by 8.5 interests. That's what I want you to put an 8.5 by 8.5, make sure you've got in for inches, they're not pixels. And then hit Create new design. And here we are. We have one page, one blank page. And we're gonna add as many pages as we want. And remember, we also have our document, that manuscript, the copy that I had you run up before the plan which is here. This is where we get to work now, so I'm going to copy. You could type this out again if you wanted to, but there's no reason to come to your manuscript, copy the what you mapped out before, and then come back over to Canada and you hit the text on the left. It doesn't matter which one of these just put at a heading for now. And you can click in here and hit paste. Now, I will get rid of that number one, which has copied over from our Word document or a Google Docs document. Now here's where you get to pick your font. It's completely up to you. There's no best font or worse font. I do find that there are some that are easier to read and some that are perhaps a little bit harder for our book. Used Times New Roman, which I guess is Canvas version of Times New Roman but not spelled that way. I do recommend that you take the text in from the margins quite a lot. And the reason being you, and I'll show you this in a second and I'm going to center it from now. The reason being is when you open up the book, what you'll see is that the words go quite to the side. And especially here in the middle where this is fold, it can be a little bit difficult to read. In fact, it's something I'd probably change in if I was to revise this book is to bring that text in from the side a little bit because you can see it disappeared a little bit into the, into the center of the book where that spine folders. What I want you to do is bring that book, bring that text in quiet a file ways from the side. You can see camera is actually really good here. It helps, you know, when the texts It's centered, which is what I'm going to do. And also sort of gives you these margins on the side, I'm going to ignore them. You can see them keep popping up that square. But I'm going to put it right in the middle. I'm gonna go with his Times New Roman. And that size looks great. So to Savannah, proof that good things come in small packages. Now, remember that's the dedication, that is the page that appears by itself at the front of the book opposite the cover. So there's not gonna be anything opposite this page. That's page one done. Now let's pick up the pace a little bit. We know if you remember back from our manuscript here, that we're now going to put all images on the left and text on the right. So coming up next, you'll see the ad page down here. And we're going to need an image. Now, whatever image you decide to put in is up to you. This is going to be opposite the title page from me on the left. So I'll go to elements here. And the title of my book is a little pageant queen that could, if I put in young girl into Canva here, I don't want, although we certainly don't want photos because this is like a cartoon as children's book. Instead go to graphics. Now here are all the options. Let's see if I can find. I can't find the one that I use straightaway, but this one, this could work. I think this is actually a graphic that I did use and make it a little bit bigger. This is an 8.5 by 8.5 inch page. But remember that Don't take it all the way to the sides because that will then disappear into the spine of the book. I recommend again centering it, make it big but not too big. That is page two. So remembering once again, this is a trickiest part to get as a new author. That is page two. That is this page here on the left. Now we're going to put page three on that right, which if we go back to our manuscript, is here. So I'll copy this little pageant queen that goodbye Adrian Kwan is indeed the title page, so I'll hit the page again. In fact, what I'll do first is I will copy the text from page one because I want to keep the same font and the same sizing. I don't want that changing on all the pages. And I will then go back to my document and copy over the little pageant queen that could copy over my title, go back to the Canada document and hit Paste there. Again, you can get rid of the numbers and something like that. If you want to change it up, fit it on one line, maybe you don't like the way this title was looking. Of course, you can change the size. You could even change a font, font from page to page. I don't usually recommend changing the font because if every page in a book Had a different font. I think you would find that quite distracting and off putting, and it looks a little weird, so I wouldn't recommend doing that. But if you wanted to change the size of a font, let's say on one page you have more to right? And it doesn't really fit. You might want to make it a bit smaller. You can absolutely do that. We're going to repeat this process. I won't show you the whole thing here because once you get going, it's very simple to understand. I'll show you one more, add another page. In fact, let's skip another page and let's go to the text first. And that's one thing that you could do is you could do all the texts pages first and then put all the images in later. But the next page, the text which is over here, is once upon a time there was a young girl named savannas are hit Copy. I'll go back to Canva. And I will put that in there. Get rid of the excess space at the bottom, get rid of that number. I know that slightly annoying, but believe me, copying and pasting as much better than trying to write it on the spot. This is a text that we're trying to find an image for. Once upon a time there was a young girl named Savannah. This is remember Page four is on the left and page five is on the right. So page for the image, for page five, the way we're doing things. So again, I put in young girl here, you could find anything that really suits, takes your fancy. There's no right or wrong. Let's say that we are going for this 11 with a fairy wings. Now. I've hit left my mouse click on it and it's gone the wrong page, that's fine. You just drag it up to here. There it is, onto page four. And remember, make it bigger center definitely. Unless you have some reason not to. Now, once you drag the image into the center, you can absolutely change, change a few things about this. So obviously you've seen that I can resize it. If you click on the up here, you can see certain color panels or color swatches. Now, if you go in here, you can change the colors of this image around, which could be super useful for your book. Let's say that it's looking a little bit too pink and maybe you want the wings to be blue, which I believe is this color here, fiddling around that you better figure it out. You go blue. And let's say that dress, we wanted to be a brighter shade of pink. Go there. And let's say the young girl that we're writing this book four is not a blonde, She's brunette. So we go up here and we change that to a brown or something a bit brownish, not gray, probably not pink. But you can also then pick whichever colors you want here. So let us give her aqua here because why not? Don't think that once you drag an image in here, you're stuck with how the image looks. So to give you another example, Let's say you dragged in this image over here. You can actually drag to images in as well. There's no reason you only have to put one. We'll leave our fairy over there and let's give her a friend. There's a guide showing us it's in the center, but maybe we want the feet to be on the same level. And again, when I click when we have this image selected, you'll be able to see anything that you can change or pop on the left. Now this one actually doesn't look like we can change any of the color. Unfortunately, you can't have some of these filters over here and play around with this. The options are pretty limitless, but let me get rid of that for a circuit, find something that we can change the color of. Let's see, we could change the color of this. Now I had to pause for a while to find an image I could actually change the colors for I finally found one, this one I can change the colors for. So again, let's say we don't like the green dress. So you can go up here and find and see, oh, that must be the color for the address. Let's give her a pink dress because why not? Then let's make her hair, which is this kind of grayish color. So it's probably this box up here. Let's make a blonde. Well, that hasn't worked. Let's give a blonde, but then it's changed the color of her eyes. So that's not looking really well. So we'll hit Undo. Undo. Maybe we should just leave it at that. Maybe we could change the color over boots to, I don't know, green. There you go. So you bring in the images, you resize them, you play with them. You can change the size of them, the color of them within reason, you'll find some of the images that you can't. But have a play. It is super easy and super quick. It is much quicker and much easier than getting a graphic artist, Believe me, to design an image for each and every one of your pages. Go through this, go through the whole process. So remember Page four. So even though on the left, this is the image for page five, which is a copy. Just as up here page to that image is the image for page three. Now what I want you to do, and you can pause this video here, go through the rest of this menu script and copy all the texts into it, pick images for it. And when you've finished doing that, it should look something like this. Now this is the actual manuscript to this book, the published book, the one I've had printed by Amazon and shipped to me. So I know it's a little bit hard to see you like this, but I'll scroll through it just so you can get an idea for what for what it looks like. You can see, as I mentioned before, that I feel that the texts went a little far to the side which made it a bit hard to see in the spine so that it's something that actually would change. But to give you an idea, if you look at the bottom-right, I can hit this which is called GridView. These are all the pages. So this is a good time to remind you once again, page one is opposite that inside cover by itself, There's nothing opposite. And then after that, I want you to think in terms of spreads. Page spreads. Now page spreads are a left page and a right page. Again, evens on the left. Here is a spread, this image with his copy four with 567891011. So you can see I've kind of matched up the image to the texts that I've put in. It doesn't have to be exactly two children's book. You could spend a whole lot of time doing that. You could spend five seconds during that. It's up to you. Again. You could play with the images, you could resize them a little bit. 16 goes with 17, etc. You get the idea up to the last spread, which is 22 or 23. And then just that, the end page at the very, very end. Once you get to this stage, just makes sure that the spreads are the right way around. Again. You could flip it so that all the images, for example, on the right and all the text is on the left. So if I went around and put all the images on the odd pages, just with these two. So now the hex would be on the left, the image would be on the right. If you wanted to change this spec, you could have, let's say the first spread have the image on the left. The second spread has an image on the right. Then the third spread is back to the left force, whereas back to the right, the options are limitless. I think you understand the sky's the limit. We're going to move on now so I can actually get you into the publishing and uploading phase. But understand, once you all for warning, once you upload this to Amazon took ADP, it is not final. Your uploaded and it will go through an approval process. But let's say you go back and go, oh, there was a spelling mistake or I don't really like that image. Or as I told you, I thought that text disappeared a little bit too much into the spine. You can go back even after people have bought your book, change it, re-upload the manuscript and as long as everything is still correct, that correctly formatted, correctly sized, then everyone after that who purchases a book? Purchases a book will get the updated version. So don't go for perfection, go for speed in this case, just get bang this out. So I want you to get to your version of this however it looks. And I want you to then be ready to begin the uploading process. Let's get to that. 6. Export your book from Canva: Congratulations you have hopefully by now your manuscript laid out in camera looking something like this. Now, the next stage is super simple. We're going to download this as a PDF because that is the format that kVp is gonna want. We got to the top. You can see download here in the top right. And we hit this drop down and we want PDF print, not PDF, Standard PDF print. And you'll leave it as all pages because we want all these pages in our book. You can choose to save download settings if you want to, which means that if you change anything here next time you go to download, camera's gonna remember about it. But that doesn't really matter. Hit Download. Canada will go away and have a little think and get ready to prepare this file and download it for you to hopefully your computer somewhere. You can see it'll give you a drop-down list here. So I'm just going to put it on our desktop. It's got a name here, call it whatever you want to. So it's got a little pageant queen book dot pdf. Hit Save. It's done it. Now camera at the moment actually has this bug where it comes up again and once we save it again, so I'm just going to hit cancel because I've already saved at once. Now, I will go away and I will find it on my desktop, which is right here, this PDF file. And if you have something that can read it, so Adobe Acrobat, you can double-click it, open it, and you can see what it looks like here. Again, unfortunately, it's a little difficult to see it as a wound. The book, you'll be able to see it as it will look in the book in a second. But for now, it is still sort of looking at the interval per individual pages by itself. But it's a good chance just for you to have another one. I want to make sure everything looks right there, no spelling mistakes or anything like that. But this is now ready to go all the way up to the last page. At the end. We are now ready to upload this tick adp. We're almost there. But before we do that, we need something called cover. We're going to disappear back to Canva to do it. And then we'll be uploading them will be publishing. So let's get to it. 7. Create your book cover in Canva: The fun part, we get to design the cover. You'll probably now going, Adrian widen, we do this at the beginning. There is a good reason for that. I have personally designed books where I've designed the cover for us because it's cool to show people that cover. People get excited about the book. However, I wanted to make sure you did it in this way, just to show you one thing here. So you have your book now, now that you've written out the menu script, right now that you have something that looks like this. And you know that there are 24 pages in it. What you need to do is go to what's called the ADP cover calculator. Katie p.amazon.com, forward slash covered Dash calculator or Coke cover hyphen calculator. Now, why you need to put this in, this is going to spit out a template for your cover based on the dimensions of your book. But really importantly, and this is why I got into the manuscript first based on how thick the spine of the book is going to be. Now because this is a 24 page book. The minimum size you can publish on Kindle. There's the spine is not thick enough for me to even put a spine on to put any text on the spine because it's so small so the spine text doesn't matter. But if you're thinking about it, if you publish a book that's 200 pages thick, that spine now is a little bit thicker and you'll cover is going to need to take that into account because I cover is a front end, the back. I now need if my page in my book is thick enough, text on my SPY. If you then go and crazy and you publish an 800 page book, then the spine definitely becomes noticeable. And again, your cover is going to need to reflect that because the spine is thicker, I'll cover needs to have more space and a tour reflect that. We're going to go to the cover calculator and we're gonna put it in the following information. Please watch carefully to get this right. We're doing a paper bag. The interior type is premium color, not standard color. Now premium color is just a little bit fancier. The reason we're picking it is not because it's fancier, but because for some reason, standard color on Kindle, the minimum number of pages you need to print a book is 72. And I'm not going to print a 72 page children's book. Having said that, if you in your manuscript, if you have 72 pages and you want to go to a standard color, you can, if you wanted to do black and white, you absolutely could do that as well. But I think the images and color and nice for the children. Premium color paper type, one whitepaper page turn left to right. We're not going backwards now. Measurement units, inches. The interior trim size, if you remember, was 8.5 by 8.5. So obviously we pick that. Now here's a big thing we need to put in the number of pages we put in 24. Then we hit calculate dimensions. Now you can have a look at this. This will give you all the dimensions because your cover is not going to be three separate ones. It's not going to be front cover, back cover spine. It needs to be one PDF file. Are you seeing now why I wanted you to do the manuscript before doing the cover because there would've been no way you could have done this without knowing the width of the spine. First. You go, Adrian, this is super-complicated unless you're a graphic designer, like how am I going to do this? Well, we don't worry about this. We're going to download our templates. So go here, hit Download Template. Now it gives you a zip file. I'm going to find this folder here on my desktop. I'm going to open it up now. Hopefully you have some sort of Instagram. You probably will. If you don't, then just go on to do an Internet search, how to open a zip file or a ZIP file. But we'll hit extract all this. I didn't install anything. This is just the software that came with Windows. Hit extract. And then it opens up and you'll see that there are these three files inside. There is a PDF, these are templates for your cover. There's a README which you can read if you want to. I've never read it. There's a PNG which is an image file. So if you know how to work with image software such as Canada, you could use this is how you can see it's got the guides for the, I will go through this in a sec that basically the solid black line around the outside is where your cover it's going to be cut. This pink areas, what's called bleed. So you need to know is that the covers printed all the way to the end of the pink and then it's chopped off at the black. That's not an exact process. So the reason they've given you this sort of pink margin is to say anything you really want to make sure you get printed. Don't put it in the pink. Because depending on how the machine cuts off the edges of the book, it may or not be visible. So basically you want to put everything in the white. The dotted blue line is where the spine is going to be folded. Again, it's not super exact. But I believe it's anything less than 50 or 70 pages. It's not going to be thick enough, as I mentioned, to put any text any text on the spine. We don't really need to worry about the spine in this case at all. But you could use this or you could use a PDF, which looks exactly the same. It's just a different file format. But what we're going to do now is import this into Canva and then create our cover in Canada. Okay, so here we are back in Canva. Create a design that's where we're gonna go. We're not gonna go custom sizes. What we're gonna do is import file. Hit this Import File button. We're going to navigate to the folder where we saved the template that we just downloaded from ADP, which is here. And I want you to import the PDF. Let's double-click that. It's finished downloading or importing uploading. Now we hit this. And while up there is our image file while cover template. Now we don't want any of this text here. You might want to read it to make sure it looks right, but I hope it is. So for example, paper book, yes, paperback book, cover template left to right, our images, the dimensions are right. We're gonna start getting rid of this now. Just hit it, hit delete all this stuff here. It's what I've told you before. So for example, black solid line is where it's going to be cut to produce a final trim size. Basically, we know all this. We're gonna get rid of it. We're gonna start actually creating our cover. I will get rid of everything except that little barcode reminder. So this is where every book that's ever printed, including this children's book, will have a barcode on the back. You can see it right there. I just want to keep that place holder there. I know exactly where the barcode is going to be. And then once I've got my cover, I can remove it. But remember, we want to design inside the white. You go, Adrian, how do I design a cover? What exactly the same way we did the manuscripts. So we'll go for the text and we will put in here the little pageant queen that could. And again, you can put any text you want. We'll put a leak Spartan in for this one, just to be a little bit different. Now, you can see that the edges of the texts are getting dangerously close to the pink. I don't want that. I do like the size of the text, however, it's nice and big. So I will bring in the edges here. And it will do a text wrap and we will go. That's gonna be a little bit difficult for Canada to find the middle. So you would either have to guess to me, this is the easiest way, just make sure it looks somewhat roughly in the middle of this. Cable will go, well, this is in the middle here, but that's in the very middle of the entire cover design. So that's gonna go right over the spine. This will be on the back cover, this part will be on the front counter, not what we want. The top and vertical will work. So yes, sets in the middle and that looks about middle for me. Then I probably want to have an image there. So we'll go back to elements. Let's look for Super Girl. Let's look at graphics again. Remember I don't want a photo. Let's say if you want to put this one here, I think this is one that we used before perhaps, but it's okay. Let's use a different one. Let's use this, a flying, flying go. Now, let's move this down a little bit. We'll move that across again, just trying to find the middle roughly. There. You can see camera, that dotted line is meaning that this text and the image, the middles are aligned, which is useful to know. I probably should put my name in there so I'll just hit go up here, hit Duplicate. Give me another textbox that's exactly the same. And I will put by nutrient because that's the author. I might make that a little bit smaller so I can go up the font size here with this selected and let us go to, I don't know, 24, little bit smaller and in the middle. Okay. How's that book? Title? Name, images looking good on this down a little bit. There's our front cover done. The back cover. Let's hit a duplicate on this and just come up with something cute for the back. You can put another dedication here you're dedicating to a young child. And let's say you could put to my youngest daughter who who will one day up to be a superstar, even though she probably already is. That'll look good again, we can try and get that in the middle. Does that look about middle? That looks about right. Now. This is ready to go except for one thing. If we export this now, I'll say this, it's going to have the pink, the black, and everything. The blue dotted lines and the fault and this, we don't need this anymore because wood that barcode be okay down there. Yeah, absolutely. Because we have this is our back cover and this is the text on the back cover. It's not covering our text, and our text isn't covering the barcode so we can get rid of them. That's irrelevant now, whoops. Actually in fact, that's not so bad. Weekend delete everything. We don't need to leave anything here except our images and probably a background now you probably don't want a pink background. I used white for mine. So if I go up to here, because there's actually a rectangle here on the Beck. Don't know if you can see that. I can't move it, but that's pink. I don't want a pink background. So let's go one. Now that is ready to go. I understand it doesn't look like a cover now, but that is the back cover on the left. The front cover on the right, the spine is in the middle. But Amazon, when it printed out in its giant machines, is gonna take care of all of that. I kept the guides whilst I was putting all this stuff on. And then at the end I wonder remove the guides because if I don't remove it, the dotted blue lines and the pink around the outside for the bleed and the black lines, they were all gonna be printed and I don't want that. This is all I want. This is now ready to go. What do I do? You say? Well, I need to export this the same way as before. We need a print ready PDF files. So we go to the top. We are going again to the PDF print. We go to download. By the way, this image was already the correct size because we downloaded it from the cover, the cover template, the cover creator. If you actually look at the Resize because I have a pro feature here, you can see it is number of pixels doesn't matter, but if you go to inches, you can see this is very close here to 8.5. The reason it's a little bit more is that bleed. I was talking about that little extra at the end to make sure the image or goes all the way to the end and then gets cut off. And why is it 17 across? Well, because 8.5 by two is roughly 17 because there's a front cover and back cover. This is already the right side, it's suffice to say so download, PDF, print, hit Download. It'll go away, do its thing. Let's just say that the desktop, and rather than calling it paperback underscore 8.5 by 8.5 underscore 24 and the scoping, Let's just help out. We call that cover. I was at Save. Again, this is his bug with camera at the moment at asks you to save it twice. I'll cancel out of that. We now have our cover ready to go. And you can find it on your desktop. If you can. Find it on your desktop, hit double-click on it. Opened up. There's our cover. We are now ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. We are ready to upload all this and we're just about done. We've done all the hard work. And let's get this thing, upload it, and let's get it submitted for approval. 8. Upload your files to KDP: Okay, homestretch. Well done for making it this far. We need to go back to ADP.amazon.com. Obviously, that was the very first thing I got you to do because I didn't want to have to worry about it now because it's so close, you wouldn't want to be going all I have to set this up now and then I'll come back and do it later. And later becomes never come to Katie p.amazon.com. We sign in. We are producing, following my mouse here, a paperback. I might actually going to do this with you. I'm not going to publish his book again because I've already done it. But let me walk you through the steps, follow through, pause it if you need to. But this really doesn't take very long Language, English, book title. We already had that, you put it on your cover. So for me it's the little pageant queen. But could I don't have a subtitle. It's not part of a series is just one-off book. The edition number don't need that author. I don't put my prefix in there, but I'll put firstname Adrian, quiet, contributors, That's Pete, other people who've contributed to the bulk. If you have an outside Illustrator, which we don't, You could put them in here, but we don't need to description now, if you do want to sell a million bucks, you want to find people, you want millions of people to find your book and create the next JKL, the next JK, Rowling sort of thing. Then the description is important. You need to put in the correct word, keyword stuff that people search for. But this is just a first off. Remember you're gonna be able to change this later. For now. Just put in whatever you want to put in. So I will put in for here. This is the story of a young peasant girl named Savannah, who had the courage to pursue in her dreams. That will do for now. Now you can put formatting in here so you can see there's bold. If you wanted to italicize underline, you can put a numbered list, bullet list. There's all sorts of, you can even put headings, etc, that you can put in links in here as well. This is this source button here. But you can put HTML and they don't worry about it. Let's just leave it at that for now. Let's get it done. And we can worry about all the finicky stuff and trying to optimize it later, but that'll do for now. Now publishing rights. Well, this is not a public domain work. Obviously I own the copyright and I hold necessarily publishing rights. Now, using Canva, all the things that you use it you're able to use. That's one of the reasons you don't want to just take images off the Internet and put them in because it had someone else copyright and then you put them in a book that's not legal. So that's another reason I had you use it in Canva. I own the copyright. Now keywords, this is again for people who are searching for your book. For mine, I might put in pageantry. I might put in children's story, picture book. It's really easy. You're just going to print this out for your daughter, for your son, you don't need to worry about this. It's optional, but if you wanted to do that, you can do that. Again. If you want to do it later, you can do that. Don't worry about that part too much. The two Browse Categories, you get to choose agreed for your book. This is more if you are aiming for best-seller status on number one, which I've hit, I've had top ten on another, on other occasions as well. You can rank in two separate categories. And if you really want to rank at the top, it's better to put yourself in a category that isn't hugely competitive. So for example, if I was to put in, I don't know, not put myself in nonfiction and put myself in business or computers or any of these big ones, health and fitness. There's no way in a million years I'm gonna rank and number one, not for a book like this anywhere. And that's not the point. But a nice such as health and fitness, a competitive that's not one that I'd want to pick. There are some niches in here obviously. But the idea that you can pick two niches for this one, we're not nonfiction and fiction. Could be a comic or graphic novel, but let's go in here fiction. And let's have a look. Just pick one that's close to what you're looking for. So we could put in fairy tales. Let's put in fairy tales, there's one. And is there anything in here about children, magical realism, not really. Romance, science fiction should be short stories, superheroes, juvenile fiction. Here's one juvenile fiction. External adventure biographer, biographical. Let's just say juvenile fiction in general. Then we hit Save. Again, this is not hugely important, but you're trying to pick ones that are probably two categories. My advice would be pick categories that are accurate. Don't pick ones that are not accurate, but stay away from ones that are super competitive, like business, for example. Don't worry about the large print. What is large print? 16 points and higher. I mean, you could if you wanted to, but I certainly didn't. Does this book contained language, situations, or images inappropriate? Are not. This is a children's book. Save and Continue. By the way, if you do produce an adult book, which I have done hitting, Yes. That's fine. You don't suddenly get pulled up by the police. It's fine. You can print adult books on Amazon. Now, ISBN is a unique identifier for each book. You've probably seen it on the bar codes and you can see on this one maybe you can make it at ISBN number there. Normally you have to pay. But for an ISBN and I think they costs, I think I paid about a 100 or $200 for a pack of ten or something like that. They do cost a fair bit. This is another reason to print on Amazon, you get an ISBN for free. So let's hit that. You can use a free kick or yes, please assign me an ISBN. It does its thing and now have an ISBN publication date. Just leave it blank. It will automatically, when you leave a blank, workout, when you upload it, when you publish it. And we'll update that as basically today. If you wanted to put it in a different publication that you absolutely can. Now remember we're using premium color, not standard because standard needed a minimum of 72 pages and we want to go 24. Premium color. We're not explain nine. Make sure you get this right. We are 8.5 by 8.5. Where are we? Bleed settings? It's no bleed. Bleed is for another day but just trust me on this. I know that I've talked about bleed very shortly when it came to the cover. But the book inside does not have bleed, so we don't have images basically going all the way to the edges of the page, so no bleed. Now the paperback cover, finished mat or glossy, there's no one that's better or worse. This one you'll see is glossy. So it looks really nice and shiny. It does print up a pick up, let's say some thumbprint look shiny, which is a good thing. The bad thing is if, if this book, someone's gonna be taking a selfie with it. And like with that ring light or flash photography, it will bounce off the shiny cover. And you weren't seeing anything, you're just basically see what's happening here. So a matt cover may not look quite as fancy, but it doesn't reflect the light the same way. This is actually a Lindsey the image that I took the background out of four, you see how there's no ring light. So it's really up to you. Met glossy, met glossy, shiny but reflective, not shiny, but absorbent and better for selfies. If you want a whole bunch of young children or your son or daughter taking a photo with a book and you're gonna be a flash photography there, then you probably want to go with Matt, but it's completely up to you personal preference. I will leave it as glossy because it's a children's book. We wanted to be shiny. Oh, now here's the moment you've been waiting for upload the menu script, that PDF ready manuscript we got from Canva. We need to find it. It is here. Double-click that. It's gonna go and upload it, give it a second. It shouldn't take too long. And depending on your internet connection obviously. But our book files are not huge. So just wait for it to upload. Successful, right? So it's done that. Now we're going to go to the next state. So we uploaded the manuscript. We need to upload the cover now. Upload a cover you already have because we've made one. We're not going to use the inbuilt cover crater, which by the way, you absolutely can. It's a little finicky to use and you certainly won't be able to probably make it look as nice as easily. But you can use it. Upload a cover, finite cover, which we very imaginatively called cover. It's gonna go and upload again. You can see another we've got green boxes here. Manuscript uploaded successfully. It's processing the file cover uploaded successfully. It's processing the file. Does your cover include a barcode? No, it doesn't. Remember that little blank spot that we left for the barcode. We didn't put an image of a bar code in there, nor would we want to. But we'll leave that space blank and Amazon will go away and put that bar code in there. A little place holder that we had on the back cover. We're not done. We're now going to really importantly, this is where you finally, finally the hard work pays off. And you get to see, you're about to get to see whether you've laid out this book correctly or not. And if you followed my instructions up to this point, it should look something like this. We've hit that long, that print preview a button. And here it is. So this is our cover. You can see down here what is this is a cover out of page total number of 24. You can see the guides have come back now because of the overlay, but they're not going to be printed so you can get rid of them if you want to. But let's keep them in for an hour to make sure everything's all right. So you can see it's put the barcode, their back cover, front cover, there is a fold for the spine. There's nothing outside of the red, so that's good. Now we finally get to see what our book looks like. This is page one, that's the inside cover and I think it would be printed there. Does that fit with inside the gray? Yes. Now you get to see how your book we're actually look image on the left, texts on the right, next one, left, right, next one left, right. This is all you're checking. This is your last chance to check that you don't have any pages muddled up, that there are no spelling mistakes, etc. Really taken a bit of time and just go through this. Having said that attorney or 24 page children's book Social didn't take too long. If you want to, you can, rather than hitting the two-page view, you can hit the thumbnail view. And this shows you in rubber and spread. Spread is a left page on the right page. And this is kind of useful because page one you can see there's nothing on the left because as I said, page one appears by itself. Then here's a spread, spread, spread. You can see all the images seem to be on the left, which is what we wanted. You could have put them on the right. You could have mixed it up the end at the end. And you know what? Everything looks good. Amazon here is not saying that there is anything immediately wrong. What we do is now hit this button, hit Approve. We are very close to finished now. We've done the previewing. Kvp now goes away and goes, okay, what sizes your book was a collar was a black and white. What paper we're using? How many pages is it? Will work out the printing cost. This is how much it's gonna cost amazon to print your book, $3.65. We hit Save and Continue. All we need to do now is work out the pricing. Now, leave this territory. This is surprising. All territories around the world just leave it as there's no reason to go to individual territories. Choose a location where you expect the majority of your book. So sales, you might be in America in which go to Amazon.com, UK, DEFRA, Germany, France, Spain. I'm in Australia, so I'm going to hit.com.au ru just for reference. If you are not listed in one of these, then just go with.com because the dot-com or the American stores, the one that tends to ship the international orders. But I'm in Australia. That means is when I say When it says choose a location where he spent the majority of your book sales, it just makes the.com.IU price come up to the top. It's gonna get me to pick a list price, so how much I want to charge in total. And then it will base the prices and all the other Amazon stores on my Australian price. If I had put Amazon.com, it would put Amazon.com at the top. And then based on the prices of the exchange rates for the American dollar, I'm gonna do Australian. And you can see here it's giving you minimum a $1.42 maximum, $350. The minimum is based on the printing costs was, I think $3.65. Amazon needs you to charge a certain amount beyond that in order to make any money. A $1.42. Look, if you want to know the ins and outs of this, people like prices that end in dot 99. So I wouldn't charge $8.42. You could charge a $1.49. You could charge $8.99. And when you see here, you'll see the royalty that you make. The basic math of it is that you want to work out your royalty. It'll be your list price, takeaway or subtract the printing price, which was I think $3.65 or whatever it was printing, sorry, $5 or $3 again, it's $9 minus $5 and then you get 60% of what's left. So $8.99, Let's just charge $9.99. That's what I did. You can see then then it goes away and calculate fairly accurate based on the exchange rate at the moment for the other Amazon stores. So at $7.18, for example, in the US store, five pound 28 and the British store. And six pounds or €634. You can play around with this. I'm really not interested in this because I printed this book. You probably putting this book just for your child. You're customizing a book if you want to play with the prices, you can. But I'll just put $9.994 here, which is $10.99 including AUG EST for us. And I will now hit Publish. Now, when you hit Publish, you then go away, celebrate, have a glass of wine wherever you want to do. If you've done everything right, you will get an e-mail back from Amazon in about 24 hours. That looks something like this. Here's one that you get I got a while back when everything went right. So it says, Hey, your paper book is available on the Amazon store. And I'll tell you which one case you've forgotten the name of your book or in case you had multiple titles available. They're available to buy an Amazon will take you straight to your link and then you can send that link to people to purchase your book. Taking over everything here. As I've said, if you want to change anything you can, then people will tell you update one of the images or you can upload the update the title. What will happen then is if you change anything, amazon will have to go through the approval process again. But unless you change anything majorly, once you've once your book has been approved, once it'll probably be approved again. But you can see here changes to contribute a series names, Here's another page count, anything like that can take up to 72 hours to appear. But congratulations. If you get this e-mail, then you are good to go. You can send the link on Amazon to anyone to purchase and you will start making some money if that's what you want to do. There is a PS here which is ordering author copies. Now, author copies means you get to, because in the old days what you'd have to do is buy a 100 copies of your book and then you have to sell them out of your garage. Author copies allow you to purchase copies of your own book at price, so you just have to pay the printing costs and the shipping cost. Then you can order it and you can order as many as you want, and then you can sell them yourself. As I said, out of your garage if you want to, for whatever you want, that's what all the copies are. And you can order those in bulk if you wanted to. If you are going to a book signing and you needed a 100 copies of your book, you wouldn't want to buy them directly of Amazon because you're paying the marked-up price. Remember the printing costs was about $5, but we're charging ten. We don't want to pay the time, we just want to pay the five author copies is how you do that. Now, if something wasn't quite right, maybe one of the margins was off or your cover wasn't quite right, or you left something somewhere. Amazon does a pretty good job. The approval process does a pretty good job of finding bits that are not going to work correctly. In fact, sometimes it's a bit too good and find stuff that is correct and incorrect. But you'll get an email that looks like this. And it will say attention needed, please review. Then it will tell you the reasons why. Now in this case, this is a different book, but it's an interior. I needed to add baba, baba, baba block. Now, as it turned out, the automatic approval process had gotten a little bit wrong. This is an issue with bleed, but I needed to go away, fix the issue and then re-upload it. And then I needed to trigger off the approval process again. And then the second time I put I put it through it worked. I believe it went fine. I think that's still going through the approval process now, but that's what happens. So if you get an email like that saying that it's attention, you know, that it hasn't been approved. Don't fret about it. It doesn't mean all my God, I'm so wrong. Amazon didn't like my book. I can never print. No, no, no. It just means there's probably some small detail you've overlooked in terms of it's normally margins, images or something like that. You go away, find it, fix it, re-upload it, and then you should be golden. The entire process, the approval process, they say it can take up to 72 hours. I have found it's generally taken around 24 hours at the moment. If you've finished publishing your book late at night and you go to sleep, generally by the morning or by, let's say, before you go to bed tomorrow, you will have that email back, but it can take a little bit longer than it can take up to 72. So as long as you hit that published button, amazon is going through the approval process and you will get an e-mail one way or the other within 24 to 72 hours. 9. Conclusion & Congratulations!: Well look massive. Congratulations for making it to the end. And I really hope as I said back in the project video that you followed along and executed with me that if you're watching this, I hope you are either now a published author, congratulations, or the very least, you've uploaded to the kVp platform and you're just waiting for that confirmation e-mail to come back from ADP, which again can take about up to 72 hours, but they've been coming through in about 24 hours for myself at the beginning of 202022. This is where I'm supposed to get you to follow me and self promote. I am just going to recommend if you want your journey as a self-published author to continue van, to visit my website. I've just put it together again for this course. Adrian jay Kwan.com. You'll see it below. Putting your e-mail address. It's not a super-complicated website trying to sell you anything like that. Putting your e-mail address and you will get access to all the templates that I am going to be bringing out for future Skillshare courses in terms of self-publishing. As you can imagine, well, if you didn't know, this children's book course is the first course that I've put up on Skillshare. So there'll be a template, there'll be templates and resources for that. But moving forwards, I will be showing on skillshare how to do other projects such as a yearbook or full-color yearbook. How to obviously publish a traditional sort of print book, black and white. How to take on full on massive mammoth projects like this and turn that 1162 views into a book. If you want to further yourself publishing career or this, got you hooked in your went, okay, now what do I do? Then? Go to my site, Adrian jay Kwan.com, putting your e-mail address, you'll get a weekly newsletter from me with author tips, author resources, and also if you have any questions, I'm thinking of starting up a Facebook group or discord, some way of communicating with you so I can help you along in your, in your author journey. Because as I said, it can be a pretty lonely place and sometimes it can be pretty confusing when you don't know why you're getting rejected or something's not working. And I'd love to be there to help you out. Not because I'm some sort of genius, but just because I've been there, done that and been through a lot with the heartache and a lot of head scratching late at night, and I don't want you to have to do that. Go to Adrian jay Kwan.com if you've enjoyed this course and I encourage you to leave a great review. And if you didn't enjoy it or there's something that you needed to know that I didn't tell you, then let me know that as well so that I can improve. But congratulations on getting published. And I will speak to you again very soon.