How to Publish a Coloring Book Using Canva

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Ronnie Walter. I'm an illustrator and author and a coach for artists. I've published over 30 coloring books for adults and kids. Some of the traditional publisher. But most of them I have published myself. Oh, and by the way, I've sold over a 100 thousand coloring books since 2013. So that's pretty cool, right? In this class, I will teach you step-by-step how to produce your coloring book using Canva and amazing and free tool for graphic design. No need to spend money on expensive programs. You can do it all in Canva. This is the perfect class for anyone who has wanted to publish a coloring book but found themselves lost in the details to actually publishing the book. It's one thing to say, I want to publish a coloring book, but it's a whole other deal to figure out how to actually do it. This is the class for you. At the end of the lessons, you'll be equipped to lay out your interior to exact specifications. Design your book cover to stand out from the competition. Plus all the important steps to upload your final files to ADP so you can get published on Amazon very quickly. Your project is to build your own book interior plus the cover all in Canva. And if you like, publish a book on Amazon, all the tools are here for you to do exactly that. I'll be using my latest coloring book design as an example so you can see me in real time designing the interior, the cover, and uploading it to Amazon. It's super cool. So I will see you in the first lesson. 2. What You Need to Get Started: Okay, So here's what you're going to need to get started. You're going to need your black and white illustrations. And how you do those illustrations is totally up to you. When I first started, I did them with black ink on paper. And then later on I designed them on a Wacom Cintiq. And now I do all of my designs in Procreate on my iPad. However you do them, makes sure the lines are really nice and black. And you clean up all the little extras and make sure that they are just really clean, clean, black, line on white. However you make your illustrations, make sure you end up with a single jpeg of each one of the illustrations. Now that I use Procreate, I'm able to sketch and draw them all at the same time, which has saved me a lot of time and I'm much more portable than using my Cintiq. You're also going to need a Canva account, whether it's free or paid. It's up to you. I have the paid version and for what I'm going to show you in this class, you do not need the paid version. There's just a little few extras on the paid version that if you use Canva lot, it is totally worth it and I use cannabis a lot. You are also eventually going to need to open a k d p slash Amazon account. And I cover that later in the class of how you do that, It's handy to have some of the things written ahead of time. One of them is your about the artist paragraph that I suggest you put it into each book, a dedication, if you are using that. And the other thing you're going to need is a description of your book that you will upload to Amazon. So let's get started. 3. Set Up Your Coloring Book in Canva: Okay, let's get started on the interior of your coloring book. It, once you open the Canva homepage, it will look basically like this. It's going to show you templates that you can try. It has all the different kinds of things you might do. Social media, video, print, print products, all kinds of things like that. You can start with templates or down here are my recent designs. So I recently did a class on Skillshare called publishing a children's book. And so that all of my guts of that class I've built inside Canva. Now I am not going to take time to explain all of the ins and outs of Canva because what we're using it for is super simple right now. But if you go to YouTube and if you just want the basics of Canva, find a YouTube video, it's very easy. It's fairly user-friendly and you'll, you'll, you'll figure the basics out. But what we are going to concentrate on is how are we going to publish a coloring book using Canva as a very simple software that is very inexpensive. It can be free, or you can buy a pro version, which I believe is about $13 a month. I have pro and I think it's a great investment because it's so easy to use. Okay, let's get started. The first thing we're going to do is create your design. Now there's this purple button up here that says Create a design. And we are going to do a custom size. And this is where you're going to put it in your specific coloring books size. And at this point you should already know because you already have your illustrations and they should be at a certain size. The book that I'm doing in this class is an actual book that I'm going to publish. It, it will be published. And so I'm laying out a book Live that will become an actual book. This is just not for demo, it's the book. And so this book in the series, they are 8.5 by 11, so I already had that in there. So it popped up a new screen. Untitled design, 8.5 by 11. This is the screen you will get. It's one single page right now. I have over here on file, I have put in show margins, and I'm also showing the rulers and the guides. Now the margin is a one inch all the way around, which is a fairly fat margin. It's not one that I would use. So what I did is I'm coming in with this rule and doing a half-inch all the way around. And that way with a half an inch, I'm not gonna get too fussy on margins, but half an inch is more than adequate for a book that you're going to publish on Amazon to make sure that all of your imagery stays in this, what we call the live area. So the live area is going to be inside this purple. Try not to have your illustration slop outside of that because it, it gets tricky and you don't want to be rejected. And even if you are rejected, you can always fix it. So it's not a terminal problem. Now, let me just stop here to say, if this is your first coloring book, I would suggest having your illustrations inside this half-inch margin all around to do a bleed coloring book where the floods all the way out to the edges of the book is very tricky to get right, particularly if this is your first book. So I suggest your illustration should live either as a floating design inside this space or it has, if you're using a border around it, it should stay within this half an inch border. Trust me, I have done over 40 coloring books. And it's so much simpler to have your coloring book live within that space instead of trying to have a bleed off the edges. I haven't done one because it's too hard and I there's too many opportunities to get rejected because of problems with your bleed. Okay. But if you want to do that, knock yourself out. But I would suggest for your first book, stay here. Okay, So the basics of canva is there's this little icon here that says duplicate page and that does exactly what we are saying. If you hit that you get another page it has or it has the margin. It has these rules I put in. And so you just make the same page. The other thing is the stage we're at now, if you just add a page, you're going to get a blank page. But right now, it is the same as when we duplicate it. Once we put things inside there, you will choose whether to add a page or duplicate a page, but that will become clear when I show you one of the drawbacks of publishing a book inside canva as opposed to using a more premium program like Adobe InDesign or Affinity Publisher is when you're setting up your book, you do not have the option of seeing your book as facing pages. So it gets a little funky as you're working in single pages, even though they're going to be facing pages when you have the actual book, It's not that hard. We will I'll show you how we're going to do that and how you can remember what page you're on. In the next section, I will show you how I am setting up my particular book and you can follow along as we do the entire book. Okay, cool. 4. Design Your Coloring Book Interior: Okay, we are ready to upload the files. Just click on this purple button, and I've opened my file. I have the file of all of my jpegs, all my drawings ready to go. And I'm just going to open them into Canva. It will take a moment to load them in. One of those fussy Canva saying is, even though I have my images numbered one through 29, they're coming in randomly. So they're not going to come in in the order in which I had them. But in my case, since I i'm I'm going to be putting them into the book fairly randomly. But if your book is say, an alphabet or something that has some compelling reason to be an order. Just keep an eye over there in the uploads that they're not going to come in an order. So I'm just going to have to pick and choose where they're going to go. That is a downside, but we live with these things, not a big deal. Okay, they are all loaded up. So here's what we're going to do. We're coming back over to our document and we have our copyright page. We have our little letter That's on page three, on page four. We know that is a left side page that's going to be blank. We want to have your coloring pages only on the right-hand pages because if someone colors heavily, they're going to cover color into the next page. And then, or if they want to cut them out, they have two-sided. So it's fairly typical, particularly for adult coloring books, that the images are only on the right-hand page. This page is going to be blank and then we're going to add a page, page five, and it's an odd number, so we know it's going to be on the right. And that is going to be our first coloring page. So I am going to start loading these in and I'll show you a couple cool ways to do this. And I've just dragged it over. I know I want to hit that mark and so I am going to position this one. So you can see the rules show up and they know it's centered in that page. We have our first page in place. Here's the easiest way to put these all in position in the simplest way that you can. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to duplicate this page, and I'm going to duplicate it again. Now this even number is going to be the blank, so I'm just deleting that one. And I have the same image on the next right-hand page. But I don't want that. I want to start loading this book up with all of the images. So I'm going to just, if you just click on this and make it live and bring another image over, it will pop right into this space. So each one, if your illustrations are very consistent, then this is an easy way to do it. Otherwise, just put them in each every other page blank and then an image page on the image page just play around into like it's centered within those rules. Okay, so now I'm going to populate this book, just like I showed you, and I'll do it fast. So you can see how this works. Okay, here I go. Okay, we've just loaded up the entire book. If you want to check it at this point, it's easy in Canva to go over hover down here and it'll say GridView. And we can look at the entire book so far. In a grid. This is where we want to make sure that we have the we have a blank page in between each one so I can easily scan through. I can also see if I've duplicated anything. I use. Oh, look at that. Look. She's in there twice. Okay. So we're gonna just weren't going to we're going to add a page that's gonna be blank and then this one is going to be deleted. It's a good way to see if you've messed up. I usually keep a checklist of where everything is so I know that I have included all of my Designs, okay, So now we're gonna go out of their close that and go back here. So we are back to the end of our book. I'm just going to scroll down to the end. Now. There's two things that I do on my books because I have a lot of them. And as you accumulate more books, you will do the same hint, hint. Okay, so I'm going to add a page here. And on this page, even number left hand, I'm going to upload a file that I have where it is. This, which is is a jpeg of a page I have that shows all of the other books that I have published. So people can go through and say, hey, I don't have that one is a really good little sales tool when you have more books. Okay, then I'm going to add another page. And on this page I'm going to upload the about the artist page. Now you can do this in text obviously. But I have these. And so I'm just going to place these because they, they stay the same through all my books. Let's just make sure that's positioned center and middle. Okay, so that's my about the artists. You should definitely have this in the last page of your book. And it'll give your email, your Facebook page, or Instagram, all your, all the details that a person would need to learn more about you. So now we have a 60 three-page book. So you want to mark down that you have 63 pages. When we design our cover, we're going to need to know that page number so that we know the right size spine for your book, which is where the book bends. We want to make sure that there's enough space for the binding. Just mark that down that you have a 60 three-page book or whatever your pages are. Okay. Here's a good time to tell you that. You can only do up to 100 pages in a document like this. They, they just stop you at 100. However, most coloring books are not over a 100 pages unless you're doing some sort of jumbo coloring book, 100 pages is a lot. Most coloring books, as you look at them, are going to be between 2524 to 25 to maybe 50 pages to color. And at that 50 is you where you're going to max out at a 100? I don't recommend doing a 50 page coloring book. It's too much. So we've just done our interior. So what we're gonna do, as I mentioned, Let's go back to the top, top. We still do not have the ISBN and the International Standard Book Number. And I will get that once we upload it to ADP. And so we're going to leave that blank. But when we do have that number, we're going to place that right in this line here. And then what we're going to do is we're going to go down. If you hit share up here at the top and download. And then you have options. We're going to do PDF print, and we're going to do CMYK. They do not have a black option, which I would prefer, but oh, well, CMYK and then you're going to download it. When you download it, you're going to get a PDF, and that is the PDF you are going to use to upload two kVp, which we're going to walk through completely. Okay, so now you have your interior of your book once you put in your ISBN. So in the next lesson, we're going to talk about your amazing coloring book cover. See you in the next lesson. 5. Set Up Your Cover Template: Hi and welcome back. Now we're going to start working on the cover of our coloring book. All you have to do is Google kVp cover template. And this page will pop up. You can say this is the link to find those covered templates. And this is really awesome. This is really awesome. You don't have to have ADP account yet to do this. But it will give you the exact calculation of what your cover should look like and it will give you a template that you can work on. Okay, We're gonna go through this very simply. So the binding type is a paperback, the interior type is black and white. The paper type is white paper. The page turn direction is left to right. The measurement units were doing inches and interior trim size is 8.5 by 11, and then the page count. Remember in the last video I mentioned you should mark down what your page count is and we know mine is 63. So we will calculate the dimensions. They've calculated the dimensions. Now, you could use this as is, and you'll build your own cover out of this. But that seems like a big pain to me when you can download a template. So I've just hit download. It is downloading a template. We're going to open that. We have opened that and we have a PNG file or we have a PDF of this. So I'm going to copy this. We know that the width of the cover is 17.392 inches because that's the width of the book plus bleed plus the spine. And the height is 11.25. So I'm gonna go back to Canva and I'm going to start go back to your homepage. Inches. My width is 17.300392 by 11.25 inches. And we're going to create a new design. Okay? So we have this, it still has the margin on it, which doesn't make any difference. So I'm going to take that margin off because I don't want it to be confusing. And then I am going to take we've saved this, copy it, and let's put it into the file and let's pop it in here. Okay, so there is that I'm going to upload that file and we know we put it in, put it here. There it is. And we're going to pop that up as an upload. And then we're going to pop it over here. Now. It's not the right size, but here we go, we've got it should fit perfectly in that space. Okay, so we've just done that. So this is your template. It's showing you where the bar code will land. It shows you the spine. And in this pink area, you want to make sure inside the nothing goes outside the pink area, that's important. And then this second rule, so there's the outside rule which is our document. This next line is the cut line. Everything between the cut line and that outside edge is bleed, which means that it's going to be cut off and you can't have anything in there that's important to your book. Now, these dotted lines show the spine. This is a very narrow book, but that's okay. But here's what I want you to do. Once you have your template in the right spot, edge to edge, all the way around, go up to this little lock, and we're going to lock that. That means that can't move around. I can't move that. You don't want to move it because that's where things start to get. Kublai. Now that I have this template locked, I'm going to go in. Let's make this a little bigger so you can see these dotted lines indicate the spine, that's where the book begins. We're going to come in and give that a grid or give that a grid line. Because eventually this, the template graphics are going to be covered up. We're going to do the same on each of the four edges. The bleed line do the same on this edge. This edge. And at the top, it's a little wonky. And we want to put one there so that when we take that bet grid will be covered up. The template will be covered up. If we want to know where those indicators are, I can go into elements and go to lines and shapes and pick up a square. And I'm going to make that using this. I can make this more transparent. Just so I can make the same size as the barcode. And this is just to remind me where the barcode is, so I don't put anything important in that space. Okay, so that is now and let's just lock that. Okay, So we can't take that away. Alright, so we have our indicators. Why is that? They're going away. Now I know where the grid lines are and I've set up my template all ready to go and then you can start designing on top of this. Now, since this book for me is part of a series of books, my large print series, I am going to pick up some elements that I use on all the books. And I will pick those up and bring them over here. And then we will continue to show you how to lay out your cover. 6. Design Your Coloring Book Cover: We have our template blocked, we have our grid lines in place. I'm gonna go to elements and I'm going to go to this square and get, either get in lines and shapes, but since we used it recently, it's up there. So we're going to take that, come along. We're going to take that and we're going to cover the entire cover with the solid cover. In this series of large print coloring books, I have, I'm using black. So you can see that I can still see all my lines. I know exactly where am I. B9 is. And if I position this backwards one, there is my barcode, which I will get rid of later, but that's just to remind me where it is right now. Okay. So now we're going to start building our cover. So what I have done is I have uploaded or I will upload a couple of graphics that I have pre-made. And I'm just going to bring those in. So I have my spine spines coming in and that I'm centering. There we go. It's centered and kinda made this the wrong size. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to duplicate this. And I'm just going to drag it down until I am at the right spot and just drag it on top there. So now it's the same. Now if I want to, I can group these two things and then they will live together. So that's my spine. And I can stick it back in the spot. And again, I can position it to center. Okay. So nuts, my spine. So a spine wraps around your book. I think it gives it a little more finished of what your book looks like in the end because it has this cute little spine. The next thing I'm going to do because all my covers have this, this is my logo. We're going to pop that in. I have to go get the other logo. It's so funny. You can keep folders of things. And this is my coloring cafe book cover folders. And I have my logo in here. So I'm going to pop that logo in and I'm going to make it around that size. I'm not very precise on these things, but you get the idea. So I've got my logo and then I'm going to put my book title then. And my book title. So here's text. I'm going to add a heading. And I don't know why my heading is stuck on this font. But anyway, we are not going to worry about that right now. That white so we can read it. Okay, so I'm going to edit this easy and simple. Let's change that typeface. The font I am using is Roboto Slab regular. Okay. So I'm just going to continue typing this easy and simple, super cute large print coloring book. So I'm going to center that. You can see it. It'll center on the logo. The other thing I'm going to do is you can go up here and adjust your spacing and I'm going to adjust my line spacing lightly. Okay, just visually space that. So there is my book title. The next thing I'm going to put in, I'm going to make this a tiny bit smaller so you can see the whole cover. Okay, So we have our title, we have our logo. Now, we're gonna go back to the uploads. And I have this graphic. And it's one of the color, one of the pictures from the interior but just colored. And I just did that in Procreate. Okay, so there's that cute thing. And then I'm going to add by Ronnie Walter. How about if I spell my name right? Okay, so we're going to move that down into place. And that font I use is Antonio bold. And I'm going to space those letters out slightly. Just a little bit. It's too big. Crunch that up a little bit, bring it back. We're going to center it on there and let's make it bigger. Let's make it 24. Were hey, so that is my front cover. We are looking at your cover. The back is on the left, the front is on the right. It's as if you've flattened out the book. That's the way it looks. Okay, Let's bring this forward. Now. If I wanted to, I could just make this white. And then Katie p will be super happy because they'll know exactly where to drop that on my back cover. What I do on all of the back covers is I give them sample. I give them a sample of several pictures that are in the book. So I'm gonna go back to those uploads I did. And let's start pulling out a few that are really cute. Here's what I like to do is I'm going to put, let's say five. So let's make five of these. Get them out of the way. So I'm going to do them a little tippy and make sure you never cross this purple line. Do not cross the line. And then you can start arranging them. And there's a reason I'm just doing one of them like this same. I'm going to position her backwards. And then let's put this one out front. And when you get acute arrangement that you like, you can start popping in. Then you can come back in. So we have that, let's put that T part there. Let's put one of these cute girls *****. I like that much row and say, cacti are super cute. And then let's do something. Okay, Let's do the waffles and pancakes. This is just to whet their appetite of what they're going to see. And sometimes you need to fuss around with these a little bit. It's up to you how you want to do this, but this is just a sneak peak so that they look at it and think, Oh, that's really cute. I wanna do more of those pictures. Okay, then we have this area here, and this is your opportunity to say something about your book. So I'm gonna go back to this is Xfinity where I did the last one. So I have, I'm picking up this type. And over here I'm gonna go back in to text. And let's say I'm going to put a heading, Let's put it over here. And just generally where it's going to land and up here. So right now it's centered, that's the default if you go to the left. So I'm going to check that out and copy and I've copied and paste this in. I'm like I said, Do you want it centered? So then I can come in here. Let's make that slightly smaller. Let's make it 16 points. We're going to make it centered. Centered. And since I picked this up from the other book, every day can be a beach day with this fun and relaxing large print coloring book from the coloring cafe. Already six pages, we're going to say 29 pages to color. So I'm just going to say something like life is super cute. When color in this fun and relaxing large print coloring book from the color and cafe, 29 pages to color. Can you just Yeah. Happy images. Make sure to bring a smile to your face. And then I'm saying use colored pencils, crayons, or markers to color these lips. Again, I'm just going to put one sided, easy and simple designs, happy coloring. Okay. I'm also going to put the logo on the back, so I'm just going to copy that and paste it. Bring that over here. You can see I'm kind of an eyeball or type in them. We're gonna do the subhead again. And on this one we're just going to put the coloring cafe.com and we'll go to that. Antonio bold. And let's widen that a little bit. Put that in position. And we have a cover. Okay, We have a cover. That is basically how I design a cover. I would either do this in mice clustered around with these. So it's, it's super easy. And you have to remember when you were doing a cover that most things are purchased on Amazon. So if you want someone to pick yours out of the crowd of coloring books on Amazon, you want to make sure you have a very simple, really clear cover that tells them exactly what they're getting. And it needs to read as if it were the size of a postage stamp. So as you can see, this is really clear. If we just look at the cover here, you'd see that bright band of yellow and you see the bright image. And it tells you exactly what this book is. It's easy, it's simple, it's super cute. And it's large print. This a coloring book. So everything is there and nothing extra. So what we're gonna do here is we are going to again go to the Share button. We're going to download it. And we're going to do another PDF because that is what kVp excepts when we upload this, so we have PDF print and we want it to be CMYK. We're going to download the cover. And since we have used kVp specifications, it should be right. You have the right bleed. Everything's within the live area. You know where your barcode is and you know where your spine is. Nothing is funky there. You've followed all these directions, please. Particularly your first cover. Make it really simple. The contents are what are, what is going to sell your book eventually just make a really clear cover so that nobody has to guess what you're doing. Don't use fancy type that no one can read. Make it so easy. And let's open. This, will double-check it. Let me get a little smaller. Okay. That's a cute cover. And frankly, okay, You can check, double-check when we upload this, which we will do in a subsequent lesson. When we upload this. Sometimes there are issues and we fix them. And I will show you how to fix them. Don't freak out. There's always a way to make it, okay? Okay, so now I'm going to download this and I am going to save it. And let's make a new folder. We'll call it cute cover. And I'm just going to shorten up this title. We're going to call it super cute large print. And we're gonna save that in here. Save, and now you have major cover and you have major interior. Those are the two things that are critical to having a coloring book. And in the next lesson, we're going to walk through how to upload all of this to Katie P, Amazon and have a book on the market to sell. Okay? Oh, you're gonna love the next lesson. Get a cup of coffee. You're going to need it. Talk to you then, Bye. 7. Upload Your Coloring Book to Amazon: And now you are ready to publish your book. Seriously, we're that close. Okay? The first thing you're going to do is you are going to go to this website right here. So that you can sign up for an account. You can sign in with your Amazon account if you have one or if you don't have one, you can still sign up to become a publisher on kVp. You just sign up, it's the usual kind of process. You give them your information. You also put in banking information so that they can pay you and you have to put it into a bank. Now, I haven't noticed from the US and I cannot speak for all countries, but each country is going to have their own opportunity for you to publish through ADP, Amazon. So you just have to Google your country and kVp Amazon and find out how to open an account. Just FYI, that's how you'll do that. And it's simple. You've signed up for a million things in your life. You can do this too. Once you have that account, then we can start to upload your book. Okay. So I'm going to go sign into my account. I am now on my dashboard. So you can see that in this dashboard, There's gonna be the bookshelf. There's gonna be reports, community where you can talk to other authors and marketing ideas. But right now, we're going to stay on this page because you are going to publish a book with mine. You can see these are all the books that I've published and I have published a lot of books. So anytime I want to go into one of these books, I can go back to it. I can change. I can edit the interior. If I wanted to change pictures or something, I can change the pricing, which everyone's mind fussed around with pricing, but I wouldn't do that very often. You can also order, offer copies at a reduced price than what you will pay on Amazon. And that can be great if you are buying them in bulk for an event or you're doing craft fairs or something like that, you can order them more cheaply than buying them on the market. Amazon. I won't go into that, but suffice it to say, in my experience, most of my books when I order author copies, it depends on how many order, but when I order author copies, I figure is going to cost me with the book and shipping. My costs for a book is about $3. If I order, like say 25 to 50 at a time. I have done that. I've wholesale them to stores and I also have done some events where I wanted to have a bunch on hand. So there are around $3. That's a pretty good gauge of how much one would cost if you are going to order author copies. Okay, So this is your dashboard and you can go in there at anytime and sort things out. But we're going to publish my book. And you are going to publish your book. So let's start to publish your book. First. Hit this big yellow button that says Create. When you get to create, they're going to ask you what you want to create. A Kindle e-book. That's a no with a coloring book, you cannot have a coloring book e-book with kVp paperback? Yes, that's where we're going to do. You can also now, hardcovers are new. I don t think most people use hardcover for coloring books. It might be kinda cool for a specific one, but they definitely adds to the cost. So it may be cost-prohibitive for someone to buy a hardcover coloring book. You can also do series if you write novels or Kindle Vela are serialized stories. So people write short chapters and they published them like a subscription and people, then you get paid by pages are read or not worried about that right now. But there are these options now with kin, with kVp that were not available in the past. So we are going to create a paperback, so create paper bag. This is when I'm going to start filling in everything that you need for the book. You're going to get this page and here's how we're going to start. Now. My book title is the coloring Cafe. Easy and simple, super cute, large coloring book. That's the entire title of my book. I don't have a subtitle. My book is not a part of a series. I do not have an edition number. And now your primary author name. So my name is Ronnie. Let's spell it right. No middle name. Walter. And any contributors? I do not have any contributors. In this section is where you are going to summarize your book. This is the description that you see when you go on Amazon and there's the description of the item that you are going to purchase. So I have prewritten my description. I'm just going to pop that in there and I will format it here. So I like short paragraphs because people tend to skim. So you want to make sure it's easy for them to read as I don't get put off by a big block of copy that they have to read through to figure out what this thing is. I also like to I'm going to take out now that I see it. I editorialized all the time while I'm working. Okay. We're going to bold. So they can see right away this super cute coloring book. They know it's super cute. I've already told them that the title, I'm telling them that again. So I have a couple of lines of copy it great for kids and adults. Includes 29 pages, hand-drawn. Bye Ronnie Walter, all one side as you can cut the picture out to display or share without running the picture on the back. I'm telling them who is good for? Great for seniors beginners? Are those looking for relaxing pages instead of super-complicated. And now I'm going to say, I'm going to say contained. And these are, I'm going to make into bullet points. So they're very easy to understand what they're getting if they want to roll right to that. I'm telling them they can have up to 4 thousand characters. More than likely you will not need all those to describe your coloring book, but just make sure this is the place to put keywords without stuffing keywords, but you want to, this is an opportunity to use keywords and key phrases in your description. Okay? So I am telling them that I own the copyright because they do. And you should to own your own copyright. Please do not use other people's art including mine. No, thank you. So I'm saying, yes, I own this copyright. Now we're gonna put in keywords. And keyword. It can be specific to your topic, to the audience that you're looking for. And so and then just what the item is. I'm saying coloring book. I'm also going to spell it the way other people in the world spell it. Put cute coloring book to have over what else would be cute. I'm putting coloring book. Coloring. Coloring for girls. It's really just keywords, what you think people might use to search for your item. If it's all farm animals, you'd want to say farm adult coloring books. And you might want to say country coloring. Be specific about what you are doing. Mine are just cute. And so it's kind of hard to come up with seven. Save this as acute coloring book, but I'm also going to put enlarge large print coloring, coloring book. Okay? So I've got seven keywords. Alright? Now you're going to choose Categories. And when you choose categories, personally, don't think that gives you the right kind of categories. But we're going to go in here anyway and starts. So when you click on that, you're gonna get these really broad categories. This is obviously non-fiction. They give you a bunch of sub headings, so I'm going to go into crafts and hobbies. And oddly enough, they do not have a coloring book category. Even though when you go to Amazon, they have it like they'll, they'll put you into other categories as your book cells. And they'll see where you fit best. And there is a process once your published to go in and ask them to put you in different categories. But right now it's a very broad, broad category. So I am going to say Nothing really. I mean, I've, as I've mentioned, I have a lot of books and I still couldn't ever find the ones where I'm like that's the right one. Okay. So let's do we're gonna do general crafts and hobby. I know that's not very specific. And let's Let's do that. And let's go back to art and see if anything. Because I end up sometimes I rank and like color theory, which doesn't make any sense, but that's the Amazon way. So I'm just gonna put color theory in here because I know I landed there. Even though I don't love that category, but you have to put it into categories. So put into categories that are as close as possible. Okay. Does your book classifies any of these types? Whether it's they're asking and whether this is new. Is it a low content book? No, it is not. Is large print book. I'm calling it a large print book, but they're talking about font size, so I'm going to not click those. And so does your book contain language, situations, or images appropriate? No, it does not obtain inappropriate images. Save and Continue. Okay, So that just saved. Now I'm going to use the free kVp ISBN for this book. I do have my own ISBN, but I'm not going to use them on this book. You have to pay for those. And that is another topic of what the pros and cons are for using your own ISBN are getting the free one from kVp. Basically. If you use your own ISBN, you can take your book, you can publish your book. Other places. It's not tied to kVp. Personally. I have never published a book myself that I felt any need to go anywhere else because this is the main marketplace for coloring books. For me, for my work is on kVp. If you would want to wholesale them into if you wanted to order author copies and put them in your local bookstore or something like that. You can still use this ISBN the KT P gives you, you just can't place it on another online marketplace. It gets a little in the weeds here. But for your first book, the free one, okay. So you can use the kVp ISBN to publish your book can only be used for kVp for distribution to Amazon distributing partner. Okay, which is fine for this book. So I'm going to say assign my kVp ISBN. Okay? So this is the number that you are going to receive, okay? This is the number that you're going to copy and paste into your interior document when we worked in Canva. And we have that space on the copyright page. This is the number that you're going to pick up in place in that document. Okay. This is your ISBN. It stands for International Standard Book Number. Every book gets assigned a number that is published and that that's your unique number. So I'm just going to copy that and I'm going to paste this over where I had to soy save it somewhere. So it's right there on my Word doc. So now you have your ISBN. That number is also how k, d, p is going to generate the bar code on your book. Alright, so publication date. I'm going to use the live on Amazon day whenever it's available. That's my publication date and I'm good with that. Then. They're asking for the print options. I am saying it's black and white, interior with white paper. They have a Korean paper. I don't think people that color or too thrilled, but the cream papers, so we're going to use black and white with white paper. And I do not see any advantage to using the premium white paper. It doesn't matter. So there's your standard black and white interior with whitepaper. Now your trim size. I'm using 8.5 by 11, but if you want to use any size you can. A lot of my early books I did at eight and a quarter by eight and a quarter, you can use any size that you want within some parameters. They'll tell you if it's wrong while you're doing the artwork, you should know what size your book is, right? Right. Minus 8.5 by 11. I have no bleed. And on the cover all of my covers are glossy. Again, it's a personal choice. I liked the glossy. Okay, now I'm gonna go over to Canada and I'm going to put that isbn into the space on my Canva document of the interior. And then I'm going to come back and upload the paperback manuscript. So hang on. 8. Final Steps to Publish Your Book: Okay, I am not going to lie. This was fussier than many of my books. As you recall. It rejected it because of some margin issues and I went back and fix those and I didn't think there was anything to fix, but kVp apparently did. I finally got the interior uploaded and then they rejected the cover. They just said there's the margins are wrong on the cover and they gave me the exact size they wanted it to be, even though I use their template. Sometimes this happens and you just do whatever k d p tells you to do. Okay. They had changed the width, told me the width of the book was wider. So I went back to Canva and put in that exact measurements you can resize in there. And I put the exact measurements that kVp in this preview or told me to do. I fussed around, made sure everything was in the place I wanted it to be. And all of a sudden they accepted it and accepted my interior. So sometimes it can be a little frustrating and it just gets fussy. Just be patient. And basically, if kVp says they want the size changed, change the size, you'll be fine. Okay. Anyway, we have a completed accepted cover. So the last thing I will do is do the final check on a thumbnail view, which I have done. I have proof, read everything. I think it's good to go and now I'm going to approve it. So that's the fun part when you get to say Approve. And Katie p is going to put you back here. And now that you're approved, you get this new box, which is the summary and it's telling you everything that you said you wanted black and white interior bleed, glossy, 8.5 by 11 and there are 63 pages. So what this is telling me over here is that my printing cost is $2.15. Now remember we talked about getting author copies. So this is the base price of your book. So if I order ten of these, it would be $21.50. Yes. I went to art school but I can do math. And so it would be that plus shipping. And so that is the baseline, That's what it costs Amazon to make your book. That will be something to remember when you, when we go to the next place, next screen. So we're going to save and continue. Now, while this is saving, I'm just going to tell you one thing. You can change anything you want about your book as far as you can, fix things, you can go back and put it in a new interior. If you want to fuss around with your cover, you can do that. The only thing you cannot do is you cannot change the name of your book because they have now forever linked the title of your book to that ISBN, that International Standard Book Number and your book title, or forever linked. So that's the only thing you cannot change. So always remember, if you end up getting one of your books, you don't like it or you don't like the size of your pictures or there's a typo. You can fix that. You just can't change the title of your book. Okay, so now we're going into, so we've gone through the paperback details, we've done the content, and now we are in paperback of rights and pricing. Now, this is country-specific. I am in the US. I am giving worldwide rights to Amazon to publish this all over the world. Depending on the country you are in. That may be different for you and you might have to go into individual territories and tell them where you can sell it. I don't know a lot about that. As far as laws. Like again, I went to art school, not law school, but my ability is to do all territories. Choose the location where you expect the majority of your book sales for me, that is Amazon.com. If you have something that's super specific to your region, you might put it specifically in, say it's all Japanese, maybe you want it to go to Japan first. But for me it's Amazon.com. Now, here's the fun part. This is how we decide how much money we're going to make on this book, which is why we're here, right? So I am thinking because this is one of my smaller books, I'm going to put in $5.99 US dollars. Okay. They've taken that to 15 out of there off of the 599. And then your royalty is 60% of the remainder, 599 minus 215, which leaves me a royalty, $1.44 per books sold. I also intend to put this into expanded distribution. That is at a 40% rate. And so I only get to twenty-five cents for that. More than likely it's no one's going to buy it in their expanded distribution program. But you might as well because who knows? I might make twenty-five cents somewhere. This is where you can play around with this. Now, you should be doing some research, look at competitive titles of your book, and you want to be priced within that realm. I mean, if I put in 1099, I would make $4.44 of book. But more than likely I won't sell that many books because other books in my genre that look like mine in the same realm are 599. So they are price-conscious, but sometimes you can push it too. If my books are a little thicker, I'll go to 699 and then get a $2 royalty. But I'm going to price this one at 599 because it is it has fewer pictures in it than some of my other books, so I'm good with the 144 as my royalty rate. So then you're going to scroll down and here's where it's going to tell you if it's sold in the UK, I will make £1.26. And so you do get, you do get other country royalties, come in as a separate deal. I'm accepting all that. I'm not going to change any of that. Published my paperback book. But first I wanted to tell you something. It says request printed proofs of this book that you can order from the Amazon cart. Cart. When the book status changes to live, you'll be able to order author copies. When I first started publishing my coloring books, I would get the printed proof. What it is is they just print your book, they printed copy of it. It has a big banner across it that says proof. So you can't resell it. And you look at it to make sure that it's good. That takes a long time. Sometimes it can take up to ten days to get that printed proof because they have to print it and send it to you. My workaround for that is to publish my book. Don't really tell people that it's published. And as soon as it's live on Amazon, I buy the book. It's only going to cost me $5.99. I buy the book and since I have Prime, it'll take, there's no shipping cost. And then it's it may take up to five days because they still have to print it and ship it to me. Sometimes it's less than that, sometimes it's three days. But you remember it's not like Amazon Prime, like, Oh, it'll be there this afternoon because they have to actually print it before they send it to you. My advice, It's a little risky, but you've, you've proved this thing a couple of times. I would say just publish. And then as soon as it's alive because they will send you an e-mail to tell you that it's live. Just order one immediately. And then you can, once you've seen it, then you can start marketing the heck out of it, knowing that it's all correct. If you get that initial copy and you see something you don't like, then fix it and then republished its trust me on this, don't freak out on those things because you can always make it work. I am pushing the magic button that says Publish or paperback book. And it's saving all of the information. This might take a few minutes. Oh, there we go. Save successful. Now they're telling me my paperback has been submitted. And it says we're going to review your book to ensure it meets Katie PPE guidelines. And it says if it passes our review, it can take up to 72 hours to be available for purchase on Amazon. If it doesn't pass our review will email you. Okay. Only one of my books of all my books did not pass and that's because I used a title for my book that was way too similar to someone else's. And that was my mistake. I should have really done a little more research on the wording. So be as specific as you can so that you have a title of your book that doesn't look too much like someone else's. It's tricky, but that's just a tip from me. Okay. And it's also going to say start your e-book now. Coloring books cannot be ebooks. You can make a digital version for someone to buy and print out, but not on Amazon. So there is no such thing as an e-book for your coloring book on Amazon. They don t know that as a coloring book. I'm going to say close that. And then it pops me back to my bookshelf. I'm here on my bookshelf again and it says it's in review. Once it goes live, it's live. It will pop up to live life. These are all live. So we just published a book that is now in review. How cool was that? Just remember to stay focused and to just know that there might be some funny details that'll get you in the end, but you have the ability to figure it out. If you don't write to me in the comments and tell me that and I will help you sort it out. Okay. 9. More Thoughts from Ronnie: Well congratulations, you've finished this class and now you are ready to publish your coloring book. How does that feel? Again, your project is to design your interior and your cover. All in Canada, if you like, go ahead and publish it. We have the tools to do that. Feel free to come back to this class at any time to review the steps because there are a lot of steps in this process. They're not hard. You're all capable of doing that. It's just there's a lot of them. So feel free to come back and refer back to the step-by-step method that I've developed for you to move this project forward. I cannot wait to see your final projects in the project section of the class if you have any questions, oh my gosh, feel free to put them in the comments below. I always answer my students questions because I really don't want you to get stuck. So I hope this was a good class for you. I hope it gives you the confidence to move this forward and I can't wait to see what you do. Again. My heartfelt thanks for showing up here and doing something that I know you've been wanting to do for a long time. Take care. Bye.