Self-Publish with Canva & Amazon KDP: Repurpose Your Repeat Pattern into a Journal

1. Self-Publish with Canva & Amazon KDP: What if your art lived beyond the screen of your iPad or of your computer? What if you could turn into a book that you can gift or use for your portfolio? That's exactly what we're going to do in this course, giving new life to the artwork that you already created. I will show you how to take your repeat patterns, perhaps repeat patterns that you created previously, and how to turn them into beautiful journal covers and into beautiful notebooks that you can publish using a free Canva account and Amazon KDP. It's one of the easiest, most actionable and most rewarding ways to breathe new life into your artwork. Here's what I will walk you through step by step. How to recycle your pattern artwork and prep it for print. How to design a custom journal cover using a free Canva account, how to create a line style notebook interior, how to choose the right book dimensions and file specs for Amazon KDP, which is Amazon's self publishing platform, how to set up your listing in Amazon KDP step by step, and how to go through the publishing process so your journal is available to buy for yourself, for gifts, or even to sell it in your shop or portfolio. You don't need any prior publishing experience to take this course. Quite on the contrary, all you need is your creativity, perhaps a repeat pattern that you created before, and a free Canva account. That's it. Let's turn your art into something real, useful and empowering. I hope to see you in class. 2. About Video Quality: Before we dive into our course, just a very quick disclaimer about the video quality. So all my videos are filmed in four K, and that's how I plow them into Skillshare. But Skillshare is a streaming platform, and if anything looks blurry or pixelated at first as you're watching this course, then you don't have to worry because Skillshare is a streaming platform, and it really just needs a moment. To fully load, especially depending on your Internet connection. Just because something isn't sharp doesn't mean that the quality of the videos that I upload is low, quite on the contrary, I pour a lot of care into producing these classes with the highest quality possible. So please don't be too quick to leave a lower review based on the video sharpness. Most of the time it just needs a little bit of your patience to load properly, and to look, it's best. So thank you for your understanding, and let's start watching. 3. Why Self-Publish?: Hello, dear students. Before we dive into our actual tutorial, I wanted to share something personal and really meaningful to me, namely a story of why I chose self publishing, why I chose to self publish, and how it completely change the way I think about my portfolio, the way I think about my career, and they're important about my creative freedom. So I was invited to be one of the speakers during an artist event called The Profitable Artist, and I thought that it would be a great opportunity to promote to consider self publishing. It's a wonderful exercise. And I pre recorded a mini lecture, which I will include as part of this course, and at some point, I think I will also publish it for free on my YouTube channel because this mini lecture contains a few important points that I think every creative should hear. So I share my personal story behind why I chose to self publish and why I believe it's an incredible opportunity for every artist. This will also serve as an introductory video to our tutorial, and I hope that it will give you enough inspiration to continue with our course project. Happy watching. You don't need to wait for a publisher or a client to give you permission to share your art with the world. As a matter of fact, you can hire yourself. Self publishing has changed the way I see my art and I see myself. And today, I wanted to show you why I believe that every artist should consider self publishing in order to grow. Case you don't know me, hi. My name is Veronica. I'm a children's book illustrator, surface pattern designer, and teacher. I've taught everything from the basics of vector illustration, digital illustration in Procreate. A surface pattern design all the way to creating your own coloring pages. And self publishing is currently one of my most favorite topics. And the reason for that is that it's very empowering. I came across this idea to self publish my own coloring books for my little daughter over on Amazon out of sheer frustration because at the beginning of this year, I was experiencing a bit of a dry spell at work. And this gave me a lot of anxiety not only about my income, but also about my self worth as an artist because in my head, I was thinking, if I'm not getting hired, then what kind of an artist am I? So I wanted to introduce you to self publishing as a great way to tackle not only your anxieties, but also practically speaking to tackle your dry spells. It's a great way to kick start also your career as an illustrator, and it's one of the best exercises that you can do for your own portfolio because at the end of the day in a very, very fast way, you end up with a physical product. For example, I self published coloring books. And within one or two weeks you can be holding this physical product in your own hands. Whereas if you were to go the traditional path with a publisher, first of all, you would have to land this job either by representing yourself or through an agency. And on top of that, the publishing industry is notoriously slow. So you could be holding your project in your own hands maybe in half a year or even a year, which is really a lot of time. Let's also turn my own example of my own personal journey into self publishing into some actionable steps that you can take. Tip number one, start with something that you already have in your portfolio. Last year, I drew a lot of monsters for my portfolio. It was a lot of fun and drawing them actually helped me to land some publishing projects. For example, a publisher hired me to illustrate a board book. I hope you can see that. I'm illustrating an affinity designer on my iPad. So I was hired even for illustrating two board books for babies and for toddlers with monsters. But unfortunately, to my frustration, this publisher went bankrupt and this project need to be canceled, which led again to a lot of frustration on my side. So I decided to create some more efficiency in my workflow. I had a bunch of monsters that I drew for my portfolio, and I decided to recycle them. This is one of the best tips that I can give you so that you save up some time, but also so that you prevent lots of beautiful artwork that you create getting stuck, for example, on your iPad, if you're creating on the iPad or anywhere in your storage. Oftentimes, it is just simply a shame to be putting your heart, your energy, and your time into your illustrations and not do anything with them. And so this is how I created my very first coloring book called Friendly Monsters. This is actually a coloring book that is really used by my daughter. Those are all the monsters that I drew literally February last year. Uh, yeah. Super sweet. My daughter was really occupied coloring those. And they were simply on my iPad and because I'm used to drawing everything with vectors. Wh, it was so easy to adjust everything and to turn it into a coloring book. So right now this coloring book and another coloring book are available on all Amazon marketplaces. I self published my coloring books through Amazon KDP. These are coloring books for kids, which I made in particular for my daughter who is four, which leads me to tip number two, let your own influences inspire your project choice B self publishing project is by default, a personal project because you're not waiting for any client or a publisher. You basically you have the idea and you hire yourself. I recommend that for your very first project idea, you take something that is really close to your heart. Even if this project will not sell, for example, those coloring books, I think in the first months of Amazon, I sold maybe two, and it was mainly through my friends. But I wasn't disappointed at all because for me, what mattered was that I had those coloring books for my daughter and also as gifts for our friends. It was just close to my heart. It wasn't all about profit. It was more about having something physical for my portfolio, something physical for my own daughter. And also proving to yourself that I am worth. I am worthy. As an artist. I can create. I don't need to wait for anybody. This is how I also created my second coloring book called Cute Easter. Cute chickens. So this one actually I created from scratch. But I knew that it's very important to have some Easter themes in my illustration portfolio because seasonal illustrations, such as, you know, Easter Christmas, they're really, really, really important, and they they sell. So I created this coloring book. I was really motivated and I had nothing else to do, meaning, I was experiencing this dry spell at work. I created this coloring book right before Easter in April, and from creating this coloring book to publishing it to actually proofing it and ordering it over on Amazon, I think it was something like two weeks. So you kind of still need to do it ahead of time. But it was super awesome because they came on time, I think on Monday before Easter, so I still had a few days, and I was able to give them, of course, to give it to my daughter, but also to gift it to the kids and the family and in our friends circle. Another example of a project that comes from the heart that I can give you from my personal experience is that right now we have May as I'm recording this video, and I'm really a lot into gardening. Like, I garden a lot on my balcony. And I noticed out of the need that I need to take some notes about my garden, the seeds, what I planted. Sometimes I forget if a plant needs what kind of soil, how much watering, is going to be okay on my southern balcony. And I already started to take some notes and create drafts of a gardening journal. So this will definitely be a project that comes from the heart that, you know, I will have the satisfaction of having created it as an artist without searching for a publisher that might, first of all, they have to agree to your project. And second of all, you are giving away some of your creative freedom because publishers usually have very strong opinions about how things should look. So if you have a vision for your baby project, they will likely want changes, adjustments, alterations. And in the end, you will have to compromise because it will be a teamwork between you and the publisher. Whereas, if you are self publishing, then your baby project can look as you want. You have a full creative freedom. That's why, again, big recommendation, choose a topic for your self publishing project that really comes from the heart. And on top of that, if it will not sell at least initially, then you will have something for yourself or for your close ones. Let me give you now tip number three. Start with a simple project. So initially, I will not lie. There will be a little bit of a learning curve, and some people who are used to using computers and iPads, they will be a little bit faster, but there's also a lot of people who are not so fit when it comes to technology and they need a little bit more time or they feel overwhelmed when they want to get started with a new project. That's why to lower this barrier for entry, namely your anxiety and wanting to give up because there's too many technicalities that you have to learn. I recommend that you start with something, first of all, from the heart and second of all, something simple. So if you really don't know what to start with, you could consider the so called low content product. This is the easiest as it can get. Imagine journal. Imagine a sketchbook, a planner, a logbook, a to do list, or a habit tracker. These are typical low content products. It means they have very minimal or even no content. It could be, for example, a repeat pattern that maybe you created while taking one of my courses that you just slap on the cover, and then insight could be completely blank or it could be bullet journal style with dots or it could be lined and it could be just a notebook for taking notes, but it will be your unique product because it's with your pattern on the cover of this notebook or of this journal. This is as simple as it can get. You can create it probably in a few minutes using any software. I'll talk about it in a second of your choice or just using the free Canva account. And boom, boom, boom, theoretically, you could be done in half an hour and have your first project, um yeah, waiting a little bit to get approved over on Amazon and then sell it on all Amazon marketplaces. With low content products, you can add your own illustrations, not just patterns, but full illustrations as covers. You can also use some decorative elements that you created before using any software of your choice as decorations that will be inside. So it could be still, for example, a plain notebook, but every now and then, it might have a botanical element or some cute linework style illustration that will give this personal touch. You can also create themed guided journals or like I said, just simple sketchbooks. And low content products are by default, of course, much faster to create, and they can give you the motivation boost that you might need at the beginning. I highly recommend that you stay tuned because I will be releasing new courses on this topic. And it's going to be either on Skillshare, where I'm a top teacher or better yet. You can stay tuned on my SPSC block letter. It's like a blog platform where you can also get all the updates, resources, knowledge articles directly to your email, or you can check it out in the Substack app because they also have a very nice It takes a little bit of time to release a new course, but it's definitely coming this year, so I hope I will see you there as well. Now, the last tip to give you some extra encouragement. The software you're using doesn't matter, so don't get hung up on the software. You can create your self publishing projects in any software. Maybe you prefer Procreate. Perhaps you're an Adobe person and you also prefer to work on desktop. I personally love using Affinity Designer. If you know me, if you've been following me, then all my feeds my Facebook groups. They're full of affinity designer recommendations. I'm not sponsored by them. I love creating on my iPads because I can take it anywhere with me. And this choice for me, the iPad and using Affinity Designer was the perfect choice for me personally. I also have the entire affinity suite, so I learned how to quickly and efficiently use Affinity Publisher, together with Affinity Designer, but it was just a personal choice. You can also set up, which I would highly recommend a free Canva account. I don't have the pro version. I used to have it, but then I realized I can bridge the gap with what I need by my knowledge of graphic design and digital illustration in affinity designer. I just have the free account and even though I was creating everything in affinity designer for the iPad, I was still putting everything together in my Canva account. It's very accessible and very intuitive. There will be also a course about it how to put together a quick low content products using the free Canva account. So also, if you're using affinity, I do have to mention that because I know affinity much better than Adobe, for example, even though I was using both and I'm able to compare. I think that in particular, using vector design has a lot of advantages because, for instance, the monsters that I turned into a coloring book, they were already vectors. And with vectors as opposed to pixel art or raster art, you are able to change the size of your artwork pretty much indefinitely. I was able just to take the vector shapes that I created literally nearly two years ago and turn it into something new, taking into account the dimensions of the coloring book that I needed. Vectors give you this technically speaking, this freedom. Literally last week, I got a licensing inquiry and I licensed one of my illustrations to a puzzle company, and I was so relieved that I work with vectors because if it was raster and I didn't have the dimensions that they needed, then I would basically have to redraw it and I would be wasting time. So one big advantage is that affinity designer is great for vector art, and another advantage is another favorite topic of mine are using vector assets. I have two courses about creating vector assets which are pre saved design elements that you save up in infinity into a library, and then you can just re use it to create new illustrations or repeat patterns. Maybe you've taken some of my botanical assets courses or any courses about pattern design. Botanical elements are the most versatile elements that you can create as opposed to other themes because they're like, in their nature, the ultimate decorative elements, botanical art. So perhaps if you've taken my courses before, you really have a bunch of cool botanical assets in your library, and you can basically just recycle them. The way they work is that you just have a library of assets that you created before and you just drag and drop them onto the canvas, the document, the project that you're working on and you can them all over again without spending more time at work. Let's wrap it up. Tip number one, start with something you already have in your portfolio. Tip number two, let your own influences inspire your project. Tip number three, start simple and tip number four, don't hang up on the software. You truly don't need permission to publish your own work. What amazing times we live in that we have such opportunities to simply create something with any software of our choice and then sit at our computer, login. Upload it and publish your own work before it wasn't even possible at all. So with this regard, it's very empowering and it can be a great tool for your portfolio and building your confidence as an artist, and it's such a fulfilling way to share your art with the world or with your loved ones. If you would need some help for example, turning your illustrations into beautiful printable coloring pages or coloring pages that can be put together into a coloring book project. I have a course that guides you through every step of the process with my favorite software affinity designer, and if you have no other personal projects in mind, then I would recommend that you start with a simple coloring book and get into the world of self publishing. Thank you so much for watching. I hope that you really feel inspired, and hopefully, I'm going to see you in class. Happy creating. 4. Low- & No-Content Products: In this lesson, we are diving into something that is absolutely perfect if you're just getting started with self publishing, namely an introduction to low content and no content products. It's the best way to start because there is a bit of a learning curve. For our project, we will be using a free Canva account, and then we will be setting up an Amazon KDP account together. So if you haven't self published before, it might feel a little bit intimidating. That's why one of the biggest recommendations that I can give is to start small. So now let's talk about low content and no content products, what they actually are. You might have heard this term before, especially in the self publishing and passive income space, but what does it actually mean? Low content products are things like, for example, journals, workbooks, prompt books, planners or logbooks. No content products are even simpler. For example, we can have lined notebooks, just like for our project, dot grid sketchbooks or blank composition books. In this course, we'll be creating a very simple, pretty much no content journal with lined interior and with our own repeat pattern on the cover. So this will count as no content. Why start here? There are three big reasons. Number one, we have a low barrier to entry. You don't need to write a story or you don't need to hire an editor to write the story for you. You can simply use your existing artwork, your existing design skills or even templates to create a finished and sellable product, and it will be very, very fast. Number two, portfolio power, just like with my self publishing story, even a simple journal or workbook or a coloring book can show potential clients or collaborators what you can do, especially if you treat it as a real design project and you really put your personality into it. You can even order a real physical example of your work, just like in my case, I ordered my own coloring books, and then you can prepare real life photos, for example, with you, holding your journal or your coloring book, and then you can include those photos on your website, on your social media. So this is a great option for beginner artists who aren't published yet. It will, for example, give you much more variety in your portfolio because instead of just flat mockups or just flat illustrations that you would like to showcase to potential clients, you will have actual physical products that you can show. And that leads me to point number three. It builds confidence. It's easier to take creative risks and finishing something when the scope is smaller. And when you finish something once, it's much easier to finish something again, and next maybe to tackle a bigger project. Perhaps a coloring book, maybe you want to take my next course about creating coloring pages, put it into a coloring book project, or you can even self publish your own picture book for kids. So start small and then get more ambitious with time once you learn how the system works. Your project is to create your on line journal using a free Canva account and one of your own repeat patterns. If you've created a pattern with me earlier in one of my pattern design courses, that's perfect, you will get to see it in action on a real syllable product. You can of course recycle any repeat pattern that you have. It doesn't have to be created with me in affinity designer. It could be a pattern that you create, maybe in Procreate or in Adobe Illustrator, as long as you are the author. This is a hands on beginner friendly way to walk through the full process of designing a professional looking cover. Laying out your interior pages and preparing everything for Amazon KDP, Amazon's self publishing platform. By the end of this tutorial, you will have a real product ready to publish or add to your portfolio. It's simple, it's achievable, and it's a great first step into the world of self publishing. I hope that you're convinced in the next lesson, I will give you a short introduction into Amazon KDP, what it is and how it works and how to get started. 5. Getting Started: Amazon KDP: This lesson, we're going to talk about Amazon KDP, which stands for Kindle direct publishing. Now, there is a word Kindle in the name Kindle Direct publishing, which might imply that this platform is just for eBooks because that's what you would associate with the Kindle reader. But it is not only limitted to eBooks. I self publish my own coloring books and a few journals through Amazon KDP. It's a platform where you can self publish and sell physical products, physical books, which include journals, notebooks, workbooks. You can create your own planners. For example, currently, I'm working on my gardening planner. You can, for example, tacular coloring book project or even self publish your own picture book. I believe that Amazon KDP, it's not the perfect platform, but I think that it's a really great platform to start with. So you can basically treat it as your guinea pig. You can be your own author. You can hire yourself and you can test things out. And because this platform is for free, you're not really losing anything. So what is Amazon KDP? KDP is Amazon's own self publishing tool. It lets you upload your book files. So we have a manuscript that we need to upload both for the cover and the interior, and then you can sell printed copies on demand. That means you don't have to be printing in bulk. You don't have to invest in any inventory. There's no shipping task for you, so you don't have to deal with any shipping problems, and there's no upfront cost for you. Every time someone orders your journal or your book over on Amazon, Amazon will print one copy of it. And by the way, every time you access your publications through Amazon GDP, you will get all the information about how much it costs, so how much actually Amazon is paying to produce your book or your journal or your coloring book and then you will earn a royalty on each sale. So it's a very simple, pretty straightforward system. Why start with KDP? There are a few reasons I would recommend starting off with KDP, which I already mentioned one that it can be your guinea pig so that you can build your confidence. Reason number one is that it's accessible. You only need a basic cover file and the interior file. You can do everything at your own convenience in your kitchen or in your studio. Need a computer, and of course, you need an email address to start your KDP account. But you don't need to invest in hundreds of printed physical copies of your product, that's already a big plus, and you don't need to learn complex publishing tools and also you don't need a client, you can hire yourself. Number two, it's free to use. There are no setup fees. You only pay a share from each sale, so it's a system of royalties. You will get a royalty for every product sold. But you don't need to pay for your listing. For example, this year I closed, again, my Etsy shop because I got annoyed that I wasn't selling my coloring pages, but they introduced that you have to pay for your listing on a regular basis. So it's not enough to pay one small fee. When you start the listing, they actually get back to you. I think every month or every second month, or maybe even once a quarter, I don't remember anymore, but they bother you that you have to keep paying even though it's a small amount to keep your listing online. I like that Amazon KDP can be my free guinea pig, basically. You can publish anything you want, and then you can even forget about it. You can let it run and no one will ever bother you about any listing fees. I think it's a huge plus. Number three, it's connected to the biggest marketplace in the world. So your journal or your coloring book will be listed on every Amazon possible. By default, I choose to set up my publication for amazon.com, which is targeted for the American market, but you can also create unique listings for any other Amazon marketplace. For example, I am based in Germany and I created my coloring books also in the German version. Even though it's still a pretty low content publication, there's no text inside, but at least I adjusted the title to be in German, and I created all the descriptions in German because I think that Germany is still a big market and I know the language. So it was just a few more minutes of my work for the work that was already done. So one coloring book was already created, and I was able to very quickly create multiple language versions to adapt it to a given Amazon marketplace. And because it's all connected globally, I am able even to send over my own publications to friends who live in Spain or in France, or in the UK, especially in the UK, it's a problem. Sometimes when I want to send over gifts, you have to go through customs and fill out weird forms. If you have your own publication, a journal or a coloring book that you would like to give, you just log into the given Amazon marketplace. And you can give in their address and send it over them through Amazon directly, so I think it's really convenient. So the fact that there are multiple marketplaces. So we have amazon.com, amazon.de, one for the UK, for France, Japan, whatnot, Canada, you will see that when you go to the tab where you have to adjust your pricing. You have to adjust pricing for each of those marketplaces. It can give you relative visibility. That's something that I would still like to mention. What does relative visibility mean in my personal opinion? It means, okay, you have some exposure because Amazon is the biggest search engine for books and for publications in the world. But at the same time, you're not alone, so it's not just your coloring book out there or your journal, and in particular, low content and no content products are so accessible that imagine that this course is, for example, taken by let's say 100 students and each of you publishes something, there will be 100 listings that might look similar and will be competing with each other. There's still a matter of competition and big saturation in the market. That's why sales could be low and it all depends also on how you promote your publication and whether you optimize it well for SEO, which we will be also talking about it in one of the videos to come. You still have to optimize it for visibility, include relevant keywords, like for any other selling platform, be it red bubble shop or a spoon flower shop for patterns. The same rules apply, you still have to optimize it and maybe not have the expectations that everything will run well from the very beginning and you will, uh create or generate a big income from the very start. You still need to have a little bit of flow, upload on a regular basis. So just like for any other, for example, POD, shop, the same optimization recommendations apply. Still, despite all that, my last reason, reason number four, is that being on Amazon KDP is empowering. Because there's something very magical about holding a printed copy of your own work, something that you made. I truly believe, and this is probably one of the main reasons why I considered this topic for my next course outside of Affinity Designer courses. It can really, really boost your confidence. It can be your guinea pig. You can see how your work actually looks on a physical product. And you will get a real product in the end. You can order more author copies. You get some discount when you order it from Amazon, from your bookshelf, so to say, you still have to pay a shipping cost, the prime discounts do not apply, but it will still be cheaper because I think effectively also you will only be paying the shipping cost and the printing cost. Since you have to pay for the shipping cost, it's worse to order a few more copies than just one or two. But again, you will probably remember another reason that I gave in my mini lecture or another recommendation that I gave that it's really a good idea to choose something a project that comes from the heart because then you avoid disappointment and regardless of sales or the lack of sales that you have, you will still have a product that you can give to your friends, you can give it to your family, or in particular, if you have a child like me, you can create something for them. And then having this physical copy without the disappointment of not getting projects from real clients or real publishers. It can be bridged and it can really give you a lot of confidence. On top of that, I already said that it's a good idea to consider recycling some of the work that you already have on your iPad, and it's empowering with disregard that your artwork doesn't get stuck on your device storage. So it doesn't get stuck on your iPad or on your desktop computer. You can see it on a real product and it can again boost your self esteem. So I think that was enough for the introduction. To Amazon KDP, let's have a look into the Amazon KDP interface together. All right, so let's jump together to Amazon KDP interface. All you got to do is to choose browser of your choice. I am using Google Chrome, but you can use any browser and then go to your search engine and type in Amazon KDP. Now, in case you didn't have an account yet, I would recommend that you actually go through this link, create a KDP account. Let's click on it together and see the two options that you can choose from. Namely, you can create a KDP account if you already have an Amazon account, which was the case for me. But you don't necessarily have to have an Amazon account where you're buying things, books, for example, and you can still create an Amazon KDP account. For those two scenarios, choose the one that applies to you and then you can go directly to the link that will prompt you to start an account. It will be normally by default, the link here, kdp.amazon.com that you have to click through and then depending whether you have your Amazon account, you will either use your existing password that is connected to your Amazon account or you will have to create a new one. In which case, this is scenario number two. You will need to enter your name. You need to have an email address that will connect to your new account and you will need to give it a new password. Then very important, before you even start with your project, with your journal project, in this case, you will need to still input some important information right at the start, namely, you will need to decide on your author name, which I would recommend that you still choose your real name, in my case, Veronica Salak that will show up next to your publication, and in this way, probably clients also or publishers will be able to find you in an easier way, and you will also need to input your payment information. So right from the start, you have to input your bank account. To which you will be getting your royalties after you've made some sales and you also have to input your tax information. Also, to find out more about all those three points that I just said, author information, getting paid, and tax information, you just have to select those extra tabs over here. For tax information, for example, there's information that there will be a differentiation between US citizens versus non US citizens. You will need to input your tax identification number for example, I am based in Germany and in Germany, we have the so called personal tax number, Stenuma and this is what I needed to input. This information will let Amazon know which country you are coming from and also if they need to withhold, meaning keep a portion of your tax because they have different agreements with different countries. With Germany, for instance, they are not withholding any tax, so the percentage of withholding is 0%. But with some countries, there might be a percentage that they will be still withholding. Tax information getting paid, payment information in your bank account, and deciding on your author name information is something that you have to do from the very start. Okay, so of course we will be diving much deeper into the homepage of Amazon KDP, but I wanted to show you in general what you can expect when you start your account. By default, you will land in your bookshelf area. So this is your bookshelf, and this is where all your publications are nested, so to say. I have a journal that I recently published and I have my coloring books here. And if you go to those uh three dots over here, you will find out that each of those publications has some extra things that you can do with it. For example, you can still edit your publication, for example, edit print boook details, edit pricing, even after the publication is live. You also have exactly this information whether the publication is live, you see the live button here when it was submitted, the pricing and so on, all the information is over here and this big Create button, the yellow Create button is where you start a new title or a new series. On top of that, you will have the tab with reports. This is my dashboard where you don't see a lot because it's only this month. We have the beginning of June as I'm recording this tutorial and I haven't made any sales yet. There's also a community tab, which is basically like a forum where you can, for example, read a little bit more about marketing and promotion strategy, ask questions. And there's also the marketing tab. So the bookshelf and marketing is where I am the most. You can run ads, Amazon ads by choosing a marketplace here and then going to Amazon ads. This is also where you can set up your author profile. For example, I can click here on Manage Author Page, and it will lead me to this Amazon Author central where I can work on the profile. This is the homepage. This view looks a little bit squished, but those books don't look like that in reality. For some reason, it looks a little bit strange in here. So when we go to profile, this is where you can set up your branded photo and write all your biographies in English, French, German, Spanish, or just in English, if you wish, and this is where you can also set up your author page URL. So I have amazon.com slash AuthorAS Veronica Salak. Uh, when I click on it, this is exactly yeah my author page that is connected to all my books. For example, let's go to my cute Easter coloring book. Here we have my author, URL, Veronica Sala author. So this is also something that you set up when you start a new account, like I said. Along with payment and taxes, you have to decide on your name or your pen name, and I do recommend that you go with your real name. So whenever a potential client, a publisher wants to research you, they can also go through this link, and they can see if you were published before, but they will not know if the work that is connected to your name is associated with a traditional publisher or if it's self published unless they click on your work. And the information, whether it was published independently is under product details. You see here under publisher, it says independently published. It means that it was self published. So going back to our bookshelf, this is where you get all the updates about the KDP environment. Lately, there were some changes to royalty payments. And this is all that you have to know for now. As we will be developing our journal project, we will go back to this KDB interface, and we will be creating the publication that is part of your project together step by step. So again, a reminder setting up an account is very easy. You either use your existing Amazon account or you create a new one for which you need to input your name and your email address, and then you're ready to go. So I would highly recommend that you go now and set up your account so that you have it ready. And in the next video, I will give you a short introduction to the Canva interface. 6. Free Canva for Self-Publishing: Let's take a quick tour of the free version of Canva. There's also a pro account, but I don't really think that it's necessary, so we will be using for the purpose of completing our project free Canva account. And I will explain how it fits into our creative process, even if you're already using Affinity Designer or any other design and illustration software. First of all, why Canva? I love using affinity designer and it's my GT tool for most of my illustration and layout work. But for this type of project, something like a lined journal or a simple printable and even my coloring books, Canva is often faster, it's very intuitive, easier, very beginner friendly. And it's especially good for quickly combining text with images. You can also profit from using free templates that are available as part of the free account, and it also has very good export features. We will be needing a PDF for print. This is what Canva allows us to do. We will also get the right file type. And on top of that, you see here, for example, my personal Canva account. It's very easy to duplicate our projects. For example, you can see here now everything that I have in my Canva account. I have some animations that I'm using for my videos as part of my branding and also for my YouTube channel. So, for example, this animation was simply just where is it here? Make a copy. It was duplicated so that I make similar uh, animations without having to start my project from scratch. With this regard, Canva offers me a lot of efficiency in my work and it helps me to save time. Most importantly, you don't have to pay for your Canva account. I used to have a pro account over here, you see the banner area unlock all the Canva create launches with another 30 day Canva pro trial. Of course, you can try it out, and then you will be able to use some of the pro features which are marked with a little crown icon. But once your trial is over and you're not using it anymore, it will get watermarked. So I used some of the elements in my project and then they got the watermark anyway. So I do not recommend doing that. Now, maybe you know, maybe you don't know, but Canva merged together with Serif, the maker of affinity, affinity designer, Affinity Photo and affinity publisher. And if you've been taking my courses, you know that I'm a huge fan of affinity. Right now, Canva and affinity are still as if separate products, but there might be some sort of an integration between the two products anyway in the future. So it's good to try out Canva because if you're an affinity user like me, maybe there will be some integrations between the two solutions. So think of Canva as your publishing layout tool, and Affinity can still stay your Illustration Powerhouse. Or of course, you can use any other illustration software such as Procreate or Adobe. So in this project, you might create your repeat pattern, for example, in affinity, and then you can export it as a high quality PNG or JPP. I will also by the way, show you how I am preparing my repeat pattern so that it fits, for example, here, in this project, I can show you. I used one of my all their patterns, which is uploaded here to uploads, I will show you exactly how I do that, and then we will be able to recycle our existing work to create our journal cover design directly in Canva. This workflow using Canva, gives you custom look, but you can still retain the quality of professional illustration because the pattern will be created in another software. So everything will be paired with the speed and ease of using Canva because you will see as we do the project together, it has a very handy drag and drop interface. So with that regard, I think it's really, really intuitive and it's basically the best of both worlds if you're using Affinity and Canva together or any other illustration software. So now we can take a quick look at Canva. In case you don't have a Canva account, the same like with Amazon KDP, you can just either search for it in your browser and there might be again a sub link that prompts you to register or to login, or you can go directly to type in the lcva.com, and this will lead you here. Maybe let's open a new Incognito tab. So v com, how it will look possibly on your computer, accept all Cookies. You can either log in or you can just sign up. And what I recommend is if you have a Google account just to continue with Google, and then you just select the email that you're usually using and you input your regular password that is connected with your Google account. But you can, of course, also continue with Facebook or just input manually your email. So this is both for login and for the sign up. The options are also available and choose whatever is convenient to you. For me, I always like to log in with my Google account, and that's that. It's very fast. And once you will create your free account, most likely you will not have all the designs here, like you see in my interface because I've been using Canva for many years now, so a lot of projects accumulated here. By the way, you see here on the left that I'm in the home page area or in the home area of Canva. And this is what we call the Canva homepage. This homepage nest here, the possibility to look for templates. For example, you can s start typing YouTube and even see the suggestions that show up, for example, choose to create a YouTube banner if you have a YouTube account or you can start typing in Instagram and have some ready made Instagram post templates, including a blank, custom Canvas, which is completely blank and free for you to use. So over here, you can search for templates. Let's go back to our home. And there's also a few icons where one of my favorite ones that I use all the time is this custom size icon. Or you can hit here on the left side, this plus Create button, and it will also give you the opportunity to use any ready made templates or here to select a custom size where you can just input the width and the height of your canvas of your document and also choose here units, for example, change it to inches or 2 centimeters. I'm going to click this X to get out of this view. If you're using Canva for a little bit longer, you can also start organizing your things into projects and into folders. For instance, over here, I have a folder which is nesting all the pages of my acute Easter coloring book, so we can also sort them. Templates will be basically what we also access from the home page over here from this Canva browser. You can also go directly to templates. And if you have a pro account, you can also access here this brand area. Having a pro account gives you access to the so called brand kit where you can input, I think, your logo, your branded colors, any graphics, and Canva solution will also give you some automations that will basically spit out for you like a custom story template, Facebook post as you see here, Instagram post ready for you to use. AI I usually stay away from any AI solution, so I haven't really explored that. I believe that if I have my knowledge about using affinity designer without any help of AI, I will stick to that. I'm a little bit against. I use AI for my business to brainstorm ideas, but I don't use it for design, so I cannot even give you more information about using AI because I'm not using it myself. So from this homepage, as we work on our project, we will be choosing this custom size here to create our Canvas and then just again to click on the same journal cover. Then we will head to the document interface, which we will be also discovering together in much more detail as we carry out with our project together, there's a design section here of the document view and Canva. There are elements that you can add. For example, here, you can go to shapes, see all and input some ready made shapes. For example, this the spine of my notebook is a simple square shape turned into a rectangle where we also change the color. You can input text in Canva, and what is really handy, for example, this notebook area is a text. We can choose among really, I don't know, tens or hundreds of different fonts in Canva, and you can also use them commercially, so you will not be infringing anyone's copyright or intellectual property if you're using Canva fonts. Brand is if you had a pro account, you might be directly drag and dropping your logo, using your branded color palette, branded fonts, and so on and so on, but we're not going to be using that. Uploads is where you input, for example, this pattern was put here. I can also click on it and input it again, but I'm going to delete it. So in uploads, this is what you input from your desktop Storge, for example, or from your iPad, what you would like to feed onto your design, now, tools, I'm not using that much projects. I don't access it really from here and also apps. There are some apps that you can connect, but I don't really use it too much. I use the most the elements section, text. And uploads, and I think this is it. So going back to the homepage. Okay, so this is the first look to the Canva interface. It's all quite intuitive once you get the hang of it. If you already know Canva, then it will be even easier and faster for you to get started with our self publishing project. And I chose it because it's very intuitive. Of course, you can use other publication software to create your no content or low content product. You can even create everything from scratch in Affinity Designer, affinity publisher, in Illustrator, in in design. But Canva is so easy to use, and everything is in the cloud, so you can also access it from any device, wherever you are, everything will be synced. I think it's really efficient and it speeds up my workflow. That's why I chose to teach about using the free Canva account for our self publishing project. This was just a short introduction to Canva enough to get you familiar with the interface and understand why we're using it for this project. Don't worry at all if it feels a little bit new and a little bit different. As we work on our journal project together, we will dive deeper into the tools step by step, and you will see how simple and fun it can be to bring your designs to life with Canva. So if you're ready to start creating, let's move on. 7. Repurpose, Recycle & Plan: In this lesson, we are going to take the first creative step in your journal project, namely by recycling and repurposing ever repeat pattern you already made, and we will be planning our cover and our interior layout for our journal. So here's my recommendation. Recycle a pattern you already made. Instead of starting from scratch, I invite you to repurpose your existing artwork, which probably normally gets stuck on your iPad or whatever software you're using to create your artwork. So this will save you some time, and it will also give you some joy that you will give a new life to your artwork. Here's an example perhaps from mine. So let's go to my website. So let's go to my portfolio. I have one pattern that is really dear to my heart, and I think I created it. Oh, my goodness. I think it was 2022 for a social media event called June and Bloom, and I made since then many color variations. It's botanical, it's feminine, but it's also magical. The dark background makes it a little bit mystical or witchy. I really, really love it. So I will be repurposing a pattern that I created three years ago. And it's again, following the advice to choose a project and probably also to choose an artwork, a repeat pattern in this case that is close to your heart because then whatever the sales, whatever the numerical values at the end, this will still be close to your heart, so you will have satisfaction from this project anyway. I absolutely love this pattern and I would love to see it on my journal cover. So this is set. I will just have to dig out my files from my iPad somewhere, find this pattern. I backup all my files, so everything is either on my iPad or on my storage. I have an external Toshiba drive. It's likely on both, both the iPad and my external storage, so everything is backed up for sure. Reusing your patterns like that is a really great move because, first of all, of course, it saves you time because the work is already done. It gives new life and value to your existing designs and it also helps to build a consistent visual brand across your products because you might actually also have some signature artwork that you may want to put on physical products, and then later when you order it, you can also take promotional photos and again, use it for your portfolio or for your website. So in case you don't have a pattern yet, I would highly recommend that you pause this course and you go create a repeat pattern. So you can either create something completely from scratch before you proceed with this course, or perhaps you would like to take one of my affinity designer courses. I teach about pattern design. There's also more information on my website and you can also find my courses on Skillshare. I teach about pattern design. Do I teach about pattern design. For Affinity Designer. So there's another sub page that I have here, Affinity Designer courses. I have this free playlist on my YouTube channel to dive into Affinity Designer. And actually, as a matter of fact, let's go to my YouTube. So this is if you're watching this video outside of Skillshare. If you go to my YouTube channel, perhaps videos. Ah, I uploaded this video one month ago affinity designer pattern in 15 minutes. It's a pretty quick class. So if you want something a little bit more slower, deeper, more explanations, then I would recommend taking one of my courses, either a Skillshare or gum Road. But if you're quick to learn or if you want to save time, you can try out this video, which is completely for free. On my YouTube channel, and actually, I have a few other pattern design courses. Exactly. There's a whole playlist on my YouTube channel, Affinity Designer for pattern designers. Sometimes it's without a voiceover, and there's also some videos with an explanation, and I also made. So if you go to the official Affinity Designer, YouTube channel, there was or start typing in creative sessions, Veronica Salak then you will come across this video here creating VctoryPitPatterns in Affinity Designer with Veronica Sarak. Two years ago, I looked different. And this is another step by step tutorial that you can take completely for free. Or you can head to Skillshare and take one of my classes in surface pattern design. But in essence, you can work in any software of your choice. You can create your repeat pattern in Procreate in Adobe Illustrator. Just make sure that the artwork you're using is 100% your own and that you hold full rights to it. I will show you how exactly I prepare my pattern tile for our cover after we cover the lesson about figuring out the overall dimensions for our journal for the template that will be necessary for the upload for our Amazon KDP account because we need to run some calculations which I'm going to show you in a second. Next, you need to plan your journal interior. So maybe I will go back also to my Canva and show you, for example, my bullet journal page for my previous journal uploaded to Amazon KDP. You need to ask yourself, do you want a lined page, journal for writing? Maybe you want a bullet or dotted page for sketching. Nodes a little bit more flexibility. You can also mix and match or you can even just have a blank page. Maybe it will be a sketchbook or like a planning planning kind of I think there's a name for that something with composition, a composition. Workbook. Yeah. So you need to make up your mind about that. You can keep it also super simple. You can just repeat one page example throughout the book. For my previous journal, I made something a little bit more ambitious because there's this you'll see there's this decorative element at the bottom of the page. It's always in one of the corners. Over here in Canva, we can go to the grid view. So when you open your notebook, let me maybe grab another notebook which I printed out through my red bubble shop. It's also one of my very first patterns that I made an affinity designer. There's actually some notes here, but never mind notes about pattern design. So when you open your notebook, there's just the cover, and there's the first page of your notebook, which will have a decorative element in the lower right corner. Then I'm going to select those two pages will be interior pages that you see when you open your notebook. Those are the two pages that you open. And I chose my decorative element to be just on the outer edges. But you can, of course, create exactly the same page. It doesn't have to be mirrored. So this decorative element is mirred. You can also make up your mind about adding any decorative elements. They can be just in one corner of your page, or it can be mirred, and this is something that you can consider and plan now for your project. Okay, so before we move on, I actually have a short checklist for you. Ask yourself, do you have a repeat pattern ready? Did you decide on the interior? Did you set up your free Canva account and did you set up your KDP account? If this is all checked, then in the next lesson, we will actually start building your interior and the cover template in Canva. 8. Journal Dimensions & KDP Cover Calculator: In this lesson, we will decide on the dimensions and the specifications for your journal, and a very important step will be to generate a template that we will be able to use in our free Canva account to make sure that we have the right dimensions for our working files. So this is a key part of the process because knowing the exact dimension that Amazon KDP specifically will require will affect the overall look and feel of the journal, but it will also influence how the cover file will be built and how it will print on Amazon KDP. So let's walk through the most popular options and prepare your layout files accordingly. First, step number one, we have to choose your notebook size. KDP offers actually many trim sizes, but for journals, these are the most commonly used sizes. So we can have six by 9 ". It's quite portable. It can fit in any bag. Actually, I found even information that it's a best seller size. If you're not sure and by the way, inches were more convenient to me than choosing millimeters because instead of centimeters, you can only choose inches and millimeters. I stick with inches. This is, for example, six by 9 ". To compare in Europe, it's very common to refer to those din sizes. This is a five. If you compare, six by nine is a little bit taller. So let me actually put this A five notebook that I have behind, and you will see this is not the exact A five size. It's the same width, but it's a little bit taller. So this will be six by nine. I find it very handy because in particular inches, I don't know how to imagine them properly. So I like to cut the dimensions out whenever I'm also getting a book project from my client to imagine the scale for my illustrations, I like to cut it out on just an ordinary notebook paper. And then another very popular notebook or journal size is 6.5 by 9.25 ". This is what we'll be using. It feels like a slightly bigger notebook. It's a little bit wider. So it has pretty much similar height, but it's going to be wider. I hope that by the end of filming this course, I will be able to order my own journal so that you can also see it in real time. I hope to take some nice photos for your reference. Those are the dimensions that we'll be using that I will be recommending to take for our journal project. It's a little bit wider, but it still feels like a relatively small notebook or journal. And then there's also in case you want something bigger, depends on the purpose of your project. If you have something in mind. Then another popular size is 8.5 by 11 ". It's really great for sketchbooks, composition planners and also for workbooks. So it's up to you, and I will show you in a second how to calculate your overall dimensions that you will have to input into your free Canva account. So that everything prints correctly in Amazon KDP. So for this project, we'll be using 7.5 by 920 5 ". We just have to make sure to stay consistent with both the interior pages and the cover template. Next, step number two, decide on pay page count. Page count matters for printing, because depending how many pages we want in your notebook, it will affect the width of the spine. And therefore, when you open when you open your journal, it will affect the overall dimensions because it will include both the front cover, the back cover, and the spine together. And of course, logically, the more pages you have in your journal, you see in my example, this spine area is also marked with this decorative orange element in the middle. This will affect the dimensions that you have to input for Amazon KDP that's super, super important. And then for a low content journal, I suggest to start with 100-120 pages. Personally, I will go for 110. You can do exactly the same project like me with the same dimensions to keep things easy. 110 pages is light enough and it makes it still quite affordable regarding Amazon printing costs. And we will keep everything probably in black and white because color costs more, and there's no need for color for a simple journal. Step number three, get your cover template. So before we start designing the cover, we need to know the overall dimensions, and we need to download a precise KDP cover template from Amazon's cover calculator to get to the calculator. I will also include this link somewhere in the class description or in the resources. You can just go to your browser and type in Amazon KDP cover calculator. And then when we click on this link, you will see the als ktpt amazon.com slash cover Hyphen calcular. You can also go to this link directly or find it in the resources. And this is where we will generate our template. Let's do this together now and fill out this form to get the template. We first have to after the planning stage, knowing what you want, input the important information here. Binding type, we will go for a simple paperback Interior type will be black and white. Paper type, I would go with white paper, simple, reading direction, left to right, pretty standard. Measurement units. We will stick with inches. And the interior trim size, remember, we will go for Oh, now I have to focus. Where is it. So this was one of the recommendations that I gave six by nine, but we will go with 7.5 and 9.25 because it's a little bit wider. You can also input a custom trim size here, but I will go with a standard that I can choose from this drop down menu, and I will input 110 pages for my page count. And now we select calculate dimensions. And this will be our template. You don't really have to focus on this too much right now. We just go to download our template. And then we can open it in our downloads, and there will be a zip folder which you have to click to open a folder. And then when we click on it, there is a PDF. There's a text file, the text file we don't need, so I'm just going to get rid of it. And PDF, I also get rid of it to keep it clean, and this will be our template. So I just keep the PNG file. Let's open it together. We will use this PNG guide Okay, let me adjust it a little bit here. So this is going to be our template, which will be our guide insight Canva when we design the front of our journal and the back of our journal. And here we also have the spine area, as you see. It looks like a colorful layout with some boxes, lines and labels, and it might feel a little bit technical at first, but don't worry. I will walk you through it. This is a visual guide for how to design your cover so that it fits Amazon's exact printing requirements. It's super important. Here where exactly the dimensions that we opted in for 7.5 inch by 9.25. But these are the actual overall dimensions which include the front, the spine, and the back cover together. You also see here there's a bar code area here. This matters, for example, it mattered when I was designing the covers for my coloring pages. There will be like a default barcode that will be generated by the Amazon system. So if you have a cover design, which also includes some information, it's no it's for normal content products, so to say. So this doesn't apply to low or no content products. It only applies to normal maybe coloring books or picture books. You'll have to be mindful that you don't put any important information in this area over here. So the white area is the safe area, and this pinkish reddish area is the danger area, and nothing important should be in this danger area because it might get cut out. So front areas over here, back areas over here. We have a narrow spine area which takes into account our 110 pages, and we have our margins and bleed zones marked in color. White area is where your important design and text should go, so we will be also Ah, you don't have to. You can just design it with repeat pattern. So if you want to keep it confidential, so to say, just a simple journal with no text and no box, then you can do that, or I don't know, for the purpose of this exercise also to learn canvas or in case you like this type of design, we'll be also adding in a colored spine area for our journal and a little kind of notebook sticker or frame. But you can also skip that together. But this will be important to know that this front is going to be on this side. And then knowing those exact here, journal dimensions, we will be able to start our cover and design in Canva. So this is what we're going to do in our next video. 9. Setting Up The Cover Template in Canva: We are finally bringing your journal cover to life using Canva. So we go ahead and log into our free Canva account. I'm going to close that for a moment. So if you haven't been using Canva before, then this is likely empty. Don't worry. We will populate it soon with new documents. And now step number one, we need to create a custom Canva design. The easiest way to do this from our homepage is to simply select custom size, and then we make sure that we have inches and you need to go back to your document, and in case you haven't opened it yet, you have to go to the PNG templates that we just generated and look for those overall dimensions that we need to input. So we have 154, 98 or the wist 15 498. And I like to triple check everything. 15, four, 98, 15, four, nine because it's so weird 498 height, we have a 9.59 0.5. It even remembers this dimension because I used it before. So this is really handy when you do it correctly the first time the system will remember the previous dimension so that you can really double check that everything is correct with those weird point numerical values. Okay, create new design, and we have a new document. Over here, we can also give it a new name, maybe magical. Journal cover because this pattern that I chose for my project, to me, it's a little bit magical. So magical, maybe magical garden journal cover. So I'm just going to name it. When I go back to my homepage and I refresh the homepage, it should actually show up. But there's nothing inside it, so it looks blank, but it's already called Magical Garden Journal Cover. And we also see the dimensions are correct in here. Okay. We go back to the document and we open the folder where we have our template and we just drag it onto the document. Then every time you drag and drop some new elements, for example, this template or your pattern, you will be able to access it under uploads. I already had it before. It's over here. In case I have a duplicate, you can also go to the three dots and move it to trash so that you don't have any copies or unnecessary copies that will kind of populate your space here. So this template is here in case you want to reuse it, and now I'm just going to drag it. So it should snap automatically. It kind of works like magnetic snapping in affinity designer. So I start from the upper left corner and just need to drag it to the other cornet and it snaps again. You're going to feel it, so to say. And now this template is also part of our document and should fit perfectly because we used exactly the dimensions that we were supposed to use. Okay, in case you're afraid that you're going to move it unnecessarily, as it is selected, you also have some sort of contextual menu here and there's a pad log or lock symbol, and you can lock it in place for now. So now our new design is created, and we have the template inside of our documents. So we also locked it. This template will now act as our guide while we build our cover. And now I would like to set up guides instead of needing to deal with this template. So one way would be but for that, we have to unlock it to unlock all the other editing options. One way that we could go about is here this transparency checker board is a symbol for the transparency option. If you click on it, you can reduce the transparency of this template, and you can proceed in this way. But I like to lock it and I like to set up guides. So in order to activate the guides, we need to go here in Canva to file. And then I think it was settings and show rulers and guides. Now those rulers showed up. And here I kind of hovered on this ruler and this arrow showed up. And then I just press and drag this guide to match it perfectly with the left side of the pinkish area. Over here, where you see 77% in my case, you can also zoom in to see things better. I'm just going to drag one more ruler now here. So I want to trace the bleed area in the spine area here in the middle and one more to the outside here to the right side. So now, if I were to reduce the transparency so that you can see better. You will see that we have this purple guide here to the left and we can still keep moving it. I'm going to fix it in a minute or do Command Z to go back because now that the transparency is lower, I'm not able to see properly if it's really fitting there. So we also need to know the spin area. So we need those two lines in the middle, one, two, and one line to the right, and now we need another line here and here. So the top and the bottom of our journal. So I'm going to bring back full transparent full opacity, actually, full opacity of my guide. And you can do the same. You see this big fat black arrows showing up. Just press and drag your guide to the top and one more to the bottom. Zoom in if you have to, doesn't have to be super perfect. Now I can simply delete this template, and I have my guides. So by using those guides, I only wanted to denote the areas that will be safe. So when you go back to see our template, I wanted those white areas. That's why I use the guides that will show me those pinkish areas. Let's make it smaller so that you can see. So here will be my spine. This might be cut out, this might be cut out, and this might be cut out. And I prefer to work with my guides like that instead of having this template which might interfere with my building blocks for my journal. Okay, so now we use our template. We have the right dimensions. We have the guides, and we are ready to design our cover. 10. Designing Your Journal Cover: Welcome back. So now we are ready to start designing our cover with the repeat pattern of our choice, basically. So this is an example of a journal cover that I designed before. This will be option number one that you basically do this exercise with me. We repurpose your beautiful repeat pattern. We also create an extra element for the middle, so the spine of our notebook. And we create also the corative element here that just says notebook or journal, diary, or any other thing that you want on this notebook, basically. But you can also go for option number two, which is just the repeat pattern and decorative colorful spine. So if this was this journal, we would have the repeat pattern, and then instead of the spiral, binding, we would have a block of color. And then, of course, the back would also include your repeat pattern. Exactly. Or option number two is as simple as it can get is just your repeat pattern. So imagine that there's a repeat pattern in the front on the spine and in the back. This is as little as you have to do for this project, and I'm sure it will be beautiful. And some people actually prefer not to have any title here that says diary or reflections, you know. Memoirs or something like that. So if you want to keep it a little bit more confidential because you might be using such a notebook somewhere on the go or in the cafe and you don't need a fancy title, then of course, you don't have to do that. So this is just to give you a little bit of inspiration of what is possible. And now, let me show you. So I created my original pattern tile in Affinity Designer, and this time, I am on Desktop, and I actually really enjoy recording my screen. So maybe I will create more desktop version courses to come. I really, really, really, really love to create on my iPad. So I also have a variation of this pattern on the iPad, and it was originally created on the iPad because this is my number one device for creating. I love Apple Pencil, and I'm using a lot of the pencil tool to create my vector shapes. Everything is vector based, and it's still pretty much just like just like drawing on paper. If I do it on the iPad, that's why this is what I prefer. And there's a few things that I have to mention for you to prepare your repeat pattern so that we do not run into any white lines or any technical problems. So I have this folder here with my paperback template from Amazon. This is my original pattern tile. So I wanted to draw your attention to the repeat type that you will be using for the cover of your journal. For example, this pattern that I created ages ago, I used a half drop repeat, and I have to admit I really stopped using half drop, and instead, I opted in, like, most of the time for the diamond repeat because it's like a half drop, but it's already in a standard repeat. Standard repeat means that there will be no offset tile in the middle, but everything is just kind of stuck like in a checkerboard to the left to the right, top and bottom, and it's much easier to create repetitions without any mistakes. But at the same time, the diamond repeat template that I use for affinity, it gives this feeling of a half drop while having a standard repeat. So if there's still a little bit too technical for you, I highly recommend that you have a look at the courses. Especially about the diamond repeat. So this was created a long time ago, and it's in a half drop. It's my original pattern tile. I have it here just in case, but I also turned this original pattern tile into a standard repeat pattern tile. And this is like the minimum that you can do to quickly create your journal. Let me show you that in action. So I'm going to go back to Canva. This is the document that we created together. And I'm going to go again to my folder where I have my standard repeat pattern tile, and this tile is already a repetition of this original pattern tile, and it includes hope you can see that it includes more details. So we will be able to stretch it out on the cover of our journal and have more details both in the front and in the back of our journal. So this is like the minimum option number one that you can do. You can just drag and drop it. Onto your document, it will also start uploading into the upload section and we already have it here, and you will remember that those purple guides that we have here, it's important that the repeat pattern is really stretched out to the edges. It can also stretch out outside of the canvas and all we got to do. I'm going to zoom out a little bit is to stretch it out. And this is as much as we can do with this pattern tile because I cannot go any further or I cannot go smaller because I will cut it out. And you might be tempted here to just if it's a standard repeat, to just copy paste, make a copy, and start building your pattern directly here kind of manually, but I really, really don't recommend doing that because see, most of the time, there is no precision of, like, a good illustration software to prevent Uh I think every pattern designer is disgusted when they see those white those white lines. So I would really not recommend to build or to expand your pattern from your pattern tile manually. So you either have enough detail on your pattern tile to really stretch it out, to have it a little bit zoomed in and just to kind of make the best out of this pattern tile as it is. And this will be, for example, your cover. You can also zoom in a little bit. If you go here on this scale to 100, this should be 100 will mean that this will be the original size when it's actually when you're actually holding it in your hand. So you can kind of eye it and see if this is what you like. And personally, I would like to have more detail. That's why from this pattern tile, I will create a variation, which is a little bit wider, bigger, and it contains more detail and more wiggle room for me. And now this step, I will continue with this step in affinity designer for desktop. But I would really like to underline, not that you get intimidated that I'm using affinity and maybe you don't have affinity designer. You can do that in any software. You basically repeat the steps that I'm doing, but for your software, you can even do that in Procreate. Hopefully, there won't be any layers limit. Procreate was about to get rid of the layers limit. I'm not sure if this is already there. You can proceed in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop in any software of your choice. And also, if you would rather use the iPad version, you can do the same in the iPad version. It's just more convenient for me to continue recording my desktop for the sake of this tutorial. That's why I decided this time to show everything in the desktop version. So in affinity designer or any other software of your choice, we have to create a new document. Here I go to File and New in case it is cut out because I'm screen recording, you have to be an affinity designer, and then up above there's the option to create a new document. We have to make sure that we have inches, and then going back to our template, we have to take so see those are our overall dimensions that we also have in our free Canva account. We have to take very rough similar dimensions. So it doesn't have to be 15.498 and so on, it can be rounded. So I'm going to take 16 and 10 ". For example, just to and because I was doing it before, it's already here, but you just type in 16 and ten, you keep 300 DPI, and I would create an artboard because you can recycle this one document for multiple repeat pattern cover projects, so to say. So then I hit Create and in the layers panel, I will rename it to magical garden, something like dark because maybe I would like to create a color variation. So this will be my darker color variation. And then maybe let's zoom out a little bit. And from the tools bar, in case you don't have those views, you have to go to Window. And for example, initially, I didn't have my layers. So from the window section, you have to select that you have layers. Tools should be there. And then from the tools, I choose the rectangle tool and I just drag out a rectangle somewhere also on the outside of the original canvas so that, again, I avoid white lines from the Swatches panel. Even though it's just cosmetic, I go to the stroke and I make sure there's no stroke, only fill. And now I go to the to to the gradient tool, which is over here to the left. It's selected and from type over here in the upper left corner, I choose bitmap, and this will only work with standard repeat. Again, if you have a half drop repeat pattern, this will not work. There will be mistakes. But this one is in a standard or a full drop repeat. I open. Now I can make a variation that has more details. I can also rotate it. But I think let's see. Let's see. So I want enough detail that will be good for my journal. And the good thing is, you can always come back to this design, and you can make changes or you can also create a new artboard, that will be next to this artboard and you can make a color variation which you first have to edit in your software. And then again, you come back. You create a new artboard and imagine that you have ten different designs, you can kind of nest everything in one document for your reference for the future. That's why I opted in for this document to create artboards this time because this is not building a repeat pattern from scratch with the automated patterns method, for example. Oki dookie, I think this looks good. Tutu to so now we can export it, and we will be able to use this more detail. So if I go back, see if this doesn't have as much detail. That's why I'm creating a new variation that already has roughly the dimensions of the journal cover, and now I go to file and Export. We can export it as JPEC and just make sure that we save it in the right folder so that we can find it well. So pattern or I can input whatever naming conventions you have cover one, magical garden and Bath. Okay, so this is saved. We can create here a new page by hitting plus, and it will retain the dimensions, the overall dimensions of this document, plus the guides that we set, they will stay. And now we go to our folder, and this is the new cover design that we just created. We drop it into our document. You see it's also uploading here so that we will have it forever in our Canva account, even if we log into it from another device, and now we have more wiggle room. So I just wanted to show you the difference. This is where we kind of pre created a bigger repeat pattern with the dimensions of the cover, and this is where we work just with the original pattern tile without cutting it to the right dimensions and just um kind of trying to do our best with the original pattern tile, which is usually in a square. So by default, you are cutting a lot of the details out. And in this way, we're able to have more wiggle room. So I am in particular, focusing on the right side because this will be the front of my journal. So the back for me, even though it looks all very similar, but for example, those bigger orange, peachy flowers that are cut here. This is where my guide is helping me. I want to prevent kind of weird cuts, for example, like this. So I'm also zooming out. I have an IMAC with Command minus or zooming in with Command plus, but you can also zoom in and zoom out by using the slider here. This is what I always recommend when we're creating repeat patterns together. Zoom in, zoom out before you commit to the size that you want. Okay, take a little bit of time. I really want those flowers to be nicely visible. So I think I think this is it. This will be the cover of my journal. And this is one of the options that I gave you. You can just use your repeat pattern. You don't have to do any extras. If this is your version, then you go to share. You click Download. You select PDF for printing, PDF print. I usually like to flatten this PDF. And because I have multiple pages because I was experimenting with different variations, you click on it and you can either select current page or you can manually choose the variation that you need. Then you hit done. Because we only have the free Canva version, we are not able to select CMYK for printing, but this is not that important or not as important as you think. This will be still okay with the free Canva version. And then we have again, okay PDF for print, the right page, and we hit Download, and it will download our covering design. It will take a little bit of time. But let's also create the variations, for example, with the now with the spine, if you would like to have a bit of a colored spine. So back to my document. This one, I don't like it that much, so three dots, and I would like to delete page. So I just want to kick it out. This one. I think I will keep it, I will not duplicate it. Now, if you would like to create decorative spine, we can also temporarily go to the transparency of this pattern and reduce the transparency so that we can see our guide in a better way. Okay? Zoom out. Now, from elements here to the left, we go to shapes and usually the most commonly used shapes are right there. We have, for example, the square that we need, but in case you want to explore more shapes, you go to see all, and then you have lines, you have a variety of shapes that you can use for your design. What we need is the square and it doesn't matter what color the square has right now. I am first focusing on its position. So for my design, I think I would like the spine to have the color, but also, I would like this color to be visible, also, both in the back and in the front a little bit. I think it looks nice. But you can also just focus on the spine. So if you want to be on the safe side, you can snap your shape into the guides. And you will see that they get a little bit highlighted with a pink line. That means everything is snapped into place. Okay. This also snapped. And now going back to the original pattern, we can bring back the transparency. So this is option number one, but you can also choose option number two with the spine. I'm going to drag it out again so that I don't move the guides. You can make it a little bit wider. And this type of snapping will also show you a line that goes exactly through the middle of our design. So the guides that we set up, they have this purple color, and the guides that show, for example, where something is right in the middle of the document, they will have this hot pink. So this is my middle. And then back to transparency, I have to then, of course, pre select my pattern, and then I can go back and bring back the opacity so that it's not transparent. And if you prefer this version, you can keep it. And now I would like to make some adjustments because, for example, I don't like how the orange of this flower. So this was again, the color is usually chosen by default. It will probably be pre selected from the pattern that you upload, but you can still change the color. I don't like how it floods the same color into the same color here. So making sure that I only select my spine, we see a few editing options here, and we already can recognize this is the color that is used for the spine of the notebook. You click on the color and you have more options to choose from. I like to. So sometimes the colors are sampled from the photo colors you can choose. For example, this one, or this one or this gray. Or I also like to use the document colors, this plus with the rainbow when you click on it, you can see the slider where you can also change anything on the slider. Or you can go to the pick a color version. You just click on it and you have this color picker, and you can select any color from your pattern. For example, I like this petrol green. Oh, I think this will look good. Okay, Diselect again, make sure that you've got everything diselected. You can also go to file settings. Show rulers and guides to temporarily deselect it so that you can see your design. Uh huh. And you can also make variations. So I go to three dots, duplicate page. We can select again the spine and maybe choose a black color instead and see how it looks. And I deselect by clicking somewhere outside of my document here. Oh, I think I like this. But you see you can make a few variations, and you can either keep them or again three dots and you just delete the page. So I think this would be my option number two. And again, if you're happy with it, you just click Share. Download, just repeat the steps. PDF print. I like to select flattened PDF. And because we don't have any extra pages, we don't have to pre select any page number. We go directly to download. Yeah. I also make sure that I put all my cover designs in the right folder. This will be cover number two, but with spine. So you see, they have to be in PDF format. All right. This could be your option number two. And now let's also create together option number three with this decorative element that says notebook or diary or any other text that you wish. So you probably guessed what we got to do. We got to go again to shapes, and just by clicking on it, we create another rectangle shape. We go to color, and we change it to white, for example. We either try to eye its position or we can also bring back here, we can also bring back from the settings, the rulers and try to use guides again. There's another trick that you can do. We go back to elements. We create another, what's it called? Another square. And now it will also snap to the color of our spine and we can adjust it on one side how we want it. For example, this could be this could be the W, and we make a copy, and we put it on the other side from the guide. So we don't put it. I just wanted to demonstrate that we don't put this exact copy to the edge because when Amazon is printing out, this would be cut out anyway. So to position our journal text exactly in the middle, we have to focus on the area where the color of the spine finishes. So here, and the area that will not be cut out, which is this guide that we have to the right side, if it makes sense. And now I just adjust the width of my what's it called of my frame? And we can kick it out on our keyboards, just hitting delete, and I will note that I will have it exactly in the middle. So now we just need some text. It can be heading. It doesn't have to be any text style. It can be heading or subheading or just paragraph text. And I go right away to the colorful A over here in the contextual menu, and I make sure that instead of white, it will be, for example, in black, so that when I put it into this white frame, it will not disappear. So I select somewhere else to be able to move it, and I place it in the middle. And again, we will have those guiding lines that will show us the exact middle. And now keeping this text selected, you can go here to the fonts. The default font was Canva sons. Oh, and now this is the fun part. Canva has so many beautiful, beautiful, beautiful fonts. So your task right now is to go through all the fonts, and, of course, mm mm mm to write what you need to write first so that you see the font for your text for your exact title. So Capslog I'm going to write here, for example, journal, and you can manipulate this text further. With those circles, you can make it smaller here. Or when you have everything selected, you can also go directly here to the font size and just input your number. That's that. I hope I pronounce it correctly. This ga gadin font is also very cute because you will see that it has a little bit of texture. So if you want to you can also make it bigger. And if you don't like this type of shape, you can also go to elements. Then you can go to graphics, see all. And from the graphics, you can type in frame or decorative frame, and you can look for some frames that will be for free. The ones that are with the crown symbol, they will not be available if you don't have the Pro account. And maybe you'll find something here that will be more appropriate for your design. Re frame solid. So if I just don't want the outline, but the solid, you can also type in solid. For example, this is a nice oval that by the way, it also has a bit of a gray from my pattern. So maybe you would like to recycle this shape here. Once it is selected, you have also options to edit it further. For example, we can change this gray color to white and this white color which is on the outside to the gray or the purple or the black from my pattern or even this orange. I think this looked nice. Then this is just an example. Then you can kick out the other frame. In case this shape is in the wrong order, you can go to position and you can either move it forward or move it backward, or you can do it here from the layers panel. You see? If you drag it to top, it will be on top. If you drag it below, will be down below. Again, I'm clicking on the font because I want to change the color. You see this colorful text color option here, and I will change the color to the color that also is included in the frame. I'm going to zoom in and make it a little bit smaller. So now I know this text is in the middle following my previous guides. So the only change I'm going to do is to resize my frame. I'm also going to experiment with the color of the spine again, choosing this purply gray to see how I like it. Okay. So this is another suggestion of a cover design with a colorful spine and with a text. If you're happy with it, you just click Share. Download. And because I also marked here safe download settings, it should also remember my previous settings, PDF print flat and PDF. There's no other pages, so there's nothing else to choose from. Download. And then I'm going to make sure that it's in the right folder. Okay, dokey, so let's make it a little bit bigger. We have right now three different covers that we can choose from either just your repeat pattern. A repeat pattern together with a colorful spine for the notebook or for the journal, and also a cover that comes together with some sort of a title, some sort of a text. The choice is yours here. Your task is to prepare your repeat pattern and to design your cover and export it as a PDF file that will be necessary for the upload for Amazon KDP. Now we will explore a simple design for the interior of our journal. 11. Setting Up The Interior in Canva: In this lesson, we are going to design the interior pages of your journal, again, using the free Canva account. This part is quite important because this is the main part of the journal, apart from the cover that makes it maybe more sellable, and what the user will be using at the end of the day is, of course, the inside of your journal. So my suggestion, especially for your first project is to keep it simple and either go with a simple blank page or just like me to create a lined page journal. So this is an example from a project that I did before. We will be learning how to do that together. I created a simple lined page with a dotted line and the curative here, the curative element. This is only for inspiration. You don't need to add in any extra decorations in your journal, and you can also just completely ignore the bleed and the margin aspect and go with a completely blank page. It's really up to you. For the sake of this exercise, I would recommend that we create this line page together. So I have to take into account if I would like to have bleed or no bleed. That means that we will decide whether our lines will be extending all the way to the edges of our page. And I went to search on the Internet for some examples. I think EtS is a pretty good platform to see what people are doing there and what people are selling. So I found two example listings which are completely random. I'm not recommending also to make any purchases via any EtS shop. There are people who are also selling different KDP templates on t's here. But I just found a few examples for you for inspiration. This is a blank lined journal page, exactly what I will be doing for my project where the lines go all the way to the left side and to the right side, to both of the side edges of the page. This is an example of a page where we include some free bleed on the edges. The sides have a bit of this white area to the left to the right, and of course, to the top and to the bottom. To know exactly what dimensions you need for those pages, you have to go to Amazon KDPs help center, set trim size, Bleed and margins. I will also make sure to link this help page somewhere in the course description or content, but you can just go ahead to your browser and type in something like KDP Bleed trim. I think this will be enough exactly. In the very first search result will be exactly the landing page that we need trim size, bleed and margins. So when we click on it, we will get some more information, which you can also read in peace and quiet about bleed, understanding what it is. It's basically this extra area around the edges of your page that will get trimmed off during the manufacturing process. So during printing, and bleed ensures that your design goes all the way to the edges of the page without leaving any unexpected white borders. That's why it's really important to set things up properly, and Amazon KDP has a nice article about understanding bleed with some examples. So we need to scroll all the way down to examples of page size with and without bleed. Like I said, I will be doing this type of interior page with bleed. Like this one. So we have to orientate ourselves on this right side of the table page size with bleed. The original size, we can find it here. So the size for our project is this one, 7.59 0.25. This is without bleed. To two, two, to do. And this is W bleed. 7625 and 9.5. So now we can go to our free Canva account. And we can go to custom size and we can create those dimensions. So I was using those dimensions before. That's why under RSN, you will see the recent dimensions that you used before. You can just go ahead and click on that. But most likely you haven't used those dimensions before. So what you got to do is make sure that you have inches. If you just open your Canva account, it will switch to pixels by default, and then you input 7.6 to five and the height will be 9.5. Then you create new design. I also like to rename my Canva designs right away. You can do that over here. No interior pages lined, something like that. Whatever will be good for your own documentation. So now we have our blank page. And another thing that I would like to take into account are the margins. Also in case you change your mind about adding in any decorative elements. So for margins, we have to go back to this help page. There's, again, even a YouTube video that you can watch in your own free time to understand margins better. Margins will be the area of your design that will protect it says here, protect your content from running off the page and being cut off during the manufacturing process. For our project, I will be doing 110 pages. So we have a look at the page count, and then we have to find outside margins with bleed. 22, two, and it's exactly the same everywhere. 0.375. So now we go back to our interior pages. We make sure that we have our rulers. Under file settings show rulers and guides, they have to be on. Now we just drag, so we have this fat arrow that shows up when we have above our ruler, then we create our first guide. You see on the top, we can roughly see the measurements that we need in purple. I try to get as close as I can to something like 0.38, 0.37, if I can. But even the 038, I am on the safer side if I choose a little bit more than too little. So I have one line, and then I go to elements, and I go to shapes. And from shapes, I just select a simple simple square, and I place it in my upper left corner. Let me zoom in so that you can see better. So if I just want to drag one of the corners of the square to retain to retain the shape of a square, I have to select shift on my keyboard, and then the shape will be retained. And then I just Exactly. I needed to focus here. So we need to kind of drag this square shape to the corner and it will snap into this one guide over here that we created. And now very gently, not to select the guide again, I click on the square. Control C, Control V to create a copy, and I place it in the other corner. Then again, Control V to create another copy. Let me zoom out. So we're creating copies that we'll be placing in the corners. Three are enough. So this is enough to create guides that will kind of show us where the margins are on all the edges left and right, and also top and bottom. So now we will drag another vertical line to the right edge. And if it snaps, then the color of the guideline will change from purple to pink. And then we gently release it and now we have to do the same with the top. This big fat arrow shows up, drag and drop. The pink line shows that everything snaps to the shape of the squares that we created. Then when we release, the pink changes to purple. Then one more guide to the bottom, change to pink, release, now very gently so that you do not select the guides again, just delete it either on your keyboard or through this delete trash icon. We are deleting those orientation squares. Okay. And now we also have our margin guides. For example, if you would like to add in any decorative elements, but also to make sure that our lines will be not cut out, especially on top and at the bottom. Okay, so the document is ready. It has the right dimensions for bleed, and we have our margin guides. Now, still from the elements and from the shape section, there are three types of lines that we can choose from. So it's enough just to click on them and maybe also to drag them to the edges so that we can see them bigger. There's like this it's not really dotted, like a lined line with lines. And there's the dotted line. So I'm just showing you what you can choose from. And now, all of them are very thick. So if we select all of them, we can edit them at the same time. And this contextual menu will pop up here. And here we can go to the stroke style and work on the stroke weight. So this is very big. I just wanted to show you how to manipulate it. You can also go manually to this little box. And change it to one. And another thing that I would do, I would go to transparency, and I would reduce the opacity of those lines to something like 35, 40. So now, if we click somewhere to the outside and we zoom in, these are the lines that we can work with. Just for a second, I would also like to select only this dotted line to show you something. Let's go back to the stroke style. Let's make it a little bit bigger. This dotted line is built from squares, but we can also change it to rounded endpoints. So now we have circles, and we can go back to one, so that it's not so thick. Now, your task is to choose what line you prefer the most, a simple line or maybe a dotted line. I think I will delete those two guys and leave a dotted line. I just have to double check if I maybe like the w because it's very subtle. How about I go back. And make it a little bit bigger. You can also keep the size of your view at 100% because this will be kind of like the 100% of your page. Nah, two is too thick. So yeah, I'm going to stay with one. And now what you want to do, you want to have this line selected, and then you want to copy it and you want to paste it in 24 times so that we have together 25 lines. So we have one line, and now we need copy paste, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25. I don't know how about you, but I prefer for the sake of this course, I'm counting in English, but if I was doing it on my own, I would count it in my own language which is Polish. In should pinch and so on. Okay, so now we have 25. We can select them all and we can also group. And now we can continue to drag them so that they can fit our page. That looks nice. By the way, to fix the fact that they're not centered evenly, we can first ungroup them. Then we can go to position, and then we can go to align elements center, and then we can group them again. I like to group them again so that nothing goes somewhere else where it shouldn't be. Okay, now we can again make them bigger, extend them and pay attention to our margins here. So I like to leave a little bit more room at the top, and I still orientate myself looking at the margin guides that I created. So I make it a little bit smaller here. I give it a little bit more air breathing space at the top. So if I deselect it will look like this, I leave a little bit of space to my top margin and a little bit less space next to the bottom margin. Yeah, and this is it, so we're as good as done. But I also wanted to show you how I created this decorative element. So back to our document. And by the way, as a group, you can still edit it. For example, you can go to transparency and pla exactly you can make it like, even less transparent, a little bit more subtle because now that everything is in place, you can see things better. So I like lines that are a little bit more subtle, but you can, of course, leave it also as black lines. Okay, now when we go to elements, we exit shapes. We can go to graphics over here and click at C all. And here we can type in anything we want for our journal. So we can type in something like flowers, outline and see what they have. And the elements that have this little crown symbol, it says that you can use it only with the pro subscription to Canva. But there's a lot of little flowers, for example, it decorative elements that are not part of the subscription. For example, this little flower here. Some of them, by the way, they don't have to fill. So depending if it bothers you, you can, for example, leave this flower, go to the color, add new color, take the pick a color tool and select the gray from the gray of your lines. Okay. And then you can position it in the corner, making sure that it's within the margins. So the guides that we have set up. So that's one example. You can also choose flowers. You can choose something with a fill, not just with the lines, flowers, black and white. And it's about experimenting a little bit browsing. So this one also doesn't have fill. I can still see the lines through. You can keep selecting Oh, this is so cute. They are free of use, by the way. You're not infringing any copyright if you use them. And I just invite you to play with it. Oh, this is so beautiful and feminine. I just invite you to play with it and maybe choose some decorative elements only if you want. This is completely optional. So my cover is a little bit witchy. So Wichi icon is something that I can spontaneously look for. I could add in a snake if I had the Pro account, or if you, you know, have the knowledge of software such as affinity or there'll be Illustrator, you can create your own decorative elements. And procreate. So a lot of that because this is very specialized, like Wichi icon. It's probably also very trendy. A lot of it is P and I cannot use it. And those are colored and I don't want to have anything in color, and I don't want to waste time switching everything to gray scale as I wanted. But as you can see, it's very easy to just look for the elements that can maybe also match the theme of your journal cover. Maybe I will type in something like mindfulness. See what comes up. Black and white. Or something like Zen Yoga. Here's a mandala, for example, that you can use or a silhouette of a Yoga lady. Ah, that would be nice. And I can just do it in gray or in light gray if I want to. So this is one example or something like this. You can even make different types of pages. It doesn't have to be the same page. Yoga gardening. Let's see what they have here. I'm going to remove that or nature or from my uploads, I can basically go to anything that I created previously. For example, this is one of my old illustrations. I can also turn it to gray scale by changing those colors over here, and I can use it for my journal design. Okay, but to keep everything simple, this is already our interior page. The other thing that we got to do is to create basically an interior pages manuscript for our Amazon KDP account. And to do that, we can go here to this grid view. And either from the three dots that you can see in the corner here, we can click Duplicate page O on the keyboard, we can just Control C, Control V over and over to make ten duplicates, and then we can select. They will be marked in purple, those ten duplicates, copy on the keyboard control C, and keep pasting them. And so we have 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, 110. Let's scroll down to see if this is correct. They are all numbered. So you will not have any mistakes. And we have 110 pages. And then our manuscript for Amazon KDP interior pages is ready. We just got to go to share. Click on Download PDF for print. I like to still select this option to flatten PDF. So everything is correct. We see here pages 1 to 110, and then we click Download and we make sure we save it in the folder with all our journal documents because this will be very handy once we start creating our publication in the Amazon KDP account. So it's downloading. It will take a moment because it's quite a few pages that it has to turn into a PDF friendly document. And now it says it's complete, so I will just make sure that it's in the right folder here in my storage. Alright, guys. So this is what we have. We have different variations of our journal cover, either with the title without the title or just with the repeat pattern on the cover. And we have simple interior pages with simple lines that are ready to be uploaded into our Amazon KDP account. I really recommend to keep this project simple, especially when you're getting started, you can start and learn everything by doing your first journal, and then you can get a little bit more adventurous and do variations, different cover designs, and also different types of interior. For example, you can create bullet journals or gardening planners. Then you can go into more detail, basically. Okay, we are ready to start our very first Amazon KDP publication project. 12. Publish on Amazon KDP: All right guys, now we are ready to start our first Amazon KDP publishing project. We have our folder here with all the PDF documents that we will need for the upload. This is by the way, the cover that I decided to do because I already printed out one journal. I hope it will come on time so that I can show you a real physical copy. I already have one journal that says journal, but I would like to have a simple notebook that doesn't have any title on the cover. This will be my cover design. This is our PDF file that we saved up from our free Canva account. Dam. This is our PDF interior pages document. That's what we're going to need. It will be handy if you have it somewhere in a folder ready to use. Next, we go to our Amazon KDP account, which you hopefully already set up and we go to the homepage basically, which is our bookshelf. Next, we create the big fat yellow button, create and we will be creating our publication together. For our journal project, we want to create paperback, so we choose Create paperback. Next, which is the primary language that the book is written in. I would suggest that we just stick to English because it's a no content publication. I will also suggest that you focus on as your primary market for starters, you focus on amazon.com, which is targeted for the American customers. Now, we need to think of a good book title. And subtitle, and I already saved up some cheat sheets here in my Google Drive document where I have the dimensions that I'm testing out for Amazon KDP just in case I forget I write down here all the specifications. You can also write it down in a physical notebook if you want to or any other a kind of information storage of your choice, for example, notion. I also have a remark that I'm using the bleed variation for my journal, and for this project, I was creating a bullet journal. So this will be a title for my journal, and this will be a subtitle for my journal. Once I create a project, I copy paste everything down into a cheat sheet document. It could also be in the Notes app if you're an apple user. So these were my notes, and this is my actual journal that I self published before. First, we need the title, which will be this it clearly says what it is. In my case, my previous project was bullet journal, and then I give it a title just for reference. So it's bullet journal, and then I called it Tan Bergia because this is the flower that I use for the repeat pattern. And then after your main title, the system will generate this column. And include your subtitle. This is how it will be structured by default. Now this is how it looks again in Amazon KDP. Your book title should clearly state what it is. For example, notebook or journal. I had here bullet journal title. So I can, for example, write Notebook journal and give it a title magical garden. It's going to be also for my own reference, but maybe also someone will be looking for something magical or something garden related in the Amazon search engine. Now I'm just eyeing it and I need to make a decision if I'm going to leave it as it is and do a little bit of keyword stuffing, which is including relevant keywords as much as you can, Notebook Journal, Magical garden because those are actually synonyms which can be included in the subtitle. I will just leave Notebook. Magical garden. This is what I would recommend. The first part of your title will be stating what it is. Is it a bullet journal? Is it a diary? Is it a notebook, sketchbook, planner? And then you can give it a hoopla, and then you can give it a title. Then in your subtitle, which will be after the column, you can add in any other relevant keywords. This is really important to include relevant keywords which will help your published item to be as searchable as possible. I will also copy what I had here previously. One more time, this will be the subtitle. Where we can put in extra keywords. I'm going to change dotted to line. Because I used notebook here, I can switch notebook to line journal. I'm including another synonym to increase the searchability. 110 pages, it's good to include in the subtitle any obvious facts about your publication. I will also change polka dot because I had a bullet journal before into dotted line. So we've got line and we have line as two separate keywords. Botanical floral motives, I'm going to leave that because as you remember, my journal cover will be botanical. Maybe someone will be searching for that in the Amazon search engine. I leave diary for mindfulness and relaxation. You can also put in something like planner, and I think that's it. We've got Notebook magical garden, lined journal, 110 pages, dotted line botanical, floral motifs, a diary for mindfulness and relaxation, planner. Good. This section is relevant if you have a series. For example, I have a series for my coloring books. If you have a series of journals which have maybe botanical themed covers, you can create a series, and then your listing will have suggestions from this series. So I can, for example, maybe go back to the browser and look for my profile and go to one of my coloring books, for example, cute Easter. Exactly. So this series that I had for my coloring books, I named it sweet coloring pages. So this coloring book in particular, just to give you an example, has an extra link that the client, the customer can click through. It has the information as part of the sweet coloring pages. There are two books in this series. You can click on it, and you will see Aha. There's not only this one coloring book, but there's also another coloring book in the series. And as I will be expanding this series, I can add in extra items into the series, and that will just give your customer more opportunities to buy from you. And I think exactly. Also here, there will be information that is labeled in this series so that the customer can consider buying more from this series. I only have one journal, but I can imagine to expand it maybe get rid of this notebook so this notebook title so that it matches this cover, and maybe I can make a collection of bold botanical covers with similar interior pages that will be part of a series, something like magical, botanical, notebooks, something like that. Then I will create my series here and I will make sure that this publication is added to the series, which you can also post edit after this publication is published. So this will not be great. But the title, by the way, will be great. So choosing your book title is very important because you cannot change it anymore. You can change other things. You can even change the manuscript itself. If you see any mistakes or if you'd like to make some tweaks, you can still do that. But the title will be set in stone. You really have to make up your mind. That's why I like starting a brainstorming sheet. This one is in Google Drive again. So that I can really make up my mind about what I want to publish. Serious is optional, and you can edit it later on. Edition number, I don't input any edition number and author should be it already remembers my name, Veronica Salak. This will be also what will be shown up here and it will link to your author page. So you either have a pen name or ideally you use your real name. Contributors, this is only if you're working on a publication together with a friend or another artist, illustrator, writer. Sometimes you are the illustrator, you make illustrations, and someone else writes the book and is the author of the text. Here, you can add a contributor. Now, description is something that even had GBT can help you with, but if you're using any AI tools to kind of cheat your way a little bit to write a nice description, I've done that. I asked HAGPT for suggestions, and I also analyzed competition to make the best description for my needs. I would just like to give you some words of warning that AI generated promotional text tends to be very rigid. It still needs to be checked. Be careful, especially if you're not a native speaker of English. You can use it as a starting point. That's what I did. I was like, Oh, I wonder what it will give me. But then I still needed to make a lot of adjustments because English is not my first language, I use this way just to see that everything looks like in proper English, so to say, but I still went in and I needed to edit my description. The best advice that I can give you is again to focus on the keywords. Let's go back to my cheat sheet. This is where I have my description. Have it basically somewhere written down so that next time you can just copy paste it if you're having more publications and you can just input different information. For example, this description was meant for my botanical bullet journal with a bullet journal style of interior pages, and now I will have to adjust everything to fit this aligned journal style. But in any case, without even overthinking it, I can just copy and paste it in here, and then I can keep editing it here. You can make your text bolt or just plain. I like to make it bold just in some places. I'm going to copy the notebook name Notebook Magical Garden. Posted in here. I would recommend that you just say, Okay, this is notebook, this is the title, B and I write By Veronica salac because I still want to spread my own brand awareness and not just a notebook, but it's a notebook by me because I think notebooks in particular for sales, they're such a no brainer item. And usually in shops, let's be honest, they're much cheaper than what you can get in Amazon. Amazon is now incentivizing people to pump up their prices because there's a lot of AI generated content, and it's very cheap and taking into account the raising production costs, manufacturing costs and printing costs and so on. It's becoming less and less profitable for Amazon to be promoting very low income products. But notebooks shouldn't be that expensive. They shouldn't have the same price as a picture book or as a textbook. So since it is still quite expensive to buy my journal here, like this one, for example, is priced for amazon.com at nearly $8, I guess it will be cheaper somewhere in the shops. I include things like buy Veronica sale because I'm hoping that maybe if someone does buy my journal, they will be guided by some sort of a brand loyalty. Maybe they like me as an illustrator. I also have my own favorite illustrators, and I would pay a little bit extra just to get notebooks with their unique a cover design, for example. So if you would like to build your brand, I would say include your name. And then the obvious facts, 110 pages. Dot. So what did we have Dot? Lined paper back. Let's go back to my lined journal. Maybe I take this because it will also include the keyword journal, 110 pages, lined journal, paperback the description is something that you can still edit even when your journal is published. Just the book title. The book title with the subtitle, you will not be able to change it later on. Oki doke. And then I want a so this is basically the mission behind my notebooks. I am writing what my intentions are for this product. So it's something personal that you have to decide on when you're designing your product description, including keywords, but also really speaking from the heart, why did you create this product? Why should they pay those extra dollars to get your journal? So I'm writing Bing common creativity and beauty into your writing with this elegant, botanical themed line journal. See if you're copying the description from another project, you have to stay really focused. Design with a feminine touch. This paperback journal. So I have journal here, so I'm going to write here this paperback notebook to include synonyms. Features delicate flow. Okay, instead of delicate, I'll put in magical. Magical floral modes throughout offering gentle inspiration as you organize your days, dreams, and to do. Then insight you will find and I like to put the number of pages in bold because you'll see it will stand out better. This is exactly the same description that I copy pasted from my document. Then let's go back 110 pages of lined paper at of lined paper. Once you create one description, again copy paste it and you can recycle it as many times as you want. Maybe you create a new notebook that has exactly the same specs. Also lines inside and you just change the name from magical garden to peaceful gardening or something like that, depending on your theme. But since I haven't done aligned interior before, I need to just double check that everything is adjusted properly perfect for writing, sketching, habit tracking or layouts. This is still true a lightweight, flexible paperback format for easy portability. I'm just checking here. I made also the measurements involved, including the brackets. So people also want to see the measurements right away and sometimes they get sometimes they get lost or you just want to reinforce the measurements. They're also here in their dimensions. See, I published this one very recently. Right now, we have mid of June and this journal was published end of May. A charming magical a little bit witchy design with moody. I'm really improvising right now. Harming magical, a little bit witchy design with moody flowers that makes every page feel like a breath of fresh air. Shall we leave it like that? A charming magical, a little bit witchy design with moody flowers. I think I'm just going to cut it because it's getting a little bit too poetic. This line maybe let's write a notebook. This notebook is your cozy companion for a more intentional null and creative life, designed by artist surface pattern designer Veronica Sala in case you need help, you can go and ask some AI solutions to get started with your description. I would say in the first line, repeat what the product is about. Repeat that it's a notebook or a journal or a diary. I would say, give it a name because if you're planning to publish more, then everything will be notebook, notebook by your name. In this way, you can create a series that will have a title and it will be also easier for you to sort, so to say, and then repeat any specs. There could be measurements here, what is inside, that there are lines inside and it's a paperback. Then the second paragraph, I suggest that includes important keywords still, such as line, journal, paperback, notebook, even to do, organize, feminine, but it's still a little bit more descriptive, even poetic. And then bullet points are always your friend. If you go back to my listing here, bullet points make it a little bit more the overview is much better and it's cleaner. Then maybe just closing lines, which still include important keywords such as lined notebook, and you can still repeat your name. This is what I would recommend. Another option for you is to go to Amazon and to look at competition and to see what they are writing. But you don't have to be super complex here in your description. It's really important just to include the most important specs. The measurements, what it is, journal diary, sketchbook planner, bullet journal, and so on. It's good to mention the dimensions, and that's it. Okay. Let's finish this first page together before we move on. I own the copyright and I hold necessarily public publishing rights. This is about publishing rights. We don't have any sexually explicit images or title. I would skip the reading age, especially for no content product, and then primary marketplace, I leave it at amazon.com. Now, categories are categories that are important information for the Amazon KDP ecosystem, so to say. You will choose those categories by clicking on the number choose categories. By default, we start with books. And you need to do a little bit of search and find in here and go through the categories to see which ones will reflect your product best. So this is the type of research that you got to do at the beginning, and this is what I have done, and I can share with you to give you advice what I'm actually choosing. So those are the categories that I basically copy pasted from the journal that I published previously, and you can still change it. You can go in and make adjustments. If you see that competition is using different types of categories, you can go ahead to your publication and you can post edit it even after publishing. But a good starting point is to use my cheat sheet basically. So category number one, books, self help journal writing. Books, and then self help is over here. And from here we choose journal writing, and it's already here. You don't have to do anything else. Then plus another category, I go to my cheat sheet, books, crafts, Hobbies Home and general. Crafts, Hobbies Home are here, general, and it's already saved, and then you can add up to three categories. I would say, use it to the max this one is a little bit of a wild card because I wanted something that hints that it's a botanical theme. So depending on what cover you have chosen, maybe you have something with food and cooking, then you would need to go through all those categories and choose something more appropriate. But for the botanical theme, I wanted to maybe risk it a little bit and choose a completely different category type. It's still books, science and math, biological sciences, plants and flowers. So let's go and find science and math, and if it's not performing, you can change it at any point. So, or even check what is under agricultural sciences. Chemistry, horticulture. Biological sciences. And then there's even biochemistry or general biotechnology. So I had biological sciences and plans. There's a subcategory of a subcategory and then I choose general and that's it, and then you hit safe categories. There is no right or wrong, and this is only to show to communicate with the Amazon KDP system. It's the language of Amazon KDP. It will give some extra information to the algorithm that is supposed to show the best product for the customer depending on their search intent. So what they put into the search engine. I guess this is the best that we can do to try to go through this list and choose the best category in our case, for the cover that we are presenting because let's be honest. Let's be honest, there's nothing really inside. It's a no content product. One more thing that we have to type in here or select is that it's a low content book like journals, notebooks, and planners. There's even a little explanation here about what low content is. I'm selecting low content book and now keywords, you can look at competition or you can just type in the obvious keywords. For example, line journal. So I am choosing the keywords that clearly state what this product is about. Line notebook. There might be more competition for those keywords, but I'm actually also a search specialist, and I know that those type of bread and butter keywords are usually the best anyway. Then apart from very obvious keywords that just state the basic nature of your product, then you can expand and go with a little bit more fancy words. But go with those bread and butter keywords first anyway. So cheat cheat again. I had bullet journal here, lined journal, lined notebook, botanical planner. Yeah, I'm going to use that too. Botanical planner. Botanical notebook. Mm hm. You can also change your keywords after publication. You can still go back and make changes. Feminine journal, feminine notebook, feminine journal. I would like to keep those feminine notebook. And is it a sketchbook? Is it a planner? We already had a planner. Maybe something like a lined planner. You can also include keywords that speak about the audience. For example, when I was choosing keywords for my coloring books, I wrote a coloring book for children, coloring book for preschoolers. So you can also type in a longer keyword, something like a lined or instead of line planner. A lined notebook for women, but no one types that in. For kids, yeah, they want to specify that something is for kids. But when I'm looking for something for myself, do I write you have to ask yourself what you're typing into the search engine. Line notebook for women. I mean, notebooks are not gender specific. Witchy Witchy notebook. Maybe Witchy notebook. I mean, it's not it's not super witchy. Mm. To me, it's just kind of, you know, moody. Botanical floral. I'll go with that. These are examples of short tail keywords. Short tail keywords are very basic bread and butter keywords that usually include just one or two words as part of the keywords. Then long tail keywords would be longer. They would have at least three, four, five plus words that constitute that keyword. For example, lined journal, for women or a feminine journal with lines. This is more of a long tail keywords, long tail keywords. They have less competition and they're more specific. Short tail keywords such as those, shorter keywords. They have more traffic, but there's also more competition. So your visibility might be a little bit compromised, but I still like to go with those very basic bread and butter keywords, especially for the start. Publication date and release date are the same. And that's it. Then we will hit Save and continue. So on this very first page, we need to input our paperback details, language, title. Remember that the title cannot be changed, author, description, categories, primary marketplace, keywords, and so on. And now we will save and continue to edit our listing. Remember that it's always a good idea to create a cheat sheet that will help you to publish any new publications after this first one in no time. 13. Editing Your Listing & Pricing: Now we can continue to page two of our listing. So we hit Save and continue and we will be moving to a section where we had to edit the paperback content for our publication. So we choose publish without an ISBN number. Or identificator. It's a special ID that is assigned so that we are able to search and identify books in an easier way. Every new publication will need to have a new ISBN number, but we will get one assigned from the Amazon KDP system, so we just publish without. Then for print options, you can also check how these will look. We just opt in for simplicity, black and white interior with white paper, trim size, we skip this default and we go to select a different size and we search for our original dimensions that we used in our Canva account, 7.5 and 920 5 ". Then for bleed settings, we opted in for a bleed. And for the paperback cover finish, for a coloring book, I would suggest to choose glossy. It's also a little bit more expensive, so you will get a little bit less profit on every sale. For a simple notebook journal diary, I would always go with the mat cover finish. Now the fun part, we will be uploading our manuscript. This is where the manuscript, which is the inside the interior pages will go, under the book cover section, we will be uploading uh, our book cover design. Let's first upload the manuscript, so our interior pages. We hit upload. You need to find the folder with your design and I have it here journal interior pages lined. And I click Open, and it will take a few seconds to upload the manuscript into the system, also depending on the volume of your publication, and it will also take a little bit of time to process. But before this gets processed fully, we can move to the book cover design, and we select upload a cover you already have. So you can also launch a cover generator. I never used it before, but since we are illustrators and designers, we have our own beautiful covers. So we choose the second option and we go to upload your cover file, and I wanted this one here. So our PDFs are ready waiting just to be uploaded. And then the system is again taking a few seconds. To upload our cover. And in a second, we will be even able to test it out, which is really important. So we will get the very first look of our publication here directly before hitting the published button. So our cover does not include any barcode. If it did, then we have to tick this, but it will it was not included. Just as a reminder if we go back to this template, remember, there will be a barcode. Is location and sizes over here. We could identify it on our template. So Amazon will generate this barcode for us because we didn't pre design it. So we leave this out. Now, this is quite new because AI didn't exist before. AI generated content. Did you use AI tools in creating text, images, translations in your book, and, of course, no. It's a no content book, and we created our covers by using our own repeat patterns. Oki doke. Now we can check our design and select launch previewer. So depending again on the complexity and the volume of our publication, this will take a little bit of time. The system is basically generating a preview for us, and in case there will be any issues, for example, I had some very small issues with the design of the covers of my coloring books. And before I publish something with printing mistakes, I was able to check my cover and also the inside of my publication within this book preview here in Amazon KDP. And also, after we hit the published button, you can still edit your publication. So just like I said in the previous lesson, we cannot change the title in the subtitle. This is set in stone. But we can change the entire cover even or everything that is inside. We can switch to a different interior. It's just that the title and the subtitle is set in stone. So that means that they will not be able to be adjusted. So if your title says it's a lined notebook or journal, then it has to stay this way. This is the preview. This is what the cover would look like. I decided not to have any title here, so it's just a plain repeat pattern. This system inserted this barcode here, but there's nothing important happening in the back of my cover, and then you can continue to flip to see what it will look like inside. And you can also switch here to this thumbnail view. And in this way, you will see exactly what will be printed out. So the cover, it's a separate file will be printed separately, looking good. And then the very first page is like half a page, so to say, because when you open any journal, you have part of the cover, and then there's just like the single page that you that you see over there in the upper lift corner. And then the other views will present the journal as it looks when you fully open it. Then what you want to still double check is probably the number of pages. So it's 110. And over here, there will be information regarding the quality checks. So if there were any mistakes, there will be a warning here, but there's no issues. It also says here, no issues selected. Everything looks good, so you can just hit a proof, and we're nearly done. So we still have to set the prices in a second, but the paperback content is all good. Okay, no AI. We checked the previewer, and this is our summary, black and white interior, white paper. There's bleed, mate, paper back cover, trim size, page count, and this will be the estimated printing cost on amazon.com. So for this journal, the entire printing cost will be a little bit less than $3, and these will be the printing costs over on other Amazon marketplaces. For example, I'm based in Germany in Germany, it will cost Amazon, the German Amazon two euros $0.51 just to cover the printing costs. So we save and continue, and this will guide us to the very last page that we have to cover, namely the pricing. So we want to sell our journal in all territories, but our primary marketplace will be amazon.com. And now, it's a little bit in progress now. It's taking a little bit of time to process everything, but we can carry on and we can input some prices. It gives us here the information. We start with our primary marketplace, which is amazon.com. It says that the minimum should be $5.74, and the maximum for our journal can be $250. But let's maybe put it at $6 first so that we get an estimation. So the printing will be $2.87. And now because it's still a low paid product, the royalty rate is only 50%. If we price our listing, this is something new that was introduced in June 2025. If we price our listing at least $9.99, then we will get 60% royalties. This is Amazon basically fighting with a bunch of very cheap AI generated products that flooded a lot of marketplaces. So if we change that to 999, our listing price, then we would have a higher royalty rate. And if someone bought this journal for basically $10, our royalty share, what we would earn would be this $3.12. But if I wanted to price it at something like 699, this is the royalty I would be earning and it's very little. So in a way, those content or low content products, they're very good for personal projects to print out something for yourself, but to make big sales, I don't think it will be that sustainable in the long run unless someone is willing to pay a higher price for your simple notebook for, I don't know, maybe some branding reasons, maybe a famous illustrator whose covers would sell. But for average beginner artists, this is quite unrealistic, but you can still give it a try and either keep the price a little bit lower. And then you have to go into volume to make some good sales. I'm going to try to price it I think like my previous journal at 799. I like those 99 59 price endings, and I'm just checking if this is what I would be happy with. Maybe something like 69 will give me a royalty of nearly $1. And I think I'm going to leave it at this. So going to pounds, I want to test what 659 would give me, and it's looking good. Maybe I can go a little bit lower. For some markets, it would also include VAT for the customer. I'm going to leave it at this and then and then here, I think I had 749 before. So it would be nice to have at least one euro or $1 royalty with the sale. Let's see, 739. That looks good. I'm going to just copy this, copy this for the French, Amazon, and you see how everything gets updated. Spanish, the same. I just want to be aiming at for simple notebooks at maybe $1, one euro royalties. The Italian marketplace, the Dutch marketplace. Poland is a lost cause. Everything, this is way too expensive, I think, for an average Polish citizen. So whatever is there, I just change the ending to 99, and I completely ignore the Polish market because Amazon is not that popular in Poland anyway. And because I don't really have an understanding of all the other markets like the Swedish one, the Japanese one, I just make sure to change any ending that I can to 99 because I think personally my primary markets will be Germany the UK and the United States, Canada. Maybe Australia. Let's see. Yeah, I don't mind that it's just $0.61. I kind of ignore the Australian market because I'm not expecting big sales over there. And this is it. So take a little bit of time to have a think how you would like to price your notebook. Will you stick with a lower price and a 50% royalty share? Or will you go above, and you can, of course, price your journals, planners notebooks at at least 999 so that you get at least a 60% royalty share. Have a look at this column here that says royalty that will give you an estimation of what you will get when you make a sale in that's that. So terms and conditions, it really takes a lot of time. So also when you go back to the manuscript or to the listing and you change anything in your description, it takes, again, at least two days for them, whoever is making that. I don't know if it's a computer or if it's an actual physical person who is checking all those listings. It takes a lot of time. So pay attention to that. I also after the publishing, if you go back and you want to change something, even if it's just a small comma, or a dot or a different word or a keyword, it will again take at least two working days so that it's all accepted again and live and ready to be purchased. I don't request a book proof because if you order approve, they will get a watermark that it's approved. I would rather later on when this publication is live, purchase the author copy, which is basically a printing cost of my publication plus the delivery cost. I don't request any proof and d d d do. I just hit publish here paperback and then the system is saving everything for me and I will have my second journal. No live yet. It will take. Today is Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, maybe Thursday, maybe Friday, it will be live, but it already gives me a bit of a preview how it will look. A simple notebook, note title. See, I created This is our main title, notebook, and then I have my title. Then there's the column, which is auto generated by Amazon KDP. Then this is our subtitle. This is us. This is the author. This is the pay the price. And then it's just a disclaimer that your book will be checked against KDP guidelines, blah, blah, blah. I will go through a review, and it also encourages you to publish your book as a kindle book. But for journals, I would rather skip that or for notebooks, and that's it. Now, if your bookshelf was empty, now you have it populated and you can go in to your Canva account. You can even create a copy, go to the three dots, make a copy of your design. Over here, you can rename it. Instead of this test, I will put in a different title, and then you can play around. I'm going to kick that out too because I don't want any title. Then you can create more variations of this design. If I were, for example, to go to, I have a whole bunch of materials here because I've been using Canva to create my online courses for a very long time. For example, I can choose a position. I can choose this repeat pattern. I'm not editing it. I might actually change it if I really consider it as a new cover design. But just to show you how simple it is, you can just take something that you already have. Of course, I would probably go to Affinity designer and I would still trim and edit it as I actually wanted, and you can play around with other repeat patterns that you basically just have at your hand here in your computer storage or maybe already in Canva. For example, this one, this we can kick it out, and this one. Oh, so nice. And on the middle, I go in and I select a color. That is maybe a color taken from the Oh, that's so nice. I really feel like uploading one more design. Oh, it looks super easy. So now, especially if you had this little cheat eet over here, boom, boom, boom, copy paste, copy paste, copy paste, you just change the title. Graphic garden. I don't know. This was like a design that I had for the fall fall garden, fall, something with the fall or autumn. I would have to give it a thing. But this is how easy it is. It looks kind of similar to this pattern that I created also for the fall season. And all you got to do is recycle the content, both for the Canva account and for the KDP account. You can recycle it as many times as you want. So you have taken this course. I did take some time because I tried to be quite descriptive when I give advice. And I explain how I do things to make them more efficient. But this is something that you needed to do only one time. And now everything is ready. Like, look, even this template has all the guides that you need. So you have to do it one time, maybe for different dimensions for next time. But if this is your favorite dimension, you can just copy paste, copy paste, copy paste and create a whole series. And next time you're creating a new publish Shing listing, you can create a series out of it. For example, a series of botanical themed journals. And this is it. We created our first or maybe not so first listing, it's in review, and now it's going to take at least two working days to get approved and to get checked by the Amazon team. 14. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for joining me in this class. I really hope that you're feeling inspired and feeling empowered, especially if you're in a bit of a creative rut or you're maybe a little bit unhappy with how the career is going or you're experiencing a dry spell, or maybe you just feel empowered because you found a way to unstuck your art from just staying forever on your iPad or on your desktop storage. I think it's a wonderful way to breathe this new life into your artwork. So before you go, I have a few ways for you to, first of all, to stay connected and also to keep the momentum going. You can, for example, follow me here on Skillshare, so you don't miss any of my future updates. I've got more self publishing classes coming soon. I really like this topic. It really keeps me going these days. So I will definitely be including some deep dives, for example, into Affinity Designer and also affinity publisher for self publishing, and we might even tackle some other more ambitious self publishing projects. If you enjoy the course, it would mean so much if you could leave a review. It really helps other students discover this class and supports my work as a teacher. I also write a creative newsletter on Substack. I call it a block letter because it's a mixture of a blog with longer articles and getting the updates to your mailbox. With this regard, it's like a classical newsletter. And on this platform, I share behind the scenes some creative tips, artists resources, and early previews of upcoming projects and classes. You will find the link in the class description, somewhere in the resources, and I hope to see you there. If you'd like to connect on Facebook, I have two Facebook groups, one for General Illustration in Affinity and Fresco, and one specifically for pattern design. It's a safe space where you can support other artists by commenting, giving feedback, but also you can get their help yourself. And I think it's nice that it goes a little bit beyond Skillshare because you can post their videos, screencasts, or any other images of your projects. And you can ask any questions you want there. If I don't get on time to give you some answers, then most probably a member of the group will reply even faster than me and give you some tips and advice. If you want to keep learning, don't forget to check out my other courses, especially if you're into Illustration surface design or exploring the power of affinity designer tools. Thanks for being here, and I can't wait to see what you create. Happy creating.