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Create an ebook in just 1 day! 🙌

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video transcript:

How to Create an Ebook for Free (Step by Step!)

One of the easiest digital products that you can create and offer to your audience right now is an ebook, and you can literally do this in one day. In today’s video, I’m going to show you step-by-step exactly how to create an ebook, and then, in tomorrow’s video, I’m going to show you how you can offer this for sale. Of course, for this, we are going to use my favorite graphic-design software for beginners, and that is Canva. This is going to make it super-simple for you to create a stunning professional-looking ebook. Let’s dive in.

Using Canva to Create an Ebook

To create an ebook, all you have to do is go to Canva.com and set up your free account. Once you log in, you will see a search bar at the top – simply type in US Letter. You’ll see US Letter Document – click on that - and then you can just for now click Blank. This is going to open up the Canva editor.

Pick a Template

To create an ebook, you need to select a template. Over here, on the left side, you will see all these different templates that you can choose from for your design. One thing I would recommend you do is look for a template design with more than one page. If I hover over a template and it just says FREE, then that means there’s only one page. However, if I hover over it and it says 1 OF 2, and it moves like this, that means that there are multiple pages already branded under this template. For example, this one here says 1 OF 5. Let’s go ahead and click on that and then I can simply click on Page 1, and that’s going to move that design over here to the right.

Customize the Template

Everything about this software is very easy. You can click on things and then you can drag and drop them around on the page. What I would do is simply double-click on this Popstar text here, add in my title of my ebook, write my subtitle, and start to customize it for my brand. For example, I can click on this background color and see a color swatch appear here at the top left. I can click there and change it to one of my brand colors. Same with this image – I can click on that, go over to Photos and find a photo that I want to use instead. Let’s say this ebook is going to be about something techie, so I need a computer photo – I’m going to type Computer into the search bar and grab one of these computer images and drag it over here into this section on the right.

As you can see, my ebook is starting to come together. For a full Canva tutorial, check out the video that I’m linking to right now – I’ll also put a link to the description below so you can check that out. It’s a more in-depth Canva-specific tutorial.

Add a New Page

So, we have our first page here. Now I’m going to click Add a new page. I’m going to go back into Templates, go back to my template, and add in the second page now. All I have to do is simply have a blank page here on the right, and then click on the templated design and that’s going to bring it over for me. I can do it again – Add a new page – add page three; Add a new page – add page four; and again for our final page. So this is the outline basically of our ebook and I can go ahead and customize it for my brand. Everything about this can be customized. For example, if I didn’t want this background color on this page 2, I could simply delete that. If I wanted to change the color of these letters, I can absolutely do that - I can switch it up like that. If you ever want to delete an element, you can simply click on it and then hit the Delete key on your keyboard or hit the little Trash Can icon top right. Even faster – if I drag my mouse on top of multiple elements at a time, I can delete many elements all in one go.

Now let’s do this section on page 3. I’m going to click on the background color and change it to one of mine. (If you’re wondering how I have my brand colors saved here – this is because I am on the Pro Plan. I do highly recommend that plan – it’s only around $10 per month and gives you a few really great time-saving features.) I’m going to change that color, then I’m simply going to keep this photo layout but replace it with photos that I want. I can either go over to Photos like we just did and search for photos that way, or I can go over to Uploads and I can upload my own photos (as you can see, I’ve done that here). I uploaded that simply by clicking Upload an image or video and uploading my photo file. Now I’m going to click on these photos here, then click on my photo and drag it on top of that specific block to upload there.

As I said, when you create an ebook, everything about it is customizable, so always check this top bar here for the editing options that have appeared. For example, I can click on Filter. I was thinking maybe this was a greyscale filter – it’s not - but if I go over to Adjust you’ll see that they’ve reduced the saturation, so I could bring this back up to normal. We would go ahead and do that with those three different photos.

If you ever want this to show you only the photos that are free, you can simply come up here to the search bar, click on this Filter icon, and then click Free and Apply filters. Now we know that all of these are free. I’m going to drag that computer photo there, and if I want I could again simply remove the saturation edit that they made. So, now we can go back here again to page 4, and same thing – you can either replace this photo with your own photo, or you could simply delete it, then hit Delete again, and start customizing this page.

Download Your Ebook

That is how you edit all the different elements. It definitely gets really fun once you are comfortable with this software. Now all you need to do is download it. First, in the top bar, where it says Title, I’m going to change that to the title of my ebook. Then I’m going to click on the Download arrow, and I’m going to download it as a PDF Print, which is what they are suggesting for us. This is going to be a super high-quality file, perfect for your ebook. So, we have PDF Print; we’re going to do All Pages, and then click Download.

Now let’s open up that ebook file. I’m going to go to Downloads and open up my PDF, and as you can see this looks awesome and super professional.

That is how you quickly and easily create an ebook in Canva. Hopefully this allows you to add an ebook to your product suite. Don’t forget to hit Subscribe because tomorrow I’m going to be doing a video on how you can offer digital products like this for sale.

Thank you so much for watching. I hope this was of help to you. If it was, please let me know by giving this a thumbs up, and share it out with anyone you think will benefit from this information on how to create an ebook. I’ll see you tomorrow with another video.