To create your first book project, you will need to select a few different options.   First, you will want to log into the Book Bolt Studio here: https://studio.bookbolt.io/ If this is your first time creating a project in the Studio, you will need to select a Project Type, a Project Name, a Trim Size, an Interior & Paper Type, as well as bleed and page counts: 

 In order to load a book that you have worked on in the past, you must have saved it inside of the Book Bolt Studio.   These are saved in the cloud, and should be available to you no matter what computer you are on.  To load a previously saved book, simply go to Project in the top menu bar here:  Under project, select “My Projects” 

When you first load in a new book project that includes a cover, you will see the guidelines page from Amazon KDP.   This is helpful to know where the cutoffs are on your book, but may make it difficult to design a proper cover.  In order to remove the KDP guidelines page, or temporarily hide it, please follow these simple steps.  Step 1: When a new project is loaded that includes a cover page, go to the top menu bar, and select the cover template opacity: 

If you want to set up a grid overlay on top of either your book cover or your book interior to line up certain elements with each other, please follow these steps.  By default, there will be certain gridlines on the page, but these are all customizable.  Start off by selecting the grid lines option near the left menu:   This will open up the grid lines options: 

 In order to group different layers together, you must first have at least 2 objects on a project page or cover.  Once you do, you will see each object in the right hand menu:  In this case, you can see that we have added both a heading to the page, as well as an image.   If we want to group the objects together, so that they move at the same time when we drag and drop them around the screen, we will need to create a new folder.

Cloning pages inside of the Book Bolt Studio is very easy.  When you create a new project, your cover, and the pages inside for your interior are shown in the left hand menu.  In this example, you can see that we have 24 pages created in the project:  If you did some really great work on a single page, and this should be repeated throughout your project, click on clone this page to others.

 We have built in multiple different effects into Book Bolt studio.  These options become accessible and customizable once you have added a layer to the project.  In this case, we have added an image of a tree, which will open up the options at the top menu bar once the tree layer is selected.  To access the effects, click on effects in the top menu, which will bring up the different image effects.

In order to add distressed effects in Book Bolt Studio, you will first need to have some type of image, or layer added to the page or cover.  Once you have an image or text added, you will then have the option to click on the distressed effects in the left hand menu, which looks like a paintbrush:  Clicking on the paintbrush will bring up the different distressed effects that are available: 

In order to fill up your interior pages inside of Book Bolt studio, you must select an interior that is offered.  To do this, log in to the Book Bolt studio, and create or load a previous project that you have worked on.  You will then need to click in the left hand menu what looks like a maze.  This opens up the interior templates library: 

The Book Bolt Studio comes pre loaded with over 1,000+ fonts that you can use commercially.  However, there are times where you just want to use your own font that you have purchased or created yourself.  In this case, follow these steps to upload your own fonts.  Step 1: Add some text to the page.  You will want to click on the text menu and then add some text to the page.

The Book Bolt Studio allows you to upload your own graphics to the image library that can be used in your design of a cover or an interior.  To do this, first, load in a new project or a previous project in the Studio.  Once you have a project loaded in, click on the images tab in the menu that looks like 2 picture frames: 

Book Bolt Studio has lots of options for customizing SVG graphics. Since these are vector files (a math equation to make sure you can make the image as big or as small as you want without distorting the image), you can also customize these to fit your designs.  To do this, first upload your SVG file to the image library and add it to the canvas. 

Book Bolt Studio will automatically save your progress as you work on both your cover, or your interior.  However, there may be times where you will want to save your progress at a certain point, so that you can come back later where you left off.  There may also be times that you are switching from page to page quicker than the auto save is functioning, so you will want to save your progress as well.

Sometimes, you want to download the files to your computer so that you can work on them later, or simply because you are cleaning up all of your projects for a better user experience.  No matter what it is, we have added the ability to download project files inside of Book Bolt studio.  Project files are NOT files that can be uploaded to Amazon KDP, but files that can be uploaded again at any time to the Studio, and begin working on them again.

You can use Book Bolt studio to create all sorts of amazing designs, but with many programs, you are simply left with a PDF that you can not do anything with!  Book Bolt studio fixes all of that by not only allowing you to download certain pages as a PDF (as well as complete projects), but we have added the ability to download single pages as SVG vector files that can be used in any program that you want.

Book Bolt Studio has an option to allow you to create multiple different covers that may look similar but use different words!  In order to do this, first open up your cover file, and select the text menu on the left hand side:   From here, select text with variants:  Once the text variant is added to the screen, you will want to click on edit text variants in the top menu:  

There are many shapes inside of the Book Bolt Studio and each one of these is editable (because they are vector graphics).  Start by selecting a shape in the shapes menu on the left:  In this example, we have selected a butterfly.   Make sure that the “shape” is selected on your screen by clicking on it.  Once a shape is selected, you can begin using the top menu to open the different options.

Book Bolt studio comes with multiple different text effects that can all be edited and customized to your liking!  Begin by adding some text to the canvas by selecting the text option in the left hand menu:  This will allow you to see that you have a few options:  Heading  Regular multiline text  Circular text  Bridge text  Text with variants  Once you select an option, text will be added to the screen and selected.

If you purchased an interior template from somewhere else, or you have created one on another software, you can still use that inside of the Book Bolt Studio!  In order to do this, follow these steps.  The first step is to click on the image library by selecting the picture frames in the left hand menu here:  This will open up the image library.  The great thing about the Book Bolt Studio is that the image library can upload PDF files and automatically turn them into 300 DPI images, so you can add these to your interior pages.

 Adding masks to your covers and interior files is a great way to spice it up and bring the creativity to KDP.  The Book Bolt Studio makes this very easy.  Here are the steps you need to take to get your first mask completed.  Step 1: Add a layer that can be masked.  For this step, we are going to add a single piece of text: 

Creating patterns with the Book Bolt studio is incredibly easy!  Patterns can be created with any type of layer, including text as well as images.  To demonstrate this, lets add an image to the canvas:  Since we want to make a pattern out of this, lets make the image smaller to demonstrate how this will work:  Once you have your layer selected, you now have the option to create a pattern by clicking on the “brick wall” option in the left hand menu: