Affinity Publisher

I now use Affinity Publisher for all of my print book formatting as well as my advertisements and book covers. Previously I used Word for non-fiction print formatting, Vellum for novels, and GIMP for any advertisements or covers.

It’s a great tool and I think they have excellent user forums and learning videos on their website (https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/), but for me when I was learning how to use the program, the content wasn’t in an order that made sense for what I needed. So I did a lot of watching and drowning and then finally putting it all together at the end.

To save others who may not be graphic designers but are instead self-publishers looking to master a new tool that same experience, I wrote books summarizing what I learned and, in some cases, also put together video courses.

Affinity released a new version, 2.0, in late 2022. So if you just bought the program, then you’ll want one of these books:

If you’ve had the program for a while, chances are you have the original version of the program, in which case you will want one of the books or video courses below.

If you have 2.0 you could still use one of the books or video courses below, because the mechanics of things haven’t really changed, but the appearance of the program has and a few things did move around so there’d be a bit of adjustment you’d need to make.

Learn how to create a basic fiction layout from start to finish in Affinity Publisher.

Video Course:
Udemy
Ebook: Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Nook, Universal Link
Print Black and White: ISBN 9781637440216
Print Color: ISBN 9781637440681
Learn more advanced fiction topics like tables of contents and merging multiple documents as well as non-fiction-specific topics like indexes, inserting images into your text, and having multiple columns in a text frame.

Video Course: Udemy
Ebook: Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Nook, Universal Link
Print Black and White: ISBN 9781637440223
Print Color: ISBN 9781637440711
A project-based course that walks you through how to create two Facebook square ads, one Bookbub ad, a banner that can be used for Amazon A+ Content or a website, and how to prepare a book cover for use in an Amazon A+ Content comparison chart.

Video Course: Udemy
Ebook: Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Nook, Universal Link
Print Black and White: ISBN 9781637440285
Print Color: ISBN ISBN 9781637440698
A project-based course that walks you through how to create three different basic cover designs, one with a central image (the bulldog example above), one that is text-heavy with a side image, and three variations on having an image for the entire cover (the two other examples above). Also walks through how to take an ebook image and turn it into an Amazon KDP and IngramSpark paperback as well as an IngramSpark case laminate hard cover.

Video Course: Udemy
Ebook: Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Nook, Universal Link
Print Black and White: ISBN 9781637440292
Print Color: ISBN 9781637440704

The original Affinity books can also be found in the following two-book collections:

(Also, for those who just need to know how to do one little thing in Affinity Publisher, I’ve published almost 90 short videos on YouTube as a video reference library for the original version of Affinity.)

%d bloggers like this: