How to Create a Flipbook Video for a Visual Book

I recently created a “flipbook” of the devotional I co-collaborated on with Kathleen Schwab. Our book, Messages from God: An Illuminated Devotional is extremely visual and often defies description. I did create a book trailer for it, but, while it showed how the book was created and a bit of what it was about, it didn’t give a full sense of the visual beauty of the book.

This is when I came up with the idea of creating a flipbook for it. Creating a flipbook could be a useful marketing piece for any highly visual book such as this visual devotional, art books, comic books, children’s picture books, inspirational quote books…. you name it! If it’s visually oriented, a flipbook could be just what you need to flip your perusers into buyers. Before I discuss the process of creating it, I thought it would be beneficial for you to see the final product.

1. Ensure that the PDF of your book is set up to display a 2-page spread like.
2. Open the PDF with Adobe Photoshop.  In the Import PDF dialog box ensure that Crop to is set to Trim Box and that all your pages are selected.
3. Click OK.  (Depending on your machine and the length of your book, you may want to do sets of pages at a time instead of all at once.)
4. Save each page spread as a .jpg in your desired location.
5. Open a blank presentation in PowerPoint.
6. Go to the Insert ribbon and select Photo Album.
7. Click File/Disk and navigate to where you saved your page spreads.  Select all of them and click Insert.
8. Make sure picture layout is set to Fit to Slide and click Create.
9. Delete the first title slide and reset the background color to white.
10. Select all the slides.
11. On the Transition ribbon select Page Curl.
12. Set the Advance Slide to After 2 seconds (this can be adjusted to your taste).
13. On the Slide Show ribbon, click From Beginning and preview the slideshow.
14. If you want to add music, navigate to the first slide.
15. Go to the Insert ribbon, select Audio.
16. Navigate to where you have the music you wish to add. (Be mindful of copyright.)
17. Insert the music.  You may want to send the music icon to the background so it can’t be seen.
18. On the Audio Tools ribbon (appears only when you have the icon selected on the slide) select Play in Background.
19. Preview your slideshow again and adjust as desired.
20. Once you have everything set as you desire, it’s time to export the slideshow as a video!
21. Click File | Export | Create a Video.
22. Select the appropriate settings (Use the recorded timings!) and click Create Video.
23. You will be prompted to name the file and select the location for it to be saved before the video creation begins.