How To: Make a Low Content Book to Sell on Amazon KDP

Continuing with my theme of ‘trying everything’ to grow and monetize my blog this year, I thought I’d create my first low content book. A few weeks ago, I started my journey into the diversification of products I can sell online by creating my first Etsy printable, a digital product. This time, I’m trying my hand at a book meant solely for physical print- a pregnancy journal. This post will detail how I went about it.

What is a Low Content Book?

As the name suggests, these are books with very little content inside, where content refers to writing and/or images. Examples of low content books include journals, planners, coloring books, prayer or gratitude books, etc. These are books where the buyer does most of the writing, not the author.

Why Create a Low Content Book?

It’s a quick and easy way to make a sellable book product. A few hours or, at the most, days on Canva and Word, and you will have a completed journal that you can then list and start to sell.

There is a Great Market for Low Content Books

People love journals. People love products that promise to (and hopefully actually do) help them to be more productive, organized, mindful, grateful-you name it, there’s probably already a journal for it. So, it’s creating a product that you know that people want and are actively searching online for daily (if you choose the correct niche).

From an author's point of view, this is miraculous because writing fiction books tends to work in the opposite way. You write the story that’s most wanting to be expressed out of you, and then you work to market it and hope people will resonate with it enough to give it a buy and, fingers crossed, a read.

So going into product design with an active marketplace searching for the very product you’re making feels a little like cheating the system. In actuality, it's just clever. At the very least, it’s worth giving a try.

How to make a Low Content Book

These are the exact steps that I took to make my ‘Since You Were Born’ Pregnancy Journal.

Choose What Kind of Low Content Book You want to Make

It's important to have a clear direction. By knowing what kind of low content book you want to make, you'll know what type of design to create (which is important for Canva, if that's what you're using). You'll also know what to search for when studying the competition to get an idea of what's currently out there and working.

Pick a niche

As with most things, it’s usually better to specialize in one thing or one area. This increases your chances of being seen as an expert by your customer, as well as actually becoming an expert since working in one specific niche will naturally lead you to dive deeper and develop a greater understanding of whatever topic you choose to explore- which you can then pass onto your audience and/or customer. You can also be more productive because you can batch your work together, which can increase your sales potential because it allows you to bundle your products.

Do some research

Do keyword research to find out what keywords (read: products that real customers are searching for to buy) you can rank for. Ideally, you want keywords that have a high traffic volume but low competition. This puts your product in a good position to show up in search engines when people go to Google to look for that kind of product.

Design a Cover

In the world of online shopping, where customers can’t even pick up and thumb through your book, it’s critical to have a great cover. First to catch people’s attention, and then to convince them to buy your product. Your cover needs to be beautiful, sure, but it more importantly needs to communicate what it is, and what it’s promising the buyer if they purchase it. Create a cover that stands out, but is also true to what it is and what it's for. I designed mine on Canva (of course) and I wrote this post a few weeks ago about how to achieve this.

Design the Interior

I also used Canva for this because it’s a great tool that’s easy to use, and with their countless templates, it’s easy to draw inspiration and design something beautiful. This is going to be the most time-consuming part, but this is the true value of your book, so take the time to do a great job. Format correctly, use great design elements that add value and make your work unique, and above all else- make sure the product is useful. Make it a product you would love to use and would pay money for.

Upload Your Book to KDP

I chose Amazon KDP because it’s where I have my novel (my other physical book) listed, so, I already have an account with them. Amazon KDP is affiliated with Amazon (clearly). So, if you have an Amazon account, you can create a KDP account. It’s super easy and can be done in a few minutes.

That said, all I wanted was a company that could fulfill my print-on-demand needs. KDP is certainly not the only one, and if you’d rather work with a different provider, you can. This is something I will research and try out in the future, particularly for creative books like journals which a different company might handle better. Just do some research to see what else is out there- Ingram Sparks, Book Baby, and Blurb come to mind- and chose the one that aligns with you.

What is Amazon KDP?

KDP is Amazon’s print-on-demand service provider. With KDP, you can leverage Amazon's marketplace to publish and distribute your eBook, paperback, and hardcover books to customers all over the world. Listing products is free, you just pay Amazon a commission on every sale. I know it works great for novels, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it works for a journal.

Add your Book Information, List, and Publish

You’ll need to add the book’s title, author, and/or contributor information. For example, if you hired a graphic designer to create beautiful graphics then this is where you would credit them if this is what the two of you agreed to. This is also where you set the sale price and the territories that you want your book to be available in.

Amazon is great at guiding you through this, they are the world's largest marketplace after all, and they know what price points are optimal. Just make sure you’re pricing your book high enough to make a profit. Remember, with a physical book there will be production costs (which Amazon will calculate for you), so account for that to make sure your book actually makes money!

ISBN

This is a book’s unique bar code. It's used by the seller to keep track of inventory. You will need one for your book. You can either buy your own from online vendors (just do a quick search) or Amazon will provide a free one for you. I purchased my own, so I can have peace of mind knowing I can use it on any platform as I chose, and I'll be listed as the publisher, not Amazon. Do some research, weigh the options, and choose what works best for you.

Note: Each format of your book will need a different ISBN. So, if your book is going to be available as a paperback and a hardcover- you'll need 2 ISBNs.

Voila- you’re done!

You will have to wait for KDP to confirm that your book is live. Sometimes, they might contact you with an issue preventing them from listing your book. If they do, they will be very detailed and clearly explain what you need to fix. If you have no issues, then they will contact you to congratulate you on your new book as well as give you a link to it on Amazon.

Order Author Copies

Amazon is unique in that it sells copies to you, as the author, at a discounted price (which is great!) so take advantage of this. It’s vital that you buy the first copy so you can inspect it. Things sometimes (read: always) go funky when a book goes into publishing. You may be using different software to format your book that KDP doesn’t recognize or can’t read properly and that can cause the printed book to look like something out of a kid’s art class- just not in a cute way.

Or, everything will be formatted correctly but you’ll feel like the book should be shorter, or longer, or the cover doesn’t quite work. You may just catch a typo or missing word as you read through it, and nobody wants that. The point is, you won't know if anything needs to change until you hold the book in your hand and look through it. So, go ahead and order it.

Author Copies for Marketing

Once you've ironed out all issues and you’re happy that your book is perfect, it’s a good idea to print a few copies to give away for marketing purposes. If there are influential bloggers in the niche that your book is targeted for, having those people review your book could give you great exposure to your target market.

Tell Your Friends

You did a thing. You started, you sweated, you finished. Now tell everyone about it. Use your new handy link to tell everyone about your new book and where they can go to buy it! Ask for reviews because that will be just the thing to get other people to also buy your book, and so on.

Conclusion

I hope this post has helped guide you through how to create a low content book on Amazon. It's doable, and it can even be quite fun. Plus, if you market successfully and it sells well, it can be a great passive income stream. So, I think it's worth a try.

Let me know what you think.

Happy creating,

Nonjabulo