Low Content Publishing: A Guide To Low Content Books [2023]

If you’re a homemaker, student, or aspiring entrepreneur seeking financial independence and a steady income, you should certainly consider the business of low content publishing.

Low content publishing can not only bring secondary income that could boost up your savings account but also revolutionize your whole life by generating a 6-figure monthly salary, and the best thing about this business – it can be extremely passive.

While there can be several ways how to succeed with low content publishing, we are going to talk about the most popular yet most profitable way – Amazon KDP.

We are going to discuss what exactly low content publishing is, and how you can start this amazing business for free today.

Some Quick Resources:

What Is Low Content Publishing?

Low content publishing is a business model that involves creating and publishing books on one of the world’s biggest shopping platforms – Amazon.

Compared to traditional books, low-content books typically do not have written information inside, but just the design elements on the cover and interiors.

That makes such books easier to produce since you don’t have to sit down for weeks or months writing hundreds of thousands of words. 

However, just because it’s easier to produce them, it does not mean that there is less money to be made with low-content products.

Low content books are in huge demand right now and people buying them like crazy for many purposes and occasions.

There can be many types of low-content books, and here’s an example of a few popular ones:

How Does Low Content Publishing Work?

Low content publishing on Amazon works in a very straightforward way.

The first thing you have to do is to come up with a book idea (niche). For that, you do keyword research, where you find searchable book titles with little competition.

You will do keyword research on Amazon’s platform with the help of a few tools to make your results more accurate.

Once you find a good keyword and a niche, you analyze what kind of designs are already selling, and what designs could be missing. Your goal is not to produce similar books that are already there but to come up with a different kind of design.

When you have a niche and a clear idea of a book, it’s time to design the cover and interiors for it.

While this process may sound scary for newbies, don’t worry as today we have some fantastic and easy-to-use tools, like Canva, which can make the design process flawlessly easy and enjoyable.

When you finish designing your books, the last step is to upload them to the Amazon KDP platform. From there people will be able to view and purchase your books, and Amazon will print and ship them to your customers without any upfront costs.

The platform will deduct printing and shipping costs from the book’s original sale price, and you will be paid what’s left after deductions – the royalties.

Is Low Content Publishing Worth It? (Top Benefits)

Low-content publishing is one of the least effort-demanding businesses available today, and there are many reasons why.

Don’t get me wrong, there is still a learning curve and work to be done over here, but compared to the brick-and-mortar business, low-content publishing can be an absolute pleasure, especially if you enjoy designing stuff.

Here are the main reasons why you should start publishing low-content books:

  • Gives you freedom: In this business, you are the boss who determines what kind and how many books you want to create. The sky is the limit of what you can earn, and the more work you are willing to put in the better the rewards will be. In addition, since you only need a laptop and internet connection to work, this business gives you location independence.
  • Easy to produce: What’s amazing about low-content books is that it takes very little time to produce them. Some of the books I’ve made took me a few hours to produce and brought thousands of dollars in return. Now compare it to a fiction book of 100 pages of words…
  • No upfront investment: You don’t need to invest in expensive tools or inventory. You don’t even need to have your website as Amazon is a perfect place to sell and market your products. You can start with no investment, literally for free.
  • No marketing efforts are needed: Amazon is a huge platform getting millions of users coming to shop every day. The appropriate keyword research and outstanding design are all you need to do to get your books exposed in front of an endless audience.
  • No special skills are required: Creating low-content books is easier than you think. There are no coding or special design skills required, as today we have fantastic tools to simplify the design process.
  • Passive income: What can be better in this world than passive income? Selling digital products, like low-content books enables products to be created once for them to be sold many many times. You publish the books, and watch the sales coming in on autopilot for years – that’s the taste of a passive income. 
  • It’s enjoyable: If you are the kind of person who’s into arts, it will be easy to get lost in the process of designing low-content books. Time just flies when I’m trying to come up with beautiful designs and ideas for my books.

To put it short, low-content publishing is definitely worth it, and the only things you need to succeed are a desire, consistency, and a little passion for design.

low content book course

How To Make Money with Low Content Books:

There are 3 repetitive steps you should take in order to succeed with low content publishing on Amazon KDP. These are – niche research, designing, and publishing.

Once you get more familiar and advanced with publishing you can also try paid advertising on Amazon in order to get your products exposed to more people.

But for now, let’s focus on 3 essential steps:

1. Finding A Niche:

Finding the right niches for your low-content books plays a vital role in your success. 

You may have the most beautiful book in the world, but if there’s not going to be enough demand for it, or the niche will be too competitive, you will have a hard time ranking your book and getting any sales at all.

That’s why it’s important that you take your time to do proper niche research for every single book that you are going to create.

In this process, your ultimate goal is to find untapped book niches, with low competition and high demand, and you can only do this by niching down general book categories. 

For example, there’s significant demand for “planners” on Amazon, but if you try to create a general planner, you will have no chance of making any sales at all, and that’s because it’s simply too competitive. 

Instead, you should focus on creating something more specific, such as “planners for real estate agents”, or anything else which is narrower than a general category.

Since Amazon is a search engine, which people use to find various products via keywords, the niche research comes down to Amazon keyword research.

So let’s talk about what Amazon keyword research is and how you can do it effectively.

Doing Keyword Research on Amazon:

When doing keyword research on Amazon, your task is to find searchable phrases which you could rank for on the first page.

This process involves running a search on Amazon’s All Departments and using 3rd party tools, that will extract important data.

 Some people do keyword research on Amazon’s book department, and that’s the wrong way to do it.

It’s because most of the time customers will be looking for books using the general search rather than a specific department, so we have to adapt such customer behavior for the most accurate results.

For that, you will need two free Amazon keyword research tools created by the Self-Publishing Titans:

  • Huge Amazon Search Suggestion Expander
  • KDP / Amazon BSR & Keyword Research SEO Tool

These are my favorite free tools that I use whenever I do keyword research. They are very accurate and they help me find popular uncompetitive niches quickly.

The keyword research involves two stages:

STAGE 1:

Looking at Amazon’s search suggestions is the best way of finding what people are searching on Amazon, but by default, amazon returns only the 10 most popular results, and that’s not enough for us.

amazon auto suggest low content

Therefore, the Search Suggestion Expander tool by Self Publishing Titans will expand our suggestions to over 100 results, and that will give us a broader spectrum of keywords to consider. 

With the help of this tool, you can also conveniently download all suggestions to your computer in the spreadsheet format if you wish.

Although notebooks and journals are the best products to start with for beginners, you can also run a search for many other types of low content books, such as:

  • Guest books
  • Recipe books
  • Workbooks
  • Coloring books
  • Activity books
  • Composition books
  • Quote books
  • Practice books
  • Prayer books
  • Bucket lists
  • And many others…

At this stage, you can write down as many appealing keywords as possible, so you can later analyze each one individually, and eliminate the ones that are not promising. 

But once again, try to avoid keywords that are too general, and instead focus on specific ones, something like logbook for lash extensions”, “calligraphy practice book for beginners”, etc.

While Self-Publishing Titans provides a free opportunity to do keyword research on Amazon, this tool isn’t perfect and there can be better free & paid options available out there. To find out more KDP keyword research tools, make sure you read our article on the best KDP keyword generators.

STAGE 2:

Now once you have a list of potential keywords, it’s time to determine which ones you need to create books for. 

For this purpose, you will need another keyword research tool – KDP / Amazon BSR & Keyword Research SEO Tool

This amazing free Chrome extension will give you important data such as keyword niche score, average best seller rank, average reviews, and average price.

When it comes to effective keyword research there are some guidelines that you want to follow, while at the same time using your common sense.

The first criteria, which you don’t need any tool to determine, is the number of results returned when you run a search on a particular keyword. 

Generally, if the search returns 250-1000 results it is a good indicator meaning that the niche might not be over-saturated.

But that’s not enough, and there is more data to consider, such as:

  • Keyword Niche Score: That’s the Self Publishing Titan’s overall score given to the keyword. While the algorithms are never perfect, try to find keywords that have a score of 50 or above.

  • Amazon Best Seller’s Rank (BSR): It is Amazon’s algorithm, which determines the product’s position in rankings considering the number of sales it has made. The lower the BSR the better, and you should aim for a lower than 300,000 average BSR. Such BSR means that the niche has enough demand and the books are selling well.

  • Average Reviews: Having products on the first page with too many reviews will make it hard for you to compete with, therefore the fewer reviews the books on the first page have the better. For the best results, you should aim for under 2000 average reviews.

  • Average Price: Amazon takes a fee from your sale for printing and shipping a book, so, the higher price you will sell a book for, the bigger royalties you will make. For that, it’s best to focus on the average price of at least 7 dollars.

Here’s an example of a niche meeting all the necessary criteria:

low content keyword research

However, not every aspect has to meet the criteria, and some may fall below the standards. I would say, the most important criteria are the BSR score, and that should be your primary focus.

Besides that, there are a few other things that you may also want to check:

  1. See if there are recently published books on page one, if there are it means you may have a chance to rank quickly too.
  2. Check if your used keyword returns similar titles of the books on the search. If there’s nothing similar on page one, that keyword is probably not relevant to what people are looking for.

And that’s about it, these are all guidelines you should follow when finding a niche for your upcoming book. And remember, there is no algorithm that is 100% accurate, so always try to use your critical thinking in conjunction with keyword research tools.

2. Creating Low Content Books:

low content book design

Once you find some profitable niches and keywords, it’s time to create some books.

The first step would be to run a search for a specific keyword, and check what is already there on the first and second pages.

Try to find a way how you could separate yourself from others with your own unique design. Don’t try to replicate what’s already there, but instead come up with something different.

One keyword doesn’t mean one book.

You can create different versions of a book targeting the same keywords. For example, you may want to create a  version for women or men, as well as a classy or artsy version.

Just have a look at what’s already there, and what’s missing.

When you get an idea for a book you will have to create the design for it. The book design involves a book cover and interior pages.

There are many types of low-content books, and the design process may vary from type to type. 

However, if you are just starting out, I recommend you to stick with notebooks and logbooks as those have very simple interiors, which normally consist of the same pages.

In this way, you will be designing only 2 pages – the cover (back and front), and the interior page, which you will simply duplicate as many times as you need.

The good news is – designing books can be easy. There’s no need to use advanced design software, such as Photoshop or Illustrator, that require prior experience. Everything can be done with the free tool called Canva

Canva is an easy-to-use online design tool with hundreds of pre-made templates and design elements. Although some capabilities are limited with the free version, you can definitely start at no cost.

And if you want to have unlimited flexibility when designing low-content books, I definitely recommend upgrading to the Canva pro version, for a small monthly fee. This will unlock many premium templates, images, and elements, which will enhance your design further.

Here’s the tutorial on how you can easily design a lined notebook’s cover and interiors on Canva:

Click here to try Canva for free

Too lazy with creating your own low-content book designs? Check out the best low content book templates for interiors and covers.

3. Publishing Your Books on Amazon:

Here comes the last and the easiest step of the self-publishing process – bringing your books to life.

For your books to appear available to the public on Amazon, you will have to create an account and upload them via Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.

upload low content books amazon

Once you create an account, on the bookshelf section select the paperback, and start filling in the necessary information:

  • TITLE: Your title has to reflect the keyword you are targeting as well as the title written on your book’s design.
  • SUBTITLE: Here you can include what is not written on your book’s cover. That can be a quick description of your book, such as color, style, and purpose.
  • AUTHOR NAME: It can be your real name or your pen name.
  • DESCRIPTION: The description does not affect Amazon’s ranking, but you can use it like a sales letter to better describe your book.
  • PUBLISHING RIGHTS: Tick that you own the copyrights for the book you have created.
  • KEYWORDS: There you have 7 fields to fill in with keywords. Include as many relevant keywords as possible by separating them with space. You can mention the type of your book, as well as the style, colors used,  occasions, etc.
  • CATEGORIES: Chose the relevant category for your book, which might help buyers to discover it.
  • ADULT CONTENT: Tick no if your book does not contain any adult content.

Once finish with all that, head over to the next page, where you have to select the following options:

amazon kdp low content upload

  • PRINT OPTIONS: Most of the time you will have to choose “Black & white interior with white paper”
  • TRIM SIZE: Choose the size of the book that you have designed
  • BLEED SETTINGS: If the design of your interior goes right to the edges of the pages, then you should select “Bleed”. If the design does not go right to the edges, and there’s a margin around the design, then you should choose the “No Bleed” option.
  • PAPERBACK COVER FINISH: You can choose whichever finish you would like to have printed on your cover, but the most popular option is the MATTE finish.
  • MANUSCRIPT: Upload your book interiors in PDF format.
  • BOOK COVER: Upload your book cover in PDF format.
  • BARCODE: Amazon issues a unique ISBN number and puts the barcode automatically on your books, so there’s no need to have your own barcode.

When done, click on the Launch Preview, and Amazon will give you a preview of your book, as well as let you know if there are any issues with the formatting.

The very last step is to select the territories and set the price:

  • TERRITORIES: There you can select specific territories where you want your book to be sold, but the wise option would be to choose “All Territories”
  • PRICE AND ROYALTY:  Set the price for your low-content book. As we covered before, it’s best to price your books from $6.99.  Also, select the “Expanded Distribution” option for maximizing the selling opportunities.

And that’s about it – you can click on the “Publish Your Paperback Book” button to publish your first book on Amazon. Then your book will go through the manual review process, which sometimes can take up to 7 days.

Final Words:

When trying to publish your first books on Amazon, don’t overthink the whole process and just focus on getting your first books out there. When you get to publish your first books you will gain the momentum which will push you forward toward publishing more and more.

At the end of the day, it is consistent work with big rewards.

Do not expect to get results just from 10 or 20 books (while it’s still possible), but instead aim for publishing 100s of them over time.

The truth is, the majority of books you publish won’t even sell, so your goal is to create a lot of high-quality books, and that will increase the chances of getting regular sales.

You will need to have a lot of books in order to generate good revenue but remember – quality is always over quantity in this business.

– Best of luck in low-content publishing!