Did you discover low-content books and are curious about their meaning? This article will delve into defining low-content books, their advantages, and how to profit from them on Amazon.
What Are Low Content Books?
Low content books, also known as no content books, are books with no or very little content inside.
They normally contain little or no text, but just design elements, like shapes, illustrations, and lines. Such types of books are in demand and both children and adults use them for various purposes, such as:
- keeping a track of life
- planning new things
- learning new things
- improving skills
- relieving stress
- treating medical conditions
- entertainment
People create and sell low-content books either for digital use, or print-on-demand. Printable low-content books are way more popular than digital ones among customers, therefore the best place to sell them is on Amazon, which prints and ships the books to the customers.
Some Quick Resources:
- Book Bolt – Best All-In-One KDP Tool
- Publisher Rocket – Best Advanced KDP Keyword Research Tool
- Creative Fabrica – Best KDP Interiors & Graphics
What are the most popular low content books?
There can be many types of low-content books. Some books are easy to create while others require more research and effort. In this section we will discuss the 7 most popular types of low-content books, which you can start creating today:
1. Notebooks
Notebooks can be used for all sorts of purposes and they can be filled in any manner. These types of books are easiest to create, and they typically come with plain-lined interior pages. Apart from lined notebooks, there can also be composition notebooks or notebooks with graph paper.
2. Journals
Journals are great for expressing thoughts and ideas, as well as to track down things. Unlike notebooks, journals typically have designed sections, which have to be filled in a specific fashion. There can be many types of journals, and the most popular ones are journals for gratitude, memories, positivity, writing music, or writing books. Besides that, people also use journals as their daily life diaries.
3. Planners
People buy and use planners to plan activities, tasks, or events, and most of the time they are used to increase productivity and accomplish goals. Since most planners are date-based, they come with dynamic interiors with different dates on each page. There can be daily, monthly, or yearly planners, and they can be used for school, work, business, and personal life.
4. Log Books
Log books, also known as ledger books, are used for tracking information for many purposes. Just like the excel sheet, the log book interior will include columns and rows, as well as the column headers. The log books are pretty easy to create, and they can be used to track income, expenses, mileage, food, medications, and other things.
5. Coloring Books
While most of the time coloring books are used by children, many adults also use them to relax and improve concentration. These types of low-content books are not very easy to make, however, they can be very profitable. Coloring books typically come with different interior pages that include fillable shapes or illustrations, and adult coloring books will have more complex elements.
6. Activity Books
Another great low-content book niche, that requires more effort to tap into. Activity books are designed for the readers to take some sort of activities, and they are widely used by both children and adults. The children’s activity books are primarily created to teach new skills and stimulate the young brain, while the adult books are more focused on stress relief, and increased logical thinking. There can be many types of activity books, including, crossword puzzles, sudoku, mazes, dot-to-dots, letter tracing, find-the-difference, and others.
7. Workbooks
A workbook is a book with instructions or exercises on a particular subject, and it is also used by grown-ups and children. While adults mostly use workbooks to improve self-esteem and mental health conditions, children use them to learn the alphabet, phonics, maths, and other school-related things. Since workbooks require deeper research and more written content, they can be priced higher than regular low-content books.
Benefits of Selling Low-Content Books:
The big customer demand for low-content books sparked the interest of many entrepreneurs to create and publish their own books on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. Despite the great customer need for such products, there are more good reasons why you can start selling low-content books:
Passive Income: Amazon KDP is probably the most passive business you can come across today. First of all, you only need to create and publish the books once for them to potentially sell hundreds if not thousands of times. Once you do the work once, you can be hands-off waiting for customers to discover and purchase your books, and Amazon will automatically print and ship them to the customers. Throughout the process, you don’t necessarily need to market your books as well as worry about fulfilling stocks or customer service, and that makes this business extremely passive.
Easy To Start: Unlike other ventures that require special expertise and knowledge to start, low content publishing has a very small learning curve. You don’t need to have business, accounting, or coding skills, and you don’t even need to have a website. You can easily create low-content books with a simple design tool called Canva and have your first book published in less than a day.
No Up-Front Investment: Talking about financial investments, you don’t need to invest anything but only time when creating and selling low-content books. You can create books for free, and uploading your books on Amazon costs nothing at all. Amazon will only charge printing and shipping costs once you make a sale, and then you will be paid with whatever is left – royalties. Of course, there are some helpful low-content book creator tools that you can purchase, but in the beginning, that is not necessary.
It’s Enjoyable: If you are the kind of person who enjoys creating and designing things, then this business might be just for you. Creating low-content books requires composing and playing with different design elements, which for many people can be a pleasant process. Therefore, many professional low content publishers view their work as a passion, or even as a therapy. Of course, not everything about this business will be absolutely enjoyable, but compared to other businesses, low content publishing can be a pure pleasure.
How To Make Money With Low Content Books?
Selling low-content books can not only be passive but also very profitable if done right. You can find numerous low-content books on Amazon that alone make thousands of dollars each month, and most of them required little effort to create.
Having success with low-content books on Amazon involves 3 essential things – finding the right niche, creating high-quality books, and being consistent.
Let’s discuss them all in detail:
1. Finding the Right Niche
Niche research is an extremely important process to make money on Amazon KDP. You may create the most outstanding books, but if they are not going to be targeted toward the right customers, then the whole work will be a waste of time.
A good niche should be not only in demand but also not too competitive. The biggest mistake many beginners do is that they pick general competitive niches, such as “notebook for kids”, and they expect their book to be found in hundreds of thousands of other Amazon listings.
Since low content publishing on Amazon is quite competitive, you have to focus on tiny sub-niches rather than on general ones. For that, you will have to do keyword research, which is a process where you find long-tail searchable keywords with little competition.
Firstly, you will have to come up with a list of potentially profitable keywords for your books and AMZ Suggestion Expander will help you do that very quickly. This Google Chrome extension will expand Amazon’s search suggestion list that represents what people on Amazon are searching for.
You can type any low-content book from journals to coloring books, and you will get a list of relevant long-tail keywords. In this process write down as many appealing keywords as possible so you can later analyze them individually.
Now once you have some potentially good keywords, run an Amazon search on them, and see what search results bring. There are two general factors you should pay attention to:
- The number of search results: The more results Amazon returns, the more competitive the sub-niche will be. For the best results, it is recommended to focus on keywords that bring less than 2,000 results.
- Books with low BSR:Â Â BSR stands for the Best Seller’s Rank and every book that is selling has that. The lower the rank is, the more times the book is selling, so if you see books on the first page with low BSR (lower than 300,000) that means the niche is in demand. To quickly view BSR for each book, you can use another Google Chrome extension called DS Amazon Quick View.
Once you find a keyword that returns little search results with low-ranked books on the first page, it could indicate that the niche is profitable.
However, this process will not give you the most accurate results, and there are definitely more factors and metrics that you want to consider when doing keyword research. For this reason, it is always advised to use an advanced keyword research tool, and the best one is Book Bolt. This tool will help you to effectively find profitable niches, analyze the competition and avoid painful mistakes.
2. Creating Low Content Books
Low content book creation is easier than many beginners think. Most of the time you will only require to design two pages for a book. One is going to be the book’s cover and back page, and the other is going to be the interior page, which you will duplicate as many times as you need.
For the more complex books like coloring, or puzzle books, having the same interior pages is not really an option. Normally such books will require you to put more effort to design different interiors, and that’s why these books are less competitive and more profitable. But for the majority of books, like journals, log books, trackers, etc, having the same interior pages is perfectly fine.
Either way, you don’t need to be a master at Adobe Illustrator, Indesign, or any other advanced design software to create book covers and interiors, and everything can be done with a free & easy-to-use tool called Canva.
While Canva may seem like a feature-lacking tool for many, the majority of books published on Amazon were actually created by Canva. Its simple yet efficient design editor made the design process flawless for many artists. Besides the intuitive design editor, Canva offers hundreds of thousands of fonts, graphics, photos, and other design elements which can be used for low-content book designs.
Another great thing about Canva is that you never have to start from scratch there as it has so many pre-made design templates, that you can simply modify to your liking.
Too Lazy to Create Low Content Book Interiors? Check The Best Sources To Download Pre-Made KDP Interiors
3. Publish, Publish, Publish!
Like in any other business, consistency is a key to being successful with low-content books. While it’s not so hard to create a single book, it definitely gets more challenging to create tens or hundreds of them, and that’s where success comes about.
The truth about low-content books is that the majority of them won’t even sell. You may publish 100 books, but only 20, or 10 of them might make any money. In fact, sometimes it can be just one book out of hundred others that is making you a living salary.
In this business, you will have to go through a lot of trial and error, to not only become a good designer but to actually find what your audience needs.
All in all selling low-content books can be a great side hustle, which does not require any special expertise, and most importantly – financial investments. Everyone with a computer and an internet connection can do that, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t too!
Final Words:
In the realm of publishing, low-content books have emerged as a lucrative niche, offering an intersection of design and minimalism.
These books, ranging from journals to coloring books, cater to diverse audiences, serving purposes from stress relief to skill enhancement.
With platforms like Amazon KDP, selling these books becomes a passive income stream, demanding minimal upfront investment. The key to success lies in identifying the right niche, ensuring quality, and maintaining consistency.
While the journey involves trials and learning curves, the potential rewards, both financial and creative, make it an enticing venture. Dive into the world of low-content books and explore the myriad opportunities it holds.