Sell Low Content Books on Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) - Masterclass! | Teagan Johnson | Skillshare
Search

Playback Speed


  • 0.5x
  • 1x (Normal)
  • 1.25x
  • 1.5x
  • 2x

Sell Low Content Books on Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) - Masterclass!

teacher avatar Teagan Johnson, Young Entrepreneur & Productivity Guru

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      2:16

    • 2.

      Samples of Low Content Books

      2:21

    • 3.

      Finding Niche Ideas

      2:33

    • 4.

      Finding Successful Niches

      5:26

    • 5.

      Creating Your Brand and Shop

      1:21

    • 6.

      Designing a Book Cover with Canva

      5:12

    • 7.

      Uploading & Selling Your Book

      6:57

    • 8.

      Marketing your Books

      5:48

    • 9.

      Whats Next, Final Thoughts, Project

      1:13

  • --
  • Beginner level
  • Intermediate level
  • Advanced level
  • All levels

Community Generated

The level is determined by a majority opinion of students who have reviewed this class. The teacher's recommendation is shown until at least 5 student responses are collected.

1,238

Students

1

Projects

About This Class

Selling low content books, such as journals, guestbooks, planners, and workbooks are a very fun business venture to get into! There are benefits to creating these rather than normal books, such as being faster to make and being very versatile in the niche that you could target. Being able to self-publish has never been so easy!

Using Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) for this is a phenomenal way to connect to your customer, since Amazon gets a lot of organic traffic and they also print and ship the books for you, just like print on demand!

I'm going to teach you all using my years of experience that I have on this platform, so you know all of my little life hacks when it comes to making your books!

In this video, I am going to teach you:

  • What kinds of Low Content Books there are
  • Finding ideas for niches
  • Finding successful niches
  • Creating a Brand and Shop
  • Making a Book Cover with FREE Software (Canva)
  • Selling your Book (uploading the cover and the interior onto Amazon with your tags)
  • Marketing your Products

I look forward to seeing your progress!

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Teagan Johnson

Young Entrepreneur & Productivity Guru

Teacher

I have always had an obsession with becoming the best possible version of myself in every aspect: from my schooling, to my family, and social life. My goal with the videos I upload onto here are simple. Teach you guys something new in a short time frame, and help you guys improve in some way. I hope to fulfill this with you! 

See full profile

Level: All Levels

Class Ratings

Expectations Met?
    Exceeded!
  • 0%
  • Yes
  • 0%
  • Somewhat
  • 0%
  • Not really
  • 0%

Why Join Skillshare?

Take award-winning Skillshare Original Classes

Each class has short lessons, hands-on projects

Your membership supports Skillshare teachers

Learn From Anywhere

Take classes on the go with the Skillshare app. Stream or download to watch on the plane, the subway, or wherever you learn best.

Transcripts

1. Introduction: Hello, my name is taken. In this course. I'll be teaching you how to create a low or no content bookstore on Amazon's website. Over L of the amount of years I've done this, I've gained so much valuable experience that I am excited to share with all of you watching today. If you have never heard of low or no content books, it is when you design a book with a nice cover and then you put a blank interior in it for the buyer to fill out. This can be a notebook, a specific planner, a checklist. It can be really anything. The good thing is that when a customer purchases it, instead of you having to print and shifts the book, Amazon does all of the manufacturing themselves, which makes your life much easier. This may sound intimidating to some, but do not worry. You do not need to be talented. I'm making book covers or even the interiors of the books. Anyone can do this. This KT, which means Kindle Direct Publishing interface, was created for anyone and everyone to be able to upload and express your creativity through books. And the design tools we use to create the covers and interiors are very user-friendly. Amazon's website is perfect for this business model because they have a terrific interface that makes it easy to upload on, as well as allows you to receive plenty of organic traffic to your store. When someone Googles for a product, what is usually the first search result? It is very likely Amazon, and that can be your product that shows up first someday. Amazon sells worldwide, which makes it easy for a huge variety of people to discover and purchase the book you create. In these upcoming videos, I will teach you how to create, upload and market each book. I'll also give you tips on creating a brand for yourself, which will be used to promote your book. I will be applying my years of experience to give you a special advice to maximize the amount of cells you get and to maximize the amount of time your books are getting sales. I am a strong believer in learning things by doing them. So I formatted this course specifically with that in mind, I strongly encourage you to follow along to each section while working on your own personal project. At the end of the course, I'll be supplying a project that you guys are invited to participate in to showcase the skills that you've learned. I hope you're as excited as I am. Let's get started. 2. Samples of Low Content Books: Before we dive into finding niches or subjects that we will publish about, I like to show you some samples of books which are considered low or no content. Low or no content books come in many different formats and styles. I define a low content book as something that the customer intends on finishing. So the publisher makes less effort on the interior and more effort goes into making the cover as appealing as possible. Quite the opposite of a regular book author. This is good for people like me who do not like writing as much, but loved designing and using a visual creative outlet. The first one is a coloring book. This is low content because it is not finished and the consumer has to color it into complete it. Crossword puzzles and other word games are similar examples. The second one is a journal, was just blank lines in it and the catchy title gives a great gifts during the holidays. If it is occupational related or if it has a funny cover on it. People could use these for a wide variety of things, such as using it as a to-do-list, a brainstorming book, a gratitude journal, an inspirational quote list. The list goes on and on. The next one is a plan book. You usually fill the interior with pages that are related to scheduling stuff. This can get very specific and it's possible to make it particular to certain careers, such as personal assistance, pilots and their flight plans that they must follow, et cetera. Another cool one that I've recently discovered is a guestbook. This type of book is intended for guests to write their names down whenever they visit a certain property. It can be for personal use or business use. A personal use could be having it at a cottage for fun to track who all has been there. And a business use could be for guests at a hotel, for example, to see how many other customers this company has brought in. The most minimal one is called a sketchbook. This is so minimal that there are only blank pages in it. So for this one, all of the effort goes into the cover of the book and you allow the customer's creativity shine in the anterior. This would be defined as a no content book. There are many different types of LoadContent books and no content books. So the sky's the limit on the different genres you can tap into. I hope this gives you a foundation on some of the ideas you can start brainstorming as we move on to our next section, thinking of the kinds of books you want to publish. 3. Finding Niche Ideas: It is time to start thinking of ideas that you'll want to use for publishing. This step does not necessarily mean much thought as it is just finding ideas for books. The first method I use is to simply brainstorm. What kind of hobbies do you have? What do you do as an occupation? What do your parents or friends do for fun or as their job? Do you have any pets? What country you're from? These are all terrific ideas that you could upload about. If you need more ideas beyond brainstorming, there are lots of other options. The first one is Google, as you can very easily find niche ideas by typing stuff into the search bar. If you're typing a letter and then notebook planner or logbook, after the letter, you can find suggestions that automatically fill in for you. And as you can see, if I type in underscore G, space planner, something's come up such as wedding planner, meeting planner, et cetera. These could be some ideas you may consider using. Another one that I found to be extremely effective is the use of social media. You can go on Pinterest and look up funny book ideas. Or if you have an idea brainstormed, want further inspiration. You can type in that idea to find more elaborate designs. If you have Instagram or Facebook, try finding pages that talk about journals and take action from the ones shown on there as well. There may be a chance that your family or friends have some ideas that they thought of before is worth a shot to ask them, might be funny, catchy, or desirable to put on a book cover. Some of my best ideas actually came from conversing with friends and family about things that might be able to be sold on Amazon. In some cases, you don't even need to go far from the place you're selling to find inspiration. You could even stand Amazon and look at other people's journals just by searching funny journals or whatever niche you are searching about. You could also go on other shopping websites. A popular website that has a similar format is red bubble. There designers have very similar style books which you can take an inspiration from. All of these could give you ideas. But I warn you not to copy other people's designs. Not only is this unethical behavior, but it can also get you banned from being able to sell books on Amazon going forward. Instead, take inspiration from the books to make your own spin of something. Once you have a handful of ideas that you like, you need to make sure that these Nietzsche's will be able to make you sales on Amazon, which leads us to the next section of the course. 4. Finding Successful Niches: Now they have brainstormed Nietzsche's, it is time to validate them to see if they will be successful. No matter how amazing your designers, it will not sell under just any circumstance. You need to find the ideal nice shoes and subjects to upload under in order for them to be discovered by other people. For example, if we search coloring book, you can see there are tons of results. Sure, this will result in sales from the people on the front page. But what about all the other 90 thousand people they have to compete with to get there. Here's another example. What about if we search Banff Canada journal? And if you don't know, Banff is a small Canadian tone. You can see there's cluster, no competition. But if you look at these products, there are no reviews or no BSR. If there is no reading or BSR, which means bestseller ranking, then there are no other people buying this item. So you need to find a medium between high competing items and low competing items that people actually buy. I personally use software and do some manual lookup work to find ideal Nietzsche's. This is the software that I use from the Google App Store. The first as ultimate Amazon search suggestion expander. This expands the search bar to show more niches under a subject. The second is kVp, Amazon BSR, and keyword research SEO tool. This gives us a rating based on their niche you searched and the DS Amazon quick view, this will be used for a manual method later. Combined, these all get valuable information for finding ideal Nietzsche's that we can make designs for. First, let's use a software to show you how to use it to its max potential. Once you enable both the search suggestion expander and the keyword SEO tool and go on Amazon, you can start searching one of your ideas. If it's a popular enough niche, there'll be separate recommendations that come up with the expander extension. I would recommend looking through all of these until you find one that is good enough to use. You can also search a niche and see what kind of specific niches people are targeting within the search results. For example, with this niche, people are using drone pilots within the pilot logbook niche. You know what's good enough to use if when you search something, they're rating from the extension is above 50 percent, the app determines a score by using the total number of results and number of reviews. And the average BSR, which is the best seller ranking. The lower the BSR number the Marvel product is selling. I would always aiming to find products with 50% or higher with this extension. After you find a product with 50% or higher, it is important to make sure that it is actually good. So just scroll through and make sure they're irrelevant journals and books which have sales. By looking at the BSR numbers at the top of each product. I'd also look at some of the reviews of these items and see what people are critiquing and make sure that you don't make the same mistakes in your books. Finally, you want to check the demand of the niche. So let's go to Google Trends and type in our niche. Then check this out. You can see that there are spikes of interest, but also sharp declines all the way to 0. So seeing something like this may make you reconsider going into this niche. But you also have to take into consideration how small the niches. I think this is a very small hobby, but the people that do it are probably die-hard fans. So this niche will still get sales. That's it for the software. Sometimes I like to look for books manually because it is the tried and true way of knowing if you found a good niche for the manual way, all you need is the AMS quick view to show us some info on the search page. When doing manual research, we want to find out first if there is demand for a certain item. So once again, go to Google Trends and search your particular niche. If there are clear search results than search for it on Amazon, and then find out if there are BSR ratings. I like to try to find BSR rankings in the one millions are lower. And that's when you know, if it's a good book that gets some sales occasionally. But if you find books within the 500, thousands, then you found a very, very competitive niche that probably gets sales weekly. In terms of search results, items under 1000 plus our good. Items under 1000 are better in items under 500 or best. Once you find a product with some demand, both search results, it has a decent BSR. You know, you've found a good niche. There are some things you can do if you are having trouble finding a good niche. You can go onto a fellow publishers book and the head to their authors central profile page. There, you can see some other niches that this similar author is also posting into. I would write these down and see if those are Nietzsche's. You will be able to tap into if after all of these methods you can not find a competitive niche, it is time to start from scratch and change the niche altogether. Finding competitive niches are an art. You need to find a perfect medium for many things. It may be challenging at first, but once you find a good niche, you already have the most challenging part out of the way for this whole publishing journey. Using the software will likely be easier for beginners. But once you become more experienced, you may find that using the manual method is more effective. This is all about practice. Once you've found a niche, we're ready to move on to our next section. 5. Creating Your Brand and Shop: After you have some niche ideas in your head, it is time to create your brand and shop. This is where your publisher name will be. And I like to make something that will be memorable so customers can come back if they want to buy more products from you. Some people like to use their real name, but for privacy purposes, I always keep my name anonymous. And it also helps for marketing. If you use a pen name, this name will represent your whole company. So you should put some thought into making it something that's marketable and memorable before signing up. Since we will likely uploaded many different niches, is smart not to make a business name to specific, although you can't change your shop name with every book you publish, I find a logical to upload everything under the same pen name, since customers can find all your books in one centralized location. After you decide on your brand name, it is time to sign up. To sign up, go to kVp dot amazon.com, press the big yellow sign-up button and then sign in with your Amazon account. You will need to give Amazon information about yourself. So click the yellow sign at the top to update your information. You'll have to include your address, your banking information, and your tax information, which includes your social security number. Since you are selling things with Amazon. After you have done all of that, your shop is complete. Now, we can start making books. 6. Designing a Book Cover with Canva: Now that you've created your brand and account, it is time to finally start making the designs. This may seem intimidating at first, but it becomes incredibly easy once you get the hang of it. The first thing you have to do is download a couple of things. So let's go to www.out.com. Find the template generator and type in your book dimensions. The most ideal dimensions that I have found, our six by nine inches and a 120 pages. That is what I've always followed. Some people do it differently, but this is the most common for low content books. Put in your email and they will email the template to once you press this button. We will use this for the boundaries for the book cover to make sure that everything will be properly placed on the book. Then you can scroll down to the cover says calculator, and type in those same dimensions. And it will tell you that proper measurements that you will have to input on our photo editing app, which is Canva. Next for the interiors of the book, the best place to get them for free would be the book bolt interior wizard, which you can Google and find. Once you're there, you'll see a website full of blank pages ready to be downloaded. So put in your desired dimensions and pages at the top and you can download any of them you see here, which are free. They give you quite the selection to work with even as a beginner. All of the highlighted ones are the ones you have to pay for it by getting their membership. But thankfully, most of the good ones are free. After we get both of those, it is time to get started. So let's go to Canvas and get to work. Go to the top right where it says Create a design, press Custom, and put in the dimensions that you got previously from the book, our website in inches. It'll open up a new tab and this is where you'll be doing your work. Let's get our template up on here right away. Go to upload, upload media, and find the template and loaded onto the screen. You can go ahead and click on it to adjust the dimensions if it doesn't perfectly fit. For my idea, let's pretend I already didn't niche research and I found that cottage guest books do well. So I'm going to make this book rustic themed with some nice texts that they'll match what people will be looking for. Firstly, let's search for that text. There are many different kinds of styles and themes as you can see, and you can even search for things. After we find the one that we want, we can use the methods we found earlier to find a nice phrase to put on our cover. So I'll just search up a guest book and look through the images. I like this one. It says, please sign our guest book. So I'll take inspiration from that and use it for our design. I must remind you guys though, not to completely copy other authors. It could get you in huge trouble and is a bad way to run your store. With our text. We will read directly over the template, making sure to expand the texts window to have it centered with the edge and the middle of the page. Like what I did here. Then we will adjust it to make it as aesthetic as possible. If desired. You can change the color, make it bold, underlined and italicized up here. Once you're finished with the text, you can add some extra aspects like images right over here by the elements. These are not copyrighted images that you're allowed to use for commercial purposes. Since this book is for a cottage, Let's try to find a camp to put on here. Once you think you have everything lined up nicely where you want it, right-click on the template on the other side and remove it. At this point, you are free to change the background to any color you'd like red up here. I like mine like this. But you could also find photos to use for the background right over here. So you can explore and find something that might match your design nicely. So now I'm going to go up to download it and make the file type PDF print. You must make sure to do it as PDF printer or the image will appear blurry on the cover of your book, and it may even get removed from Amazon. I encourage all of you to explore around with Canva and find all of its capabilities in case a certain niche could use a more elaborate design. I personally find that simplistic book covers do best for LoadContent books, but that's not for every single niche. Now that we've finished your cover design, it is finally time to upload it. 7. Uploading & Selling Your Book: Now it is finally time to upload the design. You are almost done with this whole process. So first, go back to kVp dot amazon.com and under create a new title, press paper back. It will bring you to the uploader and you can see there are many things you must fill out. For the title. It must be exactly the word for word phrase that you have on the cover of the book. He must use all proper punctuation and everything. For the subtitle, this is where you have your first chance at ranking higher in the searches. This is where it didn't fellow at some keywords in an organized manner for customers to search in order to discover your book. In my example with the cottage, we could also mention relatable words such as fishing, hunting, Midwest. But we will actually use competitors books for this. So an Amazon search up cottage guess books and look at some of the first results. What did they mention the title after the colon's. And if you don't know after the colon is where the subtitle starts, Amazon automatically puts the colon and those are words that you should consider using in your title as well. I'll collect some really good words and find an organized way of putting them into the subtitle so it makes sense. When you scroll down, you can skip the series and the edition number. And when you get to the author, you will put in your name they decided upon earlier. For this example, I'll just say my author name is legit Midwestern hunting publishing. For the contributors. You can also skip this for the description. It is important that this looks really good for the people on your product page. If you have a crowded or low quality description, they may lose interest. There is this cool kind of formatting that this uses called HTML, which allows you to use different styles of text inside of the description. So for you to optimize it without needing to learn how to do programming in HTML. We will find an editor online that can do it for us. Alright, now that we found on HTML editor from Google, we can start creating our description. I like making my versatile so I can copy and paste it into each new product and change it up very minorly. The description could also help you with ranking, but not as much as a subtitle and the tags. But it is worth it to use the same ones and all of them to maximize your chances that ranking highest. So let's make a simple description that can be carried over to all of our products and includes some keywords customers would be searching for. This is what I came up with. This lovely lined cottage guest book is great for keeping track of people that were at your camp. This book can be useful in any kind of cabin where there are lots of people around, including hunters, fishermen, or just people celebrating for holidays. Don't miss out on this offer for under $10. This book features 120 pages, durable, smooth matte finish cover, and high-quality pages. And as you can see from the editor I used, you can change it up on the left side and it shows you the string of code to input into the description of the uploader and kVp. And it will not show the LI and all of those other command things. What you see on the left here. So I'll paste that into the description and continue. For this, you can select the on the publishing rights and what these keywords right here. This is another opportunity for you to get people to find your book. So for this, you could also look at what other competitors are putting into their title. But you might not be able to do that to fill in all of these spaces. So you can also find a tag generator online that will find similar words that people may search for. As you can see, there are similar words that are popping up. So you would just put those into the keyword spot. I try my hardest to fill in all of these spots. And you can fill in multiple words in each space without needing to use commas or anything. For the categories, try to find something that is most relevant to your book. So go into the nonfiction and search around. Some that I like to use the most for low content books are literary collections, diaries and journals, and non-fiction, self-help, personal growth. General. If you have squares or anything explicit in your book that you don't think would be suitable for some audiences like kids. Then select Yes for this. And then press Next. On this page, you can print a free ISBN right away by pressing this, which is basically your books own special ID and away, each book has a different ISBN. For the publication date, select today. And for the interior, put black and white interior with white paper. Make sure it is six by nine and put bleed PDF only. This is because it tends to look better with bleed on. And let's do map. Since we did that for the description. Down here, we see that it is ready for us to upload that interior that we downloaded from book bolt. So locate that and upload it. And then it is ready for the book cover itself. So we'll select the second option and then upload the file. Once this button below lights up, press it to see how the cover looks on your book. It sometimes takes a bit to load, so you have to be patient. If everything looks good, you can press approve and continue to the pricing. For the pricing you want in all territories to maximize visibility for customers. The majority of the sales will likely be from Amazon.com. Or if you're based in another country, put your own for the listing price, I recommend starting at low. And then if it starts getting sales, raise it up since it has a demand to start, I usually put mine at 699 and then move it up a dollar or two if you start receiving more sales. I would also click expanded distribution, which makes your book available tomorrow markets. You can now press publish on your paperback book and you are finished uploading. Congratulations. 8. Marketing your Books: Now what is time to promote your designs to make sure that it gets the recognition they deserve. There are two ways to go about this. The social media way or the Amazon way. The first way consists of making a social media account fear store, and promoting the heck out of it, using hashtags, promoting it and comments and adding locations to post. The Amazon way includes advertising right on to Amazon's website, which ranks at much higher on the search page. The second option could lead you to sales, but you must first know how to properly run the ads. For my example of marketing on social media, I will use Instagram. So let's head over there and make an account. It'd be best if you use the same name as your store and create a post of your new book. Find a picture of your book either from Canvas or the page that your book is selling on. And then make a post adding hashtags that are relevant, a location and an enticing caption that will make people want to buy it along with a link attached for the product. After you make your post, you can go into relevant Instagram pages that have something to do with your niche and comment on posts. I would not recommend spam in the comments. Not only would that get you band from commenting, it is also very unethical. Just make a nice comment and advertise it impulse every so often. In terms of using advertising on Amazon, the good thing about it is that you only pay the fee if someone clicks on your listing. So the success rate is much higher than other advertising services with other stores. It is also rather cheap to advertise with Amazon, in my opinion. You first go into kVp dot amazon.com. Once again, locate the book they want to advertise, press the three dots, and press promote and advertise. For the marketplace. Press your own country. I'll be using Amazon.com. And then press create an ad campaign. Click sponsored products. For the name. You could put something that lets you remember the book you are advertising. So I'll say that this is the cottage book for the budget. This is the amount each day that Amazon will use from your account to pay for the ads. I like to go under $5 on this, you can find niches that are very good for advertising for much less. For targeting. Let's select Manual since we want to put in the keywords that will be advertised for the customers ourself. For the campaign bidding strategy, we will keep it dynamic down only, which means that we will pay for the ad at the listed price or cheaper if possible, which is good since you won't have to pay more if you don't have to. Let's keep the ad format at standard. And you can add an ad group name for if you're advertising several books within the same niche keywords. I'll skip that since I just have this one cottage book down below at your book to the list. Then press keyword targeting, not product targeting. Product targeting is much more advanced and more narrow down, which we do not want to do. Down here on the keyword targeting tab, press on the enter list as we will be doing the list manually. You can set a price as low as 25 cents for yours, especially if you are in a niche that does not have a lot of competition. Down here at the match type, you do not need to use broad or exact. Brad will give advertisements for people that might not even be interested in your book. And exact will give advertisements to people that only search your words. So it's a little bit too narrow down. Phrase is perfectly in the middle where it is the exact phrase that you use along with other words surrounding it. Down here, it wants you to put in keywords that will target people who are interested in buying the product. So you can use the keyword tools from the last section, or you can also use a Google Keyword Planner website, which gives you a bunch of advertisement related keywords which you can use for the Amazon ads. So let's go to that website and search up your niche cottage guestbook and find ones that are relevant to input here. I would take all of the keywords that are actually somewhat associated with the nice you're following. It does not need to be 100% similar for this ad campaign. When you have a lot of keywords down, press add keywords below, and press Launch Campaign at the top. Once it gets approved, it will go live. Once it goes live, it is wise to check back on at every day to see how it is going. You should check the amount of clicks you're getting and try to figure out which takes from the list are making you sales and which ones are not. Then simply remove the tags which are not making new cells. And eventually you will have a very solid ad campaign. After you believe you are done with doing that, it is time to start thinking of what's next for your store. 9. Whats Next, Final Thoughts, Project: After you upload some designs, you will find out if you make sales on the Reports tab. They will show up on this timeline and you can even see which specific book got sold by looking at the kVp reports Beta up here. If you're receiving sales on books, you should use this beta reports tool to see which specific book sold. After that, it is a good idea to double down on your ideas by making five or even more designs of the book niche that is selling. This is a smart way of continuously making books that have a potential of making sales. Kvp is a competitive spot which lots of people are using to try and have a business. Although success is not guaranteed, if you persevere and continue to work hard at creating high-quality and consistent designs. I have faith that you should be able to have some success for the course. My goal is to make it actionable so you were able to create a personal project as we went. So for the project, I would like to see some of your first designs you created with Canva. I would be so excited to see what you guys came up with. Thank you so much for watching my Skillshare course. I hope this course lead you in the right direction in terms of being a low content Book Creator and kVp. I hope you all have a good day.