After a long absence I decided to pick up this experiment again. As I recently learned about this new concept of “Low Content Books” that can be published through a variety of channels including KDP (Amazon’s Kindle Digital Publishing platform), I wanted to give this a go myself.
A low content book is a book that, well, has a limited amount of content. Think of things like notebooks, dairies, logs and puzzle books. They can be pretty easy to create if you use the right tools, while providing a lot of fun doing so. Additionally, there seems to be a healthy demand for these kind of products as they support people in all sorts of hobbies, record keeping needs or even mindfulness exercises.
So how does one go about publishing such a book? The following 4 easy steps show you how to do this. Click the arrows to open each section:
Choose a Niche
The first step is to figure out what kind of book you want to create. The easiest thing to do is to pick a subject that you like and are familiar with. I play music so I decided to create a music composition book.
Verify demand for your Niche
Since ultimately the goal is to make a little bit of money online with this book, it’s always a good idea to check that anyone actually is interested in buying the book you’re making. An easy search for “music composition notebook” on Amazon revealed that there are many such books selling hundreds of times per month, so clearly there is an audience wanting this.
Select a Creation and Editing Tool
There are many tools that could be used to create a book. In theory any software (e.g. Adobe, Canva) that is able to produce a PDF according to Amazon’s KDP specifications can be used. However, if you are not a digital designer you may not be interested to spend a lot of time learning how to leverage certain software. I opted for BookBolt, an online program specifically targeted to publish (low content) books. They offer a free trial which – after three days – converts into a paid subscription costing $9.99. The program is very straight forward with a myriad of pre-made page templates for more content than I could imagine. And they have many instructional videos on how to do just about anything in their platform, including how to find out a good niche that isn’t overcrowded yet.
Publish your book on Amazon KDP
Publishing on KDP is pretty straightforward. After you create an account and provide information that allows Amazon to know how to pay you, you can just upload the PDF generated in the previous step, select a category to publish under, choose suitable pricing and you are done. You have now published a book!
Now the only thing to do is to wait and see if anyone buys the book you just published.