The Ultimate Guide To Creating Low Content Books

We dig deep into the ins and outs of creating and selling no-content and low-content books through Amazon via the KDP program.

What are No Content and Low Content Books?

• Journals and Diaries
• Composition and Writing Notebooks
• Notebooks
• Sheet Music Books
• Sketchbooks
• Doodling Journals

Low Content Books on Amazon

Before we get into the Amazon KDP program and the step-by-step guide to producing your very own no and low content books for sale on Amazon, let’s cover a couple of the big advantages you’ll enjoy when you decide to get into the publishing game yourself.

Easy and Fast to Produce

One of the biggest reasons people decide to become no/low content authors is because these books are so easy to produce.

You can go from idea to finished product up on Amazon and make sales in about 24 hours or so (and sometimes even faster than that).

Next to No Technical or Special Skills Required

Secondly, you don’t need any special skills or actual writing ability to create low-content books for sale on Amazon.

The KDP program provides you with most of the tools you’ll need to get your book put together, and outside of a handful of things like cover design and some manuscript pages inside the rest of the book will be filled front to back with blank pages.

Next to No Up-Front Investment

The beautiful thing about the Amazon KDP program is that your books will be “print on demand.”

This means that they don’t physically exist until a customer comes along and purchases them. At this point, Amazon physically prints your book (exactly as you have laid it out), packages it, and ships it out the door to your customer – handling all of the heavy lifting for you.

Unless you outsource some of the work in creating your no/low content books (which isn’t a bad strategy when you want to scale things up, but more on that in just a moment), you can 100% start your own Amazon KDP empire without spending a penny, to begin with.

Requires No Real Ad or Marketing Budget

Not only is Amazon going to handle the production and fulfillment of your orders with this approach, but they are also going to handle advertising and marketing your no/low content books, too.

They’ll make sure to get the word out about your titles, and they’ll advertise them to different people when searching for journals, diaries, sketchbooks, and the like. As your no/low content books gain in popularity, they’ll get promoted even more aggressively.

You won’t have to do anything but sit back, relax, and watch as the sales come pouring in!

No Need for Inventory and Overhead

Finally, the fact that you don’t ever have to worry about covering inventory or overhead with this side business is a dream come true.

All you have to do is come up with the no/low content book ideas, handle the design and digital publishing of those titles in the Amazon KDP program, and then let the magic of Amazon take over from there.

It doesn’t get much better than that.

If you’ve been looking for an easy but profitable side hustle to make more money from, the no content or low content book world is a great place to focus your energy.

Your Step by Step Guide

Now that we have covered the “what” and the “why” territory of starting up your own no/low content book empire on Amazon let’s get into the nuts and bolts of actually knocking out these titles and making some money.

Brainstorming New Projects

Believe it or not, coming up with ideas for these “blank books” is a lot harder than you’ll probably expect – especially right out of the gate.

You can’t very well throw up blank covers with blank pages, call them a notebook, and then expect customers to flood Amazon with sales.

There’s no real value proposition there. There’s no differentiating that completely blank book from other options.

No, you need to make sure that there’s some sort of theme and some sort of “hook” that compels people to purchase your blank books compared to any of the other options on the Amazon platform.

Think about different design ideas, different motifs, different themes, and different “hooks” that might interest people looking to buy a new journal, a new diary, a new laboratory notebook, a new daily planner, a new sketchbook, or something similar.

Once you have a couple of ideas, it’s time to move through the rest of the process.

Sign Up for Amazon KDP

The next piece of the puzzle is creating your own account on the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform.

Originally called CreateSpace, KDP is the self-publishing arm of Amazon – providing both Kindle and physical copies of the books uploaded by authors there.

A revolutionary new approach to publishing that has democratized the whole process in ways never before thought possible, it’s now effortless for any author on the planet to get their work published and promoted to customers worldwide.

KDP is 100% free of charge, available to anyone and everyone, and generally a pretty simple and straightforward system to work with.

You’ll find all the tools you need to upload and publish your book within your Amazon KDP dashboard upon signing up, alongside all the options and tools you need to manage better the sales you make, too.

Best of all, after uploading your work to Amazon through the KDP interface, it becomes a “print on demand” title.

Every time someone orders from Amazon, that book is made -specifically for that individual, eliminating overhead wholly. 

You’re drop shipping that fresh copy to them – which means no pre-bought inventory that needs to be stored, managed, and shipped by you (not to mention purchased ahead of time).

It doesn’t get much better than this!

Market Research

After signing up for the Amazon KDP program, you’re going to want to have a poke around the no/low content category of books sold on Amazon to see what kind of competition you’re up against for your new idea.

First, you’ll want to see if people are doing something similar and try and gauge interest if they are.

Some people pause their idea if they see that someone has already beat them to the market with it. 

But that’s not bad news.

It means people are purchasing those products, there’s an active market, and you have the potential to produce an even better product that gets customers to buy your stuff rather than the pre-existing option.

Looking at best-selling journals, diaries, and notebooks will also give you an idea of the kind of design, quality, and overall finished product that customers on Amazon are expecting as well.

This study can be hugely helpful, especially for new authors just getting into this space.

Making Your Books

Next comes the part of the process where you have to make the books you sell. You have two real options to choose from in this department.

DIY

On the one hand, you can elect to do the bulk of the heavy lifting of designing and developing your no/low content books all on your own.

This process might sound daunting at first, but with powerful tools, it’s a whole lot easier than it ever was before.

All you have to do is come up with unique cover ideas and maybe a couple of pages worth of content inside to make your content engaging and attractive to prospective buyers. The rest of the pages are going to be completely blank, after all!

You might want to use Canva to create your books, book covers, or grab photos. You can take a 30-day free trial of Canva Pro here.

A popular low content book software is Book Bolt. From inspiration, design, and creation through distribution, marketing, and sales – Book Bolt has all the tools for a successful best-selling success story!

Outsourcing

Of course, you could also choose to outsource the work of designing your new no/low content books to be published on Amazon KDP as well.

There are plenty of designers out there that can produce gorgeous graphics, slick covers, and creative internal page templates – and they can do all of that quickly, too.

You’ll have to pay a bit of extra money to outsource this kind of work, though, so it may be something that you only want to consider after you have a couple of self-designed titles under your belt.

Use the money from those title sales to build more books without having to do the work yourself, and you’ve created your own little publishing empire!

Publish!

The last real piece of the puzzle here is to go through the Amazon KDP publishing review process to make your books “live” on the Amazon platform.

Publishing is simple, as it is a self-guided process that is the same every time you publish a new book with Amazon KDP.

From start to finish, the whole process takes maybe 10 or 15 minutes (sometimes even faster than that), and your book will go live within 48 hours maximum, but often much sooner than that.

Rinse and Repeat

The only thing left to do after your no/low content book is made available for sale on Amazon is to start cooking up ideas for new book titles that you can knock out and add to your product catalog.

Get a handful of these up every month, and by the end of the year, you’ll have dozens (or more) of these books making sales regularly, pushing a flood of income your way for next to no real energy or effort whatsoever.

There aren’t many side hustles or small business opportunities out there as “set it and forget it” as this one is.

Jump on board as soon as you get a chance and start making money from no content and low content books today!