This week I’m covering a highly discussed and debated topic of low content and even no content books on Amazon KDP; is there still money to be made?
What are ‘low-content’ and ‘no-content’ books?
In the most simplest of terms, if you understand ‘content’ to be ‘information’ then low-content and no-content books are basically books with not a lot of information in them. Examples of these types of books would be journals, diaries or planners, logbooks, appointment or client books.
They are super simple to make, I know a lot of people simply create a page, maybe two pages and then copy and paste these pages several times until you have enough for a book.
Do people make money with low-content books?
Whilst this all sounds pretty great, if you want constant and consistent growth and profit then creating and publishing low-content books in my opinion isn’t a great strategy. The marketplace for these types of books is extremely saturated, so many people are doing lined notebooks and journals and spending hours designing book covers because that’s basically what you end up competing with; another persons book cover because there’s no useful information or content inside.
If you’re tempted to try this route it’s important to know Amazon did change their ‘rules’ when it comes to low-content books. You uses to be able to make an attractive cover and have blank pages inside, but now Amazon have done away with allowing completely plain pages. Designers (that’s what we’ll call them) are still getting away with lined pages, however we don’t know how long that will last.
There is some success to be had
This post may come across really negative towards low-content books, I just don’t want to see you wasting your time trying to make covers that might seem like they will sell because of a current trend; often this doesn’t last and your sales fizzle out.
However, there is some success to be had.
If you are happy to spend a quality amount of time doing some in depth research there are profitable niches out there that you could potentially make your mark on. As an example, I managed to do this myself within the Christian Living niche with prayer journals.
If you have an idea in mind, the first thing to do is search it on Amazon for yourself as if you were looking to purchase one. If the amount of search results isn’t crazy high then the next thing you need to do is find out if these books are selling. To do this you’ll often need to install a plug-in or a browser extension so you can see the BSR (Best Seller Rank) of the book you want to ‘duplicate’. If the best seller rank is good for the first 5 or more more books then that shows these books are selling and you could be on to a profitable niche.
My Experience With Low-Content Books
Of course, this is just my personal experience with low-content books sold through KDP. As I’ve said previously, there are probably plenty of people out there selling low-content books successfully, this is just what happened to me.
In all, I probably designed around 20 low-content or no-content books some of them were as they had only lined pages. Out of those 20 I have one that now sells every now and then which is a very specific niched down journal.
My first thought is that figure isn’t too bad, if I was guaranteed to have a selling book out of every 20 I designed I might have continued making them…but that ‘guarantee’ just isn’t there.
Conclusion…
Personally, I don’t want you to waste your time and effort on creating something that just won’t really make you a profit unless you’re willing to put a lot of time and possibly some pennies into promotions.
However…it is possible to make lower content books that still have some value to them. If you’re looking for an easier KDP route I would suggest doing this. Some examples of this would be prayer journals or daily devotionals that have quotes or verses in them here and there. This way the consumer or customer is getting a little something from your book rather than just a blank inside canvas!
I hope you’ve found this helpful in some way and I wish you all the KDP success, keep at it!
By Leander Rose 
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