Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm starting a new series:
how to make money selling low or no content books on Amazon KDP. So if you want to make sure that
you don't miss any of the other videos in this series, go ahead and hit that subscribe button
and the little bell next to it, and you'll be notified every time a new video comes out.
In today's video, I'm going to go over what exactly Amazon KDP is
and what a no content or low content book is. All right, let's get started! [Music]
Okay, so first up, what is Amazon KDP? KDP actually stands for Kindle Direct Publishing,
and it's a way that you can publish your low content or no content books or actually high
content books like novels for free on Amazon. You upload images of your book,
so the cover and the full manuscript, and you fill out a bunch of information,
and then that book is listed on Amazon. Now, if somebody buys your book, Amazon will go ahead and
print it. Before that, it's not printed, but if someone buys it, they do print it and they
ship it off to the customer. But of course, they subtract their printing costs and a commission,
and then they give you the rest as royalties. This is pretty awesome. It means you don't have to
keep inventory of your books, and you also don't have to pay any upfront costs. On the other hand,
you aren't going to make as much as you would if you took care of the inventory, shipping,
and everything that's involved with the book itself. Amazon takes care of all that for you,
and they do expect a commission for that. So what are low content and no content
books? Well, those are books that actually don't have many words in them. Usually,
the user is the one to fill them out. So this could be a book for note-taking,
maybe a logbook, a book used for journaling, and that kind of thing. And here are some examples.
The first type of low content book is a journal, and I'm just going to come out here to amazon.com
and type in "inspirational journal," and we'll get a lot of examples here. Now,
some of these journals are completely blank, other than lines, and some of them have prompts to kind
of give you an idea on what to write about. And anything you see with extra features like
the spiral-bound notebook, this is not a KDP notebook. You don't have that option with KDP.
So definitely, when you're searching for these types of books on Amazon, not everything you see
is a KDP Journal. My guess is that this book here is probably a KDP Journal. I'm going to click on
this one, and let's go ahead and look inside. It looks like every page has just lines and
a space for the date and then a quote or a little affirmation.
Now, currently, low content books don't allow you to look inside anymore. This is a feature
that was discontinued, and they decided not to provide an ISBN number for low content books.
And without an ISBN, you lose the ability to look inside. So this is probably an older book,
and it is. It's from 2019. So the older books you see out there that are Amazon KDP low content
books will have the "look inside" feature, but the newer ones will not, unless the artist provided an
ISBN that they purchased. And for low content books, I don't really think it's necessary to
have an ISBN, although that feature is nice. So "look inside," if you really want that,
you can go ahead and purchase an ISBN. Another type of low content book is a planner,
and here are some beautiful daily planner examples on Amazon. You'll notice a lot of
planners do have the spiral edge. Hopefully, someday Amazon will offer that option too,
but currently they don't have that. Usually inside a planner, your interior will have calendar pages,
to-do lists, and things like that. The next step is logbooks, and I'm looking at examples
of password logbooks. There are really a lot of options with logbooks. You could do password
logbooks like these, mileage logbooks, expense or exercise logbooks, and these usually have charts
inside that the user can fill out. The next low content book type is a sketchbook. Now,
sketchbooks are usually blank with no lines inside, but with KDP, you have to put something
on the pages. So it can be as simple as a page number on every page or maybe a little design
at the bottom of each page, but having something on some of the pages is a requirement of Amazon
KDP. It's okay to leave some pages blank, but I put at least something on every other page.
Another type of low content book is a music composition notebook. These are going to have
like musical staffs inside so that people can add their own musical notes and make their own songs.
Now, there are some types of books that are not considered low content by Amazon KDP:
activity books, puzzle books, and coloring books. So, if you want to make that kind of notebook,
you can still put them on KDP, but they're not considered low content,
and you will get a free ISBN if you're making that kind of book. All right,
so that covers Amazon KDP and what low content books are. In the next video, I'll go over how
to find a niche for your low content book. All right, if you like this video, please hit the
subscribe button, and I'll see you next week with the next video in the series. Thank you!!