People are making thousands of dollars each month
in passive income by selling blank books on Amazon.
- I received $4,333 in royalties.
- I am generating a decent income every single month.
- That is doing $78,000 a month on Amazon kdp.
- But is this too good to be true?
Today, I want to put this to the test
by making and selling my own low content book.
And I'm setting myself three rules.
One, I'm not allowed to write a single sentence in the book.
Two, I have to do it all from my laptop.
And three, I need to finish it in less than an hour.
The first thing on my plan is to find
an easy to use software.
So I'm just gonna log into Book Bolt
as it appears to be the most straightforward
for someone like me with no computer design skills.
Right, so now we need to decide
what kind of book we want to sell.
There are lots of different low content books
such as notebooks, journals, and diaries.
But instead of just guessing,
I'm gonna use Book Bolts research tab
to find out what's actually popular.
After searching products and keywords,
it seems like planners sell very well.
Obviously, I've set myself a bit of a challenge to do this
as quickly as possible, however,
you can spend as much time as you'd like to research
and find gaps in the market to dominate.
This should do well all year round
as it isn't seasonal like a 2023 New Year's Planner
for example, and won't become outdated.
There's a lot of other evergreen book options too
such as of manifestation, prayer and dream journals.
It's probably a smart idea to make sure
the book you sell has a high search volume,
low competition and high monthly sales.
Saying this, there are a lot of competing products
when it comes to selling planners.
But I know for my many years in business
that high competition in the market doesn't necessarily mean
that you can't make sales.
It might cost us a few sales initially
because we don't have the trust and sales history
that others do, but once we get the ball rolling,
then we're in business
because obviously there's a massive market.
Next, let's make the cover.
I'm gonna name my project, daily planner,
to keep it simple.
I'm gonna use standard 6x9 paperback size
and keep the bleed option on for the best result.
Since it's a yearly planner, I'll make it 365 pages long.
If you are making a different kind of book,
it may be best to keep it shorter, around a hundred pages,
to reduce printing costs and improve your profits.
As you can see, we've got two sides.
The right hand side is the front cover
and the left hand side is the back.
Now we've gotta add some personality to this front cover.
If you are doing this as well,
make sure to avoid copyrighted photos
as you aren't allowed to legally use these.
By clicking on this picture icon,
it actually brings up Pixelbay
which has thousands of copyright and royalty free images
that we can use on our cover.
I'll be honest, instead of using a fancy photo,
I feel like going for a black minimalistic feel
with my journal.
So I'm gonna drag this dark background to fit the cover.
I'm even gonna expand it over the edges a bit
to make sure it prints correctly
because the last thing we want is a load of refunds.
To further promote sales,
it's a good idea to create a brand for these books.
This way, if one book sells well,
customers may recognize the brand and purchase the others.
I'll use the brand I've already created for my podcast,
Strike It Big.
So, I'll write my heading, and I think I could do
a bit of imagery to bring it to life.
Let's see what we can find on Pixelbay.
Oh, this is quite nice.
Let's drag this in and see how it looks.
Obviously, there's not much personality on this cover
but I'm on a time limit, so you get the idea.
I'm sure you could probably make it look nicer
but as I said, computer design isn't my strong suit.
At least you know if this sells,
then yours will probably do better.
Now we're onto the inside.
So, if I click on this icon and select #planner,
it gives me a lot of different template options
for the inside of the book.
This means I don't have to write a single sentence.
You can create as many pages as you wish,
have every page the same, every page unique,
whatever you want,
but as my book is a planner,
I need something designed in a way
for people to lay out their schedule and goals.
There are so many different options in here
but I'm settling on this one and adding it
to all pages as I like how it allows you
to plan your day down to the hour.
I always get distracted by different things
so this would really help me out.
Actually, I think it'd be nice
for people to be able to make some notes
so I'm gonna add a few extra pages for that.
So that's the inside pretty much done.
I've obviously whipped this up fairly quickly
but with some proper planning and time,
you could create a real masterpiece.
The moment has finally arrived to export my book
and get it live on Amazon kdp.
This is where all the magic happens.
It's free to sign up to, and most importantly,
you don't have to make a minimum amount of sales
to get paid.
The money starts rolling in monthly,
60 days after the month in which you make your first sale.
Say you made your first sale in May,
you'd get paid 60 days after the end of that month,
so the end of July.
I'm gonna go back to Book Bolt
and select download current projects CMYK.
This splits the book into two different files,
one for the interior and one for the cover.
We'll need both of these later on.
Next, I just need to go back to Amazon
which will only print my book when someone orders it,
meaning I don't lose any money if it doesn't sell.
They ask for all the usual details like name, address
and payment preferences.
Once I'm on the homepage,
I'm just gonna hit create, select paperback
and fill out all the necessary details.
And you know what's really cool?
I get to list myself as an author.
I mean, I bet my teachers wouldn't believe it
as I'm the most dyslexic person there is.
Well, they probably would believe it looking
at my cover design and a lack of content in the book.
I also need to write a title.
If I head over to the research tab and click on the cloud
then Book Bolt will search for the top 100 bestsellers
in whichever category we pick.
Obviously, we're gonna be looking at the planners
and this gives us a ton of information
about what titles are actually working.
So, I'm gonna call it,
Strike It Big Daily Productivity Planner,
because those are some of the key words
that seem to be working.
For the description, I'm gonna do the same
and search on Amazon to see what's working
on the most popular ones and add something similar.
Now, we've gotta talk
about the main reason people don't get sales,
and from my research,
this seems to be that they don't use tags correctly.
I can go to keywords and search for daily planners
and see exactly what is being searched
for most on Amazon and Google.
You can use up to seven tags,
so I'm gonna make sure to pick the ones
with the high search volume.
Another way to actually rank on Amazon and be found
is to use categories that are not as popular.
Then you'll start to rank higher.
The rest of this page is quite self-explanatory
so let's crack on with the next.
You wanna make sure that publish without ISBN is selected
because an ISBN number doesn't apply
to low content books like diaries and planners.
It's important to have a look at the preview of the book
and make sure everything is perfect.
It might take a while for the preview to load, but trust me,
it's worth the wait.
And the moment of truth arrives,
and that all looks pretty good to me.
Now it's time to set the price.
I'm gonna go with $14.99 cents,
which means I'll make $3.69 cents per sale.
There's absolutely no risk for me
because Amazon only prints the books
once they've been ordered,
so I don't have to buy in bulk
and pay for stock that might not sell.
After it's been checked by Amazon,
It'll be live and ready to make sales.
(gentle music) (pen scribbling)
So it's a couple of weeks later and I've got some good news,
we've made some sales.
The book took around 72 hours to be approved,
but for the first three days, we made zero sales.
I actually thought after going through all of this
I was gonna have to tell you not to bother
but something crazy happened on the fourth day,
we made our first sale.
I've made millions of dollars from my businesses
but honestly, making my first book sale, it felt brilliant.
At the moment, we're sitting at 10 books sold,
bringing in a total of $149.90.
Of course, this isn't all profit.
We have to take away $113 for Amazon's costs,
and also I used Book Bolts free trial
of the newbie membership, which usually costs 9.99.
You can get the pro version
if you want to take this more seriously
but for what I wanted to do, the newbie was enough.
They've also hooked me up with a discount code
because I've used them so much in this video.
So if you use the code MARKTILBURY
then you can actually get an additional 20% discount.
I'll drop the link in the description.
So if we take that into account,
we've made a total profit of $26.91.
I'm going partying.
I get it, this might not sound amazing
but just think how quickly I made this book
and it's already making around $27 per week.
Imagine if I had 20 books with loads of reviews,
all making 10 sales a day.
You could scale this side hustle
to making thousands every month if you put your mind to it.
If you wanna discover seven more passive income ideas
then I'm gonna leave that video right up there
but don't click on it just yet.
Make sure to subscribe if you wanna grow your wealth.
Okay, I'll see you over there.