If the idea of earning passive income while you travel, explore, or simply enjoy more freedom appeals to you, then low-content book publishing might just be your perfect side hustle.
You don’t need to be a writer, or spend months glued to a screen crafting a 50,000-word manuscript. In fact, with low-content books like journals, planners, and logbooks, you can create something valuable in just minutes and publish it on Amazon for the world to buy.
It’s a simple, scalable way to build income that keeps working for you, whether you’re on the road, off the grid, or just ready for more ease in how you earn.
What are Low Content Books?
Low content books are paperback books that have little to no content. A notebook is a great example of a low content book. A notebook usually has a cover and on the inside, all you find are lined pages with no text. Also, every page inside is identical!
Source – Spiral Notebook on Amazon
The end user of the low content book will fill in the content as required. You don’t need to do anything else!
Creating books like this only take a few minutes to a few hours and you don’t even need to have printing machines. All you need is a set of online tools to design the cover and the inner pages.
Amazon KDP or other platforms where you will sell the low content book will take care of printing and shipping.
NB: Recently Amazon have been discouraging books as low content as this, due to the extremely low barrier to entry and therefore the sheer amount of sellers. They’ve stopped offering free ISBN numbers for books which are simply one page repeated throughout.
Does this mean the end of low content books? Absolutely not!
Firstly you can still upload your low content books, but you will have to purchase your own ISBN number which isn’t cheap. Therefore I recommend you take just a little more time and focus your efforts on creating books that are still low content, but with less repeatable pages.
Here are 10 creative ideas for low to medium content books;
9 ‘Amazon Approved’ Low Content Book Ideas
1. Coloring Book for Kids
2. Adult Coloring Books
3. Activity Books
4. Guided Journals
5. Guided Memory Book
6. Themed Planners
7. Puzzle Books
8. Fun Meal Planners
9. Guided Travel Diaries
As you can see with just a little thought and creativity you can design something fun for your chosen niche!
How to Make Money with Low Content Books
1. Choose Your Niche
Start by selecting your niche and target audience.
You may already have a niche in mind such as music composition notebooks, adult coloring books, kids puzzle books, etc. Ideally you’ll want to be in a niche you know well and have some interest in, but most importantly it needs to have high demand. You don’t want to be creating low content books that no one is ever going to buy.
As the biggest ecommerce platform in the world, use Amazon as your guide to research demand, competition and estimated monthly sales and revenue.
First search for the niche you have in mind and have a look to see how many results your main search term displays.
For example here is the result for ‘adult coloring books’;
That’s a lot of results, which shows the competition is high. Ideally you’ll want to niche down until you see 20k results or less.
Here’s the result for ‘adult coloring books for women’;
And it gets even better when you niche down to ‘adult coloring books for women inspirational’;
Now we know we can likely compete in a market with only 3000 books rather than 50,000, but how can we see what the demand is and how many monthly sales current book sellers in this niche are making?
I use a tool called Junglescout, which has a chrome extension that gives me all these details and more;
As you can see on average there are just over 300 monthly sales, with an average monthly revenue of $2.3k. That’s a niche I’d be happy to have a go at!
You can also use a tool called BookBolt which has specialized software called KDP Spy, which shows best sellers rank, ratings, estimated sales & revenue, Amazon search volume, etc.
Once you’ve determined demand, take a quick look at the ratings to ensure there isn’t one dominating brand taking most of the top ten spots and ideally that there are two or three competitors in the top 10 with lower ratings.
Using the Junglescout extension you can quickly determine whether some of the listings in the top 10 are making good monthly sales even with low ratings, which is a great indication you can compete.
Once you’ve decided on your niche and the type of books you’re going to create it’s time to choose where you’re going to sell your books.