Caroline from My Freedom Empire answers some of the most common questions she gets about low content book publishing on Amazon KDP. For starters, what’s a low content book? Anything with little to no text or images. Examples would be journals, planners, trackers, recipe books, etc. Next, is low content book publishing on KDP too competitive? Caroline doesn’t think so. Sure, there are niches that are really tough to rank a book title in, but if look hard, you can find some good opportunities still.
Once you publish a low content book on Amazon/Kindle, can you change your title or subtitle? Negative. Now, if you accidentally made a spelling mistake in your title or subtitle, email KDP support and explain what happened. They’re usually pretty good about fixing things like that for you. Otherwise, create a whole new book listing with the updated title and subtitle, and unpublish and remove the old one. Let’s see, what else?
How easy is low content self-publishing with Amazon KDP? “To be honest, not very,” Caroline says. “It’s not an easy get rich quick kind of deal. KDP is quite hard work. And that is regardless of whether you’re publishing high content or low content books. There are lots of people who’ve jumped onto this business model recently, so there’s a lot more people competing for space on Amazon marketplace. And everyone’s copying each other, so you’ve got your work cut out for you.”
How do you know if you can use a stock image either in your low content book or as the cover? Look at the image’s license. On iStock, for example, if it’s got a Standard license, you’re good to go; but if it says Editorial use only, it cannot be used for commercial purposes. Is KDP low content publishing a scam? Of course not. Plenty of publishers are making money with it, so if someone’s saying it’s a scam, they probably just don’t wanna admit they didn’t put the work in.
Can you create more than one KDP account? Nope, one per person; and if your KDP account gets terminated, you’re SOL because you can’t create another one. Can you sell your low content books elsewhere, like off of Amazon and Kindle entirely? Sure, assuming you get an ISBN and don’t use the free one given to you by KDP. Google it, you’ll see where to buy them. And remember, you’ll need a unique ISBN for each format of your low content book.
How do you get more sales of your low content books? Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as throwing together a low content journal, let’s say, and then listing it on Amazon, and then money just starts flying at ya. You have to start the snowball down the hill before Amazon’ll help you out. You can do this by sending people to buy your book straight from social media. There’s Facebook groups, you could build an email list, you could pay influencers to promote it, you could run PPC ads. Anything really.
How many low content books do you need to publish before you start making money? There’s no magic number and no guarantees. You’re better off focusing on quality, because if you nail all aspects of your low content book, even just one book could make you good money. And vice versa. Can you ask for reviews? Yes, honest ones. But you can’t ask for positive ones or five stars or anything like that, got it? For more, check out Caroline’s YouTube channel.
