My Results From Selling KDP Low-content Books on Amazon for Two Months
My experiment in income streams continues.
A little over two months ago I wrote that I was experimenting with creating a new income stream selling low/no content books through Amazon KDP.
Honestly, I was surprised at how much traction that post got. To date, it’s my most-viewed post of all time. Though I guess people do love reading about new ways to make money.
I meant to post an update before now, but I’ve been dealing with some personal stuff over the last couple of months and so I just wasn’t able to. But now the time has come to give you what I imagine has been a hotly anticipated update.
*Ahem* drumroll, please!
After just over two months of selling no-content books on Amazon, I have made…
A whopping total of zero dollars and zero cents.
Yes, you read that right. I haven’t sold a single book since I started publishing.
Now, this isn’t the outcome I was hoping for, obviously. But I’m not shocked. While I’ve heard that some people have been incredibly successful financially selling low-content books, I didn’t expect to be bringing in thousands of dollars within just a couple of months.
I thought maybe I’d sell one or two, though.
This doesn’t mean I’m deterred. On the contrary, I’ve just been motivated to take it more seriously and really learn about the ways to up my chances of success. To be honest, when I uploaded my first books I didn’t really know what I was doing. I watched one or two videos and called it good, pretty much winging the rest.
Not exactly a recipe for success, and I realize that.
Mistakes were made.
Since I started uploading, I’ve published 7 no-content books. I had planned on doing more by now (in my last post, I said I wanted to have 15 done within a month), but that didn’t happen for the same reason I didn’t post an update earlier. Whether or not uploading more earlier on would have made much of a difference at this point, I can’t say.
As it turns out, though, it may be for the best that I haven’t published that many. Because as I’ve learned more about selling KDP low content books I’ve realized that I made a lot of mistakes with my first ones.
A few things that I did wrong:
- Not utilizing the keyword boxes as much as I could have
- Not doing enough research on what keywords to use for the titles or the keyword boxes.
- Deciding on what kind of books to sell before doing any research on if it was a good niche to target, resulting in publishing into a niche with keywords that make it hard to rank in search results.
- Not making sure that the title of my book was printed on the cover or spine of the actual book (I was creating plain notebooks so I didn’t think I really needed to put a title on the book cover itself. Turns out I was wrong!)
Most of the stuff I’ve learned over the last couple of months has come from watching a bunch of YouTube videos. I particularly like the ones by Paul Marles. He covers a range of topics around KDP publishing and his videos are clear and to the point. I’ve particularly found his videos on how to find keywords useful, and I’ve been using his tips to find keywords
Next steps
Since I realized that I was doing everything wrong, I’ve basically decided to start over. I’m going to unpublish the books I already have up (because you can’t change the title of the books and I want to publish ones with better keywords) and use what I’ve learned to do it right this time.
I’ve been doing a lot of research into keywords, so my plan is to pick the keywords first and then create book around ones that I think will do well, instead of creating whatever I feel like first and then trying to come up with keywords later.
I’ve been using Publisher Rocket to help me with my keyword research, and so far, I have liked using it. We’ll have to wait and see if the keyword information I’ve gotten from it pans out in the long run.
My goal right now is to upload 15–20 books by the end of April. Then, I’m just going to let them sit for a while and see what happens. Another thing I’ve learned is that it can take two months for Amazon to index your book with the keywords you use, so it can take some time before people are actually able to find the books that you publish.
Lastly, in my previous post I talked about how I was using Book Bolt to help with creating my books. After using it a bit more I’m not sure I will continue to use it for covers (I think just using Canva is a bit easier), but I am going to keep it for a while because I find their pre-made interior design templates helpful. However, there are other places to get pre-made templates and there is always the option of creating them myself, so I am going to explore those options as well and compare that to Book Bolt.
I’ll update your guys again in a month or two with my progress. In the meantime, if there are any specific questions you have let me know in the comments and I’ll see if I can help.
This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase through one of these links, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
Grace Moore is a writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her interests include travel, reading, and doing any activity that involves supplies from the craft store. She lives in Washington with her husband, where they can often be found discussing Doctor Who in-depth. She’s passionate about helping writers find their motivation and unlock their creativity. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter.