Funny You Should Ask: How to Publish Low Content Books: A Hilariously Detailed Guide to Publishing Notebooks, Journals, and More on Amazon KDP

By Lori Culwell

Learn How to Make Money Publishing Notebooks, Journals, and More on Amazon!

Heard about publishing no-content and low-content books on Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), but don’t know where to start? Are you curious about selling notebooks, journals, planners, logbooks, sketchbooks, or other types of books on Amazon KDP?

In Funny You Should Ask: How to Publish Low-Content Books, Amazon bestselling author Lori Culwell provides a start-to-finish blueprint for breaking into the low-content publishing business. You'll discover how to generate ideas, validate niches, research your competition, and promote your work in this highly lucrative and ever-expanding publishing field. With the help of a blank practice journal included in the guide, you’ll also learn how to create the ideal low-content book, honing your design skills and focusing your areas of expertise, so that when you find your "hit niche," you'll be off and running!

In Funny You Should Ask: How to Publish Low-Content Books, you’ll learn:

— What, exactly, is low content publishing?

— The one big mistake most low-content publishers make when first starting out

— Where to find low-content book templates

— How to come up with book ideas

— The difference between no-content and low-content publishing

— How Kindle Direct Publishing fits into all of this

— How to start low-content publishing for free (or at a very low cost)

— 13 of bestselling low-content books (some of which might surprise you!)

— How to expand your brand once you find your “hit niche”

— How to advertise and promote your books

And so much more!

PLUS, you’ll receive a BONUS of 30 days of researched and verified niches!

Funny You Should Ask: How to Publish Low-Content Books is for anyone who loves books and wants to earn extra money selling them. Whether you’re an author trying to branch out, a designer or artist trying to repurpose your designs, a student who wants to publish notebooks for extra income, or a teacher with a ton of great ideas for homeschooling material, the strategies described in this book will get you started earning passive income on Amazon’s KDP platform.

Part of the “Funny You Should Ask” series, in which Lori Culwell makes everything easy to understand in her trademark “snarky yet informative” style!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Dec 20, 2022

Lori Culwell

Lori Culwell is the founder and president of Get Creative, an internet consulting firm whose clients include Johnson & Johnson and Apple among others. She has contributed to Salon.com and the San Francisco Bay Guardian and divides her time between New York and Los Angeles.  

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

It took me way too long to sit down and write this book.

In fact, this is one of those books that I’ve been working on for at least a year because I wanted to be able to hand it to my creative-type friends who need a side hustle that can absolutely turn into a successful business, and low-content publishing is that thing. It’s fun, you can do it from home, and it allows you to get paid for your creativity. 

What was holding me back?

I guess I initially felt weird about telling people that, in addition to putting out regular books, I was also publishing stuff like notebooks, planners, and sketchbooks using Amazon’s self-publishing platform (called Kindle Direct Publishing, or KDP). I had only just successfully convinced some of my writer friends that self-publishing is a legitimate thing. Did I really want to also try to convince them to sell blank notebooks? 

Also, every time I tried to explain low-content publishing to someone, I felt like I was selling them on some multi-level marketing scheme. Say! What if I told you that you could make money selling blank books on Amazon? All you have to do is join our team and recruit every single person you’ve ever met in your entire life! Bleah.

But here’s the thing: I know you can make money selling low-content books on Amazon because I am making money selling low-content books on Amazon. 

As a creative type, there are a million reasons why I like doing it. For one thing, it gives me the opportunity to put my ideas out there more frequently. (As I’m sure you can imagine, a 50,000-word book takes a little while.) Also, I’m not going to lie—as an author, I just like selling books, and when the income hits your bank account, there is zero difference between money earned from a composition notebook and money earned from a book you spent a year laboring over. 

And they do sell. I have written something like 15 books in my life, and as it turns out, my best-selling book of all time is a writing prompt book I put together a few years ago because I thought it was funny. (I can’t tell you the actual title of that book because, hello? Copycats! But suffice it to say it’s exactly the kind of irreverent book you would expect from me.) 

With this book, then, I want to empower you with the big picture of low-content publishing by telling you everything I know about how to create and sell these books, drawn from my years of experience. From there, it’s my hope that you’ll use this information as a starting point to create your own approach that fits your skill set and schedule. As you’ll soon see, there are countless ways to make low-content publishing work for you!

This book is a crash course on the many different elements of low-content publishing—from research and something called niche validation, to how to create, upload, and market your low-content book, and everything in between. By the end, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of the many (many!) different types of books you can produce, as well as a solid game plan to start putting them out there right away. And you won’t even have to join an MLM.

Ready? Let’s get going!

1

WHAT’S ALL THIS? WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?

Welcome! This is a book about self-publishing books.

Sort of.

Did you know that you can self-publish things like notebooks, planners, and sketchbooks on Amazon, and that people will actually buy them? True story! You don’t have to write fiction or nonfiction to publish books anymore. In fact, you don’t have to write anything at all. Some of the most successful books being sold on Amazon right now are blank notebooks and journals published by regular people like you and me.

Maybe you already know what low-content publishing is, and you’re here to get more detail on how to actually do it. Maybe you came here to see if selling notebooks on Amazon really is a thing (Spoiler: It absolutely is). Maybe you’ve never heard about this concept until just now and therefore everything I’m about to tell you is going to completely blow your mind. 

Whatever the case, I’m glad you’re here. Since this subject is surprisingly dense, and people tend to have a ton of questions, I thought we’d start with a brief, rapid-fire Q&A:

What exactly is low-content publishing?

This refers to the publishing of books containing little to no content—things like notebooks, planners, logbooks, coloring books, etc.—using Amazon’s print-on-demand system, called KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing). Basically, you upload the cover and interior for a book one time, and Amazon handles the rest, everything from printing and production to shipping and customer service. It’s kind of magic.

Wait… What?!

I know! It’s a lot to take in. Basically, you design and upload a book that’s blank or has repetitive pages, and then when people order it, Amazon prints it and sends it out, and you get a royalty. There is no cost for publication or printing.

I’m sorry if you’re just hearing about this now.

Now, in case you’re wondering if this is just some kind of weird Amazon loophole, you’ll be reassured to know that people have been doing this for a long time (about ten years, in fact) and that Amazon is totally fine with it. In fact, in May of 2022, they added a whole section to their terms and conditions directly addressing low-content publishing. Everyone in the industry was grateful for this, because it was clarifying and extremely legitimizing. (Here’s it is, in case you’re interested: https://lowcontentpublishing.org/amazonlowcontent

This sounds great! What are some of the pros of low-content publishing?

—It’s a solid, legitimate source of passive income. As long as your account stays in good standing, you will receive royalties on these books for the rest of your life (and beyond!).

—The startup cost is very low. Publishing on Amazon is free, and you can start out using free or very low-cost tools (that I will tell you about), and then scale up once you start making money.

—The inventory is all digital. If you’ve ever tried to sell merchandise online and have experienced the true joy of having a living room filled with a bunch of physical products, you’ll feel the value of this. 

—There’s a very low barrier to entry. Unlike buying a franchise or even starting up a business in your kitchen, your low-content publishing business will just involve your computer and your imagination.

—It’s faster and easier than writing a whole book (like, by A LOT). If you’ve ever self-published a book, you’ll understand just how much time and effort goes into writing, editing, publishing, promoting, and everything else. Low-content publishing is far less labor-intensive and lets you test your ideas much more quickly.

Okay. What are the cons?

—It’s competitive, and it can take a while for you to find your niche, especially if you don’t love research or you’re not great at design. Because the barrier to entry is so low, you’ll find there are a lot of people putting out countless blank-lined journals every single day. The good news is, a lot of these people tend to not make any sales because they don’t niche down or keyword research, or because they’re generally terrible at design, and therefore won’t be competition for you, especially when you apply everything you’re going to learn in this book. (Maybe this is a bit of a con AND a pro…)

— It can take a while for your books to start selling, especially if you don’t have the budget for paid advertising. With this in mind, I want to set expectations here: Please don’t go into low-content publishing thinking you’ll strike it rich in your first month. While I certainly hope that happens for you and I will be very happy if it does, it’s best to approach this like a real business, meaning you put in the work, set reasonable goals, and grow from there. 

—It takes a long time to get paid. Amazon pays you 60 days after you make a sale. This can sting a bit if you also run advertising for your books, because they charge you every two weeks for that, and, well, you do the math.

This all seems pretty straightforward. Why did you write a full-length book about blank-lined books? 

This is a fair question. On the surface, low-content publishing seems super simple. Because of that, many people who learn you can publish notebooks on Amazon go crazy and start doing so with absolutely no strategy, and then quit and say things like Low-content publishing is a scam, or I tried low-content publishing and it didn’t work. This book is designed to give you solid tactics and strategies for success so you don’t end up like one of those people.

I can tell you from experience that if you go into this without doing proper research or having the intention of bringing quality products to the marketplace, your publishing efforts are unlikely to succeed. I want you to see low-content publishing as a business, and I’m going to strive to teach you how to do it properly.

Ultimately, my goal with this guide is to empower you to take your ideas, inspiration, knowledge, and design skills and turn those into a passive income stream in the form of low-content books. If you do it right, you can use that money to supplement your income, or even replace your day job (if that’s your intent).

What if I get overwhelmed and want to quit?

I’m not going to lie. There’s a lot to this. In the following pages,