Make $1700 A Month Selling Books On Amazon - Easy Side Hustle - No Writing Required

In this video, I'm going to talk about a fairly easy side hustle that I don't see a lot of people talking about. I like it because it only takes a little while to set up, and once it's set up, it's fairly passive. But before we get into the video, let me just introduce who I am. My name is Stevie Sells. I'm an entrepreneur that enjoys all things e-com, business, social media. So if you enjoy any of those topics, drop a sub below. So like I mentioned, this is a pretty low barrier to entry side hustle, and it's absolutely possible to make a couple thousand dollars a month with it once you put in a little bit of legwork. And you're probably wondering, well, Stevie, what is the side hustle? Get to it, bro. So what we're going to talk about today is selling low-content books with Amazon KDP. And a low-content book isn't just any old book. We're talking about books that don't really have words. Things like journals, notebooks, planners, coloring books, sketchbooks, and there's a whole bunch more. And Amazon KDP is a platform that Amazon has created that allows anyone to publish and sell books completely free. It's free to sign up. It's free to list your books. And this is another reason why this is a great starter side hustle. Also when selling books like this, you don't really need to write content for them. All you pretty much need to do is design the cover. And some of you guys are probably like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't have design skills, so this isn't for me. But there's a pretty cool tool that you can use, which we're going to discuss in this video that allows pretty much anyone to design these types of books within minutes. Low-content books have the potential to generate thousands of dollars passively for you every month. You just have to find the right niches and create unique designs that stand out among your competition. And the tool I mentioned before that we're going to use helps you do this. You'll be able to see the exact Amazon KDP products that are trending and getting tons of sales every day and use that information to create your own optimized products. So let's not waste any more time. Let's get into the video. So the tool that we're going to use today and the tool that I think makes this whole process a lot easier is called Book Bolt. And low-content books is all that Book Bolt does. They're a super focused platform and that's part of why I love it. There's that saying, if you try to do everything, you won't do anything. And because Book Bolt stays in their lane of low-content books meant for Amazon KDP, the platform is simple and easy to learn. So Book Bolt is a full all-in-one tool that lets you make puzzle books, activity books, coloring books, and basically any type of low-content book you can think of within minutes. Again, you don't need graphic design skills or anything like that. Most of the platform is very drag-and-drop friendly, and we'll get into that later in this video. Alongside the design part of Book Bolt, they also allow you to do product research all within the Book Bolt platform. You can view trends, do keyword research. It shows you current Amazon KDP bestsellers. And the best part is you can spy on your competition and use that information to inspire designs for your business. Book Bolt is basically a one-stop shop for anyone that wants to get into the low-content Amazon KDP side hustle quickly and easily. Now before you go and sign up for Book Bolt, I've actually talked to the people over there and asked them if they'd create a special discount code for this video. They were super down, so check out the description in this video for a link to Book Bolt and of course a special 20% off discount code. That's the deal, man. Okay, so once you create your Book Bolt account, you log in, you're going to be brought to this screen right here. And this is just a bunch of different tutorials. They're super helpful. So after this video, if you still have specific questions or don't exactly know how to do something, you can come here and likely figure it out pretty quick. Now the first thing you're going to want to do is click this cloud button on the left side of the page right here. And this is where you're going to be able to search for the bestselling products in your niche, which will help guide you when you're designing your own books. And it's important that you don't just think about what you would want to buy. You need to look at the data and create designs that fill a gap in the market and also have a large enough customer base. And this cloud part of Book Bolt allows us to do that. So this is the cloud page right here. You can see this is our bestsellers menu. We can search by top 100, top 200, top 300, top 400, top 500. We can choose our category, notebook, journal, music sheets, calendar, planner, coloring book, a bunch of different options there. We can pick our price range and of course our BSR range. For this example, I'm going to keep everything the same. Besides this, I'm going to pick journal and then just click search. When your search is done, you're going to click this results data tab right here. And what you're going to want to pay attention to most is this average price. This is right around where you're likely going to want to price your product. In our case, it's $8.62. So just stick that in the back of your head. Scrolling down into our results, you can see we have some journals here. This old school anatomy one is pretty cool and unique. Scroll down some more. Here's another one with that kind of old school look. We've got this one that has some gaming controllers on it. This one with the pink unicorn and rainbows. And you can see that some of these results are not low content books. Like this looks like a book with words. This one too right here. But what we're looking for is inspiration for our own design. And these are top sellers, so we should pay attention to them. Oh, I like this design right here. So we're going to use this sort of swirly abstract art as our inspiration for this example. Before we leave this page, let's just look at one more thing. So we've got this dad tell me your story journal. From what I understand, this is basically just a blank notebook. But a daughter or son would give it to their dad and have them fill it out and give it back to them. Pretty cool idea actually. And so on this particular product, we scroll down and we can see all this information here. So we've got reviews, ASIN, publication date. We've got the price. They're selling theirs for $11.99. So let's just do a quick calculation on that $389 times $11.99 equals $4,664.11. That's per month with only one product they're selling with Amazon KDP right now. Now it's not likely that you're going to create a bestseller right off the bat, but you can make hundreds of these books super easily with Book Bolt and eventually a few are likely going to take off. So yeah, lots of potential here, especially if you're newer to entrepreneurship. Again, this is a great low cost to entry starting point. Okay, so we're going to go through an example here and I want to use this top selling abstract art journal as inspiration. And Book Bolt has a super easy to use designer built in, so don't worry if you're not artistic or whatever. This is pretty straightforward. So to get to the designer, you click on your name in the top right corner and then you scroll all the way down until you see Book Bolt designer right here. We click that and then we're brought to this screen. This is where you pick your template. We can choose paperback or hardcover. We can choose cover or interior. We can pick our trim size. I've found that the standard for Amazon KDP journals is six by nine, so we're just going to go with that. But obviously you have a lot of options here. You can choose your paper color. We're just going to go black and white with white paper and then the number of pages that you want. And for this, we're going to put 50. Again, you can customize this however you want, but then you just click submit and then it takes a couple moments to generate. So just have a little patience. It's not too bad. Okay, so once your template loads, you're going to see a few different things. This orange pinky line right here is your bleed line and basically you just don't want to put any part of your design that you want people to see in or on these lines. You want to make sure you keep everything within these blank spaces. On the left side, you can see we have a bunch of different tools we can use to design our book. We can add text, we can upload custom images, add different shapes, we can even draw on the book. You can manipulate different layers kind of like you would with Photoshop, add different effects and even do masks. Now I'm no artist, so I'm definitely not going to be drawing my own design. We're just going to go over to the image tab here and you can see that I already uploaded an image that I want to use for my cover. If you go this route, be sure that the image you use is safe for commercial use and royalty free. There's a lot of pictures out there on the internet and you just want to make sure you pick one that's free to use. Also, I already uploaded my image here, but if you haven't yet and are wondering how, all you need to do is click this or drag your image here and it'll quickly upload to BookBolt's platform. For this example, I brought in this swirl pattern that I found on a royalty free website and all I need to do is click and hold on this image and drag it over onto my template. You see in the corner here, you can resize it right here and we're actually going to use this corner right here and twist it or rotate it. And yeah, all you need to do is click and hold and you can kind of move it wherever you want. And I should note too that the right side of your template is going to be your front cover and the left side of your template is going to be your back cover. You definitely don't want to get this confused. It could definitely cause some issues. So if you have some writing that's going on your cover, be sure it goes on the right side because this is your front. You don't want to end up with it on the back and then no one knows what you're selling. All right, so what I'm going to do now is sort of fit this image to this template. We'll just resize it down like this and I'm going to go over those bleed lines because my image is sort of abstract and I don't care if a little bit gets cut off, but yeah, that looks pretty good right there. I'm going to drag it over again from here, we'll rotate it and then sort of fit it on the backside too. There, I like how that looks. Next, we're going to add a title to our cover and I suggest that you pretty much always do this so people know what they're buying. If it's just a blank cover, it doesn't really have an identity and won't resonate with that many people. And this is sort of a busy design, so if we put text right over the top of this, it might be really hard to read. So what we're going to do is add a custom shape to the cover. So I go over here, click shapes, and then you've got all these different options. The one I'm going to pick is just this plain rectangle right here. So I just click it, hold it and drag it over to my cover. From there, I can resize it any way I want just by dragging the corners and edges. I think that looks all right. I'll just kind of center it here. Boom. I like that. And then I actually want to change the color of the rectangle itself. So if you want to do that, just click the shape that you want to change the color of. And then up here in the left corner, you'll see this little black circle. Click that. And then right here, if you click again, you can choose any color you want. For this though, I'm probably just going to go with white. Yeah. I like how that looks. And you just X, X. And I just chose white because I think I'm going to actually add colored text over the top of it, which will give our journal just a little bit more personality. Now it's time to add our text. So we go over to the left side where all our tools are and you can see this second one here says text. We click that and they have a ton of different text options here. But if you can't find one you like, you can actually scroll all the way down to the bottom and right here where it says load more 1000 plus fonts. You can click that and access, well, thousands of other fonts. Once you pick the font that you want to use, you just click it and then it just automatically shows up on your cover. You can grab it and you can move it wherever you want. Ours is obviously going to go right on this white rectangle. So we'll move it over there. Then you just double click it, select it all and can type whatever title you want your book to be. I feel like our design sort of has a dreamy vibe to it. So maybe this would make a really cool dream journal. We're going to go with that. So I'll type dream journal and then I can move it and resize it however I want. I think I want it something like that. Now if you want to change the color of your text, you just click your text right here and then click this paint bucket in the top right corner. From there, you can pick any of these colors right here or you can click right here and pick any color under the sun. And we're going to go with sort of a blue, something to match this color right here. Kind of dark. You can lighten it up right here. You can see as we move that it's getting darker and lighter. I'm thinking something like that. Okay. So then you just X out of that and you can see how easy it is to create really beautiful designs in BookVault within minutes. Once your design is done, which for this example, ours is, you go up to the left corner and click this download button. And it's going to pop up with this preparing icon with the circle thing and you're going to want to wait because BookVault is actually compiling all the components of your cover and exporting them to the specifications that are needed for Amazon KDP. Once your design is ready, you're going to see this box pop up. Just click download and then your PDF should generate. Take a look at it and make sure everything looks right and then you're going to save it to your computer. On my computer, I just click right here in the right corner and I can save it wherever I want on my computer, but on yours, it might be different. Just be sure to save it in a folder where you can easily find it. Okay. So now our cover is done, but how about the inside? And like I said before, these types of books don't really have words or written content in them. We're making a journal and those pretty much just have lines in them. And BookVault makes designing these blank type of pages really easy. So now what you're going to do is go up to the top where it says interior, click that and that's going to bring you to a page where you can see all these different interior pages that you can put in your book. You can see there's a bills tracker, there's a mood tracker, there's shopping lists, there's reading lists, there's chore lists, there's reminder lists, there's body progress charts. There are so many interior page designs that you can use, but we're doing a journal, so it's super simple. So one of these first three options should work well. We've got just blank pages, we've got college ruled, and this one says journal. We're going to go with that. So just click the option that you want to use, and then we need to choose our size. And remember, we chose the six by nine size because that's kind of the standard. So we're just going to click here, select six by nine, no bleed. And then we put our page count right here, which is going to be 50. And all we need to do is click download. This will spit out a perfect PDF file of 50 beautiful journal pages. You don't have to manually put your PDF together. BookVault automatically does it to your specific requirements. And this file is ready to be uploaded to Amazon KDP right away. Doing this yourself would require a fair amount of work, even though the pages are blank. So yeah, BookVault really comes in clutch because this takes less than a couple minutes to generate. So then you have to save your interior pages to your computer. Again, on my computer, I just click this right here. I'm just going to save them in the same folder that I put my cover in. That way I can easily find both of them. And guys, you have now completed designing your first book. It's really quite simple, and I think the opportunities are pretty much endless. I obviously designed a simple journal, but you could really niche down and create specific journals for entrepreneurs or planners for teachers. It's really limitless. Also, BookVault, with its thousands of templates, makes bringing these visions to life a lot easier and way less time consuming. You don't need to know Photoshop or be an artist. You can simply use royalty free images and add unique themes and text to set your designs apart. Also, the product research tools that BookVault has available are super helpful when trying to determine which niche to design products for. But now you have your finished book downloaded, so let's go to the next part and show you how to upload it to Amazon KDP. Okay, so this is the Amazon KDP platform. I'm not going to go deep into how to make your own account. It's really straightforward. Anyone can do it. It's free. Very basic signup process. So once you're here, you start by clicking this create button, and then you can scroll down and you have all these different options. You can do a Kindle ebook, paperback, hardcover, series page, or Kindle Vella. We're doing a paperback, so we'll click create paperback. Next you have a bunch of different fields that you have to fill out for Amazon so that they know what type of book you even created. We can pick our language right here. We're just going to select English. And then our second thing is our title, which is super important. And BookVault actually has a tool that helps you find high ranking keywords for your title. So going back into BookVault, and on the left side of the page here, if we scroll down, we can see this tab that says keywords. So we're going to click that, and then we're going to select search. Next you're just going to see this box. This is where you type in your starting keyword. And we're making a journal, so that's exactly what we're going to type in right here. And you just click search, and then it takes a little bit just to populate that list. Okay, so here we go. And before we move any further, I want to point out that BookVault's keyword tool not only gives you Amazon search volume, but it also gives you Google's too right here in this column. These two metrics together really help paint a better picture of what's actually trending. In these other two columns, you can also see cost per click and competition. We're going to be looking for keywords that have a decent search volume, but maybe aren't super competitive yet. So right away I see aesthetic journals for journaling. Our journal that we made I think fits into that aesthetic niche. So that's a keyword I would definitely consider putting in my title. You can see that it has over a thousand search volume on Amazon. Looks like Google's isn't showing up for whatever reason. And it also says no data for competition, which I'm going to assume that means maybe this is a newer trending keyword. Scrolling down, here's another one I like. We've got journaling journal for women. Unfortunately no data on this one either, but I think for women would be a good keyword to include in our title. So I would just write down some of these more niche keywords that fit your book that you've made. And then we can sort this by search volume and look at adding some keywords that are also more competitive. They're competitive for a reason, and that's because there's usually a lot of search volume on them. That doesn't mean you shouldn't include them in your title. Just be sure to create a mix. You don't want to be too niche or too broad. So heading back to Amazon KDP, and since we're just doing an example, I'm just going to write aesthetic dream journal. We'll just leave it like that for now, but you'd want to fill that out with a lot more keywords. You can add a subtitle if you want. We're going to leave that blank. We're not doing a series, so we can skip that. Same thing with edition number. For author, you can put your name or your business name. We'll put Stevie Sells. We don't have contributors, but if you did, you can add that here. And then we're at the description box, and this is where you write a little paragraph with some bullet points about the book you're selling. And I always recommend looking at your competitor's listings and seeing what's working for them. I've seen long descriptions work, and I've seen short ones work too. For now, I'm just going to write, this is my super keyword rich description. Yay. Just because this is an example. Scrolling down, we have publishing rights. This isn't a copyrighted book that I made, so we're going to go ahead and select, this is a public domain work. If you're creating custom art or drawings for your low content books, then you may want to select the other copyright option. But if you're just using stock images like I did, then you would select the public domain option. Next is our keyword section. So we're going to go back to the Book Bolt keyword tool and just copy some of these keywords over that are relevant to the journal that we've created. I'm just going to fill this in really quick and paste the same thing in a few of these blanks. You want all these to be different. Next, it's time to pick your category, and you're going to want to pick the category that's closest to what your book actually is, and Book Bolt has a tool for this. So let's go back to Book Bolt here, and you're going to want to click your name in the top right corner, and then scroll down to KDP Categories Finder, and then you just put in your keyword, which in our case is going to be journal, and boom. These are some different options of where you could list a journal on Amazon. Some of them may not be exact, but I think this first one fits what we made pretty perfectly. So now you just hop back to Amazon KDP, click choose categories, and find that same category. Looks like it was under literary collections, so we go back here, click literary collections, and scroll down, and boom, right there, diaries and journals. Then click save. Now after you select your category, you have these two options to look at as well. We are making a low content book, so we select that, and then the other option is, is your book a large print book? And our book doesn't have any print on it besides the cover, so we're going to leave that blank. The last thing on this page is about adult content. It says, does this book contain language situations or images inappropriate for children under 18 years of age? Ours is a simple dream journal, so we're going to select no. Then you just click save and continue. And on this next page, you assign your ISBN, but for low content books, you actually don't need one. So we're just going to select the option publish without an ISBN. You can select your publication date. This is optional. Scrolling down, we have our print options. And for this one, I'm just going to click black and white interior with white paper. But you can see there are some other options here that would make sense for other types of books. For example, if you have a book that has color on the interior, you should choose the standard color or premium color option. The premium option is just going to have a little bit nicer feel to it, but it'll likely cost more too. Next, we pick our trim size, which again, we pick six by nine. So we're going to select that. If you made a different size book, you can choose that here. Our bleed settings, we're going to go no bleed. And then we get to pick our cover finish. Matte is going to be a matte finish or not shiny and glossy will have that shiny look to it. I like matte. So that's what we're going to pick. And now we're at the part where we actually upload our files that we exported from BookBolt. So you just click this button, upload paperback manuscript. And this is where you upload your interior pages. Once you've done that, it's time to upload your cover and you can launch the cover creator right here on Amazon, but we made our cover in BookBolt's editor, which I personally like a lot more. So we select this option that says upload a cover you already have. Select your cover file on your computer and click upload. And the great thing again about BookBolt is that it automatically exports the files in the exact format that Amazon needs them in. Okay. So both our interior and cover have been uploaded successfully. So we scroll down even more and right here's a little box that says, does your cover include a barcode? We don't have one, so there's no need to check this box. But if you do have a barcode on your design, you should check this. Now we're at the bottom of the page and this is where you can actually preview what your book will look like. So we click this launch preview or button and then it brings up this nice interface. And this is where you can actually page through what your journal will actually look like. And if we click this arrow right here, it opens to the front page. We keep clicking and you can see that we just have a bunch of blank journal pages. Just make sure to go through this and make sure there aren't any mistakes or anything like that, because this is exactly how your book will print and be received by your customers. Once you approve your design, you're going to see your printing cost right here and you're going to want to take note of it because it is relevant to what we're going to do on the next page. Save and continue. And this is our last page. On this one, we get to pick where we want our book to be sold and our pricing. You can pick what you want for territories, but I'm going to select all territories. Primary marketplace is going to be amazon.com of course. Scrolling down, this is where we set our pricing and you can see right here, it sort of gives you a minimum and maximum. If you remember when we were doing our product research, the average price for a journal was like $8 to $10. So I'm just going to write $9.99. And once you set that, you can see what our expected royalty rate per book will be. You can definitely charge more for your books, especially if you have a really unique designs. And obviously your royalty rate will go up substantially if you have designs people are willing to pay for. For example, if we set this to $19.99 instead, you can see our royalty rate goes up to $9.84, but we're going to keep this at $9.99 for now. Now some of you guys are probably like $3.84 per sale, bro, that's not that much. But you have to remember that a lot of these products are selling hundreds, if not thousands per month. So even if you're selling, let's say 500 per month, which is doable, if you do some testing and find a winner, you're going to bring in almost $2,000 per month, just off of one Amazon KDP product every month, unless you're in sort of like a flyby trend, that's not going to be relevant in a couple of weeks. And guys, this is the power of book bowl. You can create these low content books very quickly, get them on Amazon and test different concepts and designs in order to find profitable niches. They've built this platform solely for that. So let's say you create 150 designs out of those 150, maybe 10 will sell 500 per month. So 5,000 units per month. This is of course, assuming you do proper keyword research and create unique designs, you could make almost $20K per month. It all comes down to doing the research and then creating unique designs that a niche group of people will really like. But again, not too niche because then no one will find them. Let's go back here and just do the final step on Amazon KDP. So we've got some terms and conditions here. And then at the bottom here, you just click publish and it can take a few days for your book to actually go live on Amazon. I'm sure it goes through some sort of approval process, but usually it's not too bad. And that brings us to the end of this video. I hope you guys enjoyed learning about this sort of underrated side hustle. Again, if you want to sign up for book bowl and give this a try yourself, be sure to check the description below to find a link to book bowl and also a special 20% off discount code that they provided us just for this video. Thank you so much for watching. I know this is a long one. Subscribe for more. Peace.