The most popular type of book to sell on
Amazon is a low content paperback. Why? Because they're easy to make. There's no money required and you don't need to be a real author
to even publish one. Now, on the surface, well,
it all sounds really nice. As you can imagine,
there's just way too many people out there cutting and pasting
the same type of book together. If you run a search on Amazon, you'll get over 60,000 results
for the term lined journals. And typically the only thing separating
one book from another is the cover. But don't get me wrong here. If you're already selling
these types of books or perhaps you're just getting started,
I'm not telling you to stop doing them. Instead,
I just want to show you a smarter way to create low content books by doing
something called medium content instead. So what does that even mean? Well, unlike high content, which is,
you know, written pieces like fiction and nonfiction
books, medium content books are just like low content, except they require slightly
more effort to make. However,
you still don't need to be an author or artist to get started,
and you definitely don't need to spend any money making them. To understand this better, here's what Amazon says regarding the differences
between low content and medium content. A low content book has minimal
or no content on the interior pages. These pages are generally repetitive
and designed to be filled in by the user. Common examples include notebooks,
planters, journals and other similar works. This does not include activity, puzzle
or coloring books. Now, the most important thing to remember
with that is the word repetitive. When you create something
like a line journal, for example, that's filled with the exact same page
over and over again. That's considered low content by Amazon,
and it's actually something they're trying to discourage new sellers
from creating. Earlier this year, Amazon released
an update saying they're no longer providing free ISBN for low content books. And if you're not aware what those are, basically
they're the bar codes for your book. And while you're technically not required to have one,
there are a few disadvantages to that. So first, without an ISBN, you're
not eligible for expanded distribution. A free program
that makes your book available to more readers outside of Amazon,
such as bookstores and libraries, and also without an ISBN you're listing,
won't have that look inside feature that a lot of shoppers use
before they buy it. It helps them make a purchasing decision, and that feature most likely helps
improve your conversion rate. So it is very important. Now, if you want to see,
you can always just buy your own ISBN outside of Amazon
by going to a website called Belgacom. However, just be aware
they are pretty expensive here. One will cost you $125 or if you buy ten at once
then you can get them for $30 a piece. This is yet another reason why you should
avoid doing repetitive low content. So if you're ready to get started, let's now walk through the three
step process for creating your first medium
content book. And we are going
to cover a lot in this video. So you may have to watch it more than once to help drill down
each individual strategy. Okay. Step one before anything else,
you want to find out what the best selling books are. To do this, start
with this list of medium content ideas, and for each one,
look them all up on Amazon. Now it's probably about a 20
to 30 minute process for each of these
looking them up on Amazon. So I'm just going to take one idea now
and show you the process so that you could do it
for the rest of them. Sound good? Let's do it. Okay. So from that list, I'm just going to use
the one I like coloring books and enter that into Amazon here. And we're basically trying
to find a niche now, right? Trying to find the best selling products. I can see there's 90,000 results
for coloring books and that's a problem. So we want to niche down. We want to get this down
closer to like 50,000. So I could do a space here
and see a bunch of different options. You see coloring books for adults,
for kids, book for teens, girls, Disney. There's a lot of different ways
that we can niche down. So let's say
I go coloring books for adults, right? And I enter that in. And now we're down to 70,000 results.
Okay. So what we can do
is we can keep doing this. We can keep niching down. If I do a space again, I see relaxation is the first one
or really the first like, wow. Like seven, eight, nine. Wow. And then you come down to coloring book. So I like relaxation. Let's just try it. I can enter that in now.
And we're down to 20,000. That's awesome. You know, I can really go down a rabbit
hole if I like and keep hitting space. And now I see how I can do large print animals spiral Disney easy
so you can keep doing this. I'm going to stop right now because this is going to be an hour
long video if I don't. And let's just go with this here
and again, 20 down search results. I can look at the listings here
to see what types of books are out there. And these are books that we can
probably end up making as well. Okay. So we started with just coloring books
and now we're in a niche that I think will be better
than just regular coloring books. But if you didn't catch what I just said
there, I possibly said one of the most devastating words any entrepreneur can say
when starting a business. I said the word. I think not. I know, but I think it will be better. I'll make it a point to call this out,
because when you're looking for your next book idea,
you should know for certain that what you're about to get into
is either a good or a bad idea. You don't want to waste your time creating something
that there's just no market for. Or maybe the competition is too high,
or this has no profit in it. On Amazon, the best way to verify
any niche is to analyze the level of demand, competition
and potential royalties. We do this by pulling in the estimated sales reviews
and the percentage of royalties on all products within the particular
niche we're looking at. We teach this concept here on our channel
and to help us get the most accurate Amazon data we can,
we use the Jungle Scout Chrome extension. Now, don't worry, I'm not going to try
to sell you on anything in this video, but I will be using it to teach you the general process
of using data to your advantage. Okay, back to our results page here. Under each product with the extension, you can see the estimated number
of monthly and daily sales revenue and other things like the date it
first became available, which is actually a really important part of this strategy
we're now about to get into. Now, alternatively,
you could pull up the extension this way, which shows a lot more information
for every product on this page, which you can see
is about 48 different books. So now if you found a niche
just like this, here's how to find out whether or not it's
a good idea to further explore. Looking at our list here. We can see the average monthly sales
is around 500, meaning that these 48 books sell on average of 500 books per month,
which is like 16 sales per day. And on Amazon, that's really good. In fact, our indicator of a strong
niche is usually around 300. So this definitely passes for high demand. You can also verify that the sales
are evenly distributed across the top ten products, which is something
you'll want to keep an eye out for. The last thing you want to see
is just the top two or three books hogging up all the sales,
which thankfully isn't happening here. Now, what about the level of competition
for this? Look at the number of reviews or at Amazon
now calls ratings. We could check the average
rating number up here at the top, which I'd have to say is a bit higher
than I'd like to see. Ideally, this would be under a thousand
or even 500. But also, just keep in mind,
it's almost 20, 23. There's really not too many categories
on Amazon that will be under 500 and are also in high demand. It's just the nature of Amazon
that's becoming more and more competitive each year. But that also doesn't mean
you can't get into a category like this. It just means
you need to further investigate just how competitive it actually is. So in this case, what I like to do
now is filter these results to see how many books are selling a lot despite
having a low rating number. Okay, so how we can do this is head over
to menu and then click filter results. So like I said,
we typically look for 300 minimum sales. So I come over here to the lowest sales
and I could enter 300. But we typically talk about 300
when it comes to private label, when selling books,
I think 150 is a great number on the minimum side
because that's about five units a day. So I think that's still very strong. Now for reviews, this is how we gauge it. Comp attrition. I want to see, like I said,
all the products that are selling at least 150 monthly sales
and they have no more than 100 reviews. Someone entered that here in the max. What that's going to tell me is show me
all the products that are selling a lot despite being new or just not that many reviews and competing
with these guys with thousands of reviews. So I can enter that in here and click
Apply Changes and that will readjust my results down to eight
that we can see down here at the bottom. Okay. So what's great is I can now
look at the average monthly sales, daily sales
and then date first available as a column I love to look at because it tells you
when they launched their product. So you can see here a lot of
these were launched this year in 2022 or some of them late last year,
and they're already doing really well. 16 daily sales, 15, 12, 12. So this is a really good niche
for new sellers to get into. Also, what I can do is
I can come over here to the Price column and click it as well and see
different products pricing strategies. So this book, for example, started at 999 and then they dropped their price
all the way down to 699 like it is now. This is something we'll talk about later. A lower price will always sell more
than a higher price. And I can even confirm that by coming over
to this product, monthly sales and seeing just how they grew over time. So they started at 171 sales
and then over time, they've grown to now, you know, over 300 monthly sales
because, again, they change their price. If we just come back to it, you'll see
that again, they lowered their price. And around that same time, it looks like
they lowered it really in July. And if we go to July on the monthly
sales graph. Wow. Yeah. That's when they really spiked from, you know, in the two hundreds
to almost four hundreds into 300. So that is the power of low price. And again, we'll get into that later. In fact, what we can do is we can look
at this top metric up here, average price. So the average price for all eight of
these products is just over $6. We're going to talk about this more later,
but that's a really sweet price. And really, when we price our book, we're going to want to be really close
to this price and maybe even a little bit lower
at the beginning. So now that we know that this niche passes for both high demand
and relatively low competition, the last step is to see how much royalties
you can potentially make. So with KDP, it's good to know the two types of royalty rates
your books are eligible for. If your book is priced between 299 and 999,
you'll qualify for the 70% royalty rate. And if your book is priced
below to 99 or above 999, then you qualify
for just a 35% royalty rate. So for most medium content books, you'll
want to target the 70% royalty rate. As you just saw in the extension. You'll typically sell a lot more books
when priced within this range. And that's really important because you want to start building up
your reviews as fast as possible. So when you're looking for a particular
niche check to make sure that the average price
is within that range, just like it is here now with all three of these indicators
checked off, you'll want to write these numbers
down somewhere and then repeat this exact same process
for at least ten different niches. You can make this into an Excel sheet
and compare all your ideas there. Or if you're a Jungle Scout user, you can keep track of all of this data
within Product Tracker, a tool that helps you organizing compare
different practices. And unlike Excel, the data
constantly refreshes. So you only have to do this once. But either way, however you do it,
just keep track of your findings and make sure to do it
for at least ten different niches. By the way, if you're getting any value from this video
so far, we'd really appreciate if you hit the like button down below. Okay. Moving on to step two, creating the
interior of the book as well as the cover. Oftentimes, this is one of the most
challenging parts for new sellers, especially if you're not an artist. But like I said earlier, you don't need
to be an artist to make a great book. You just need to know a few tricks and be willing to watch a few YouTube
videos like you're doing now. And of course, you could always pay someone on Fiverr
or Upwork to make all the designs for you. But I said earlier
that you can do this for free, so I'm going to show you how to create
a book without spending a single dollar. The first thing you need to do is choose
what size book you're going to create. The best way of doing
this is to check what your competitors are doing by visiting their listings
and looking at the dimensions listed here. Also, take note of the page count as well. This will be determined roughly
how many pages your book should have. Next, head over to this website
and download a template of your cover. Now I'll be putting this along with
all the links I mentioned in this video. Down in the description once here,
go ahead and fill in this information and then click calculate dimensions
and download template. Whether you're on a mac or a PC,
open up the zip file and then select either
the PNG or the PDF file. Either one works. You also have a read me file here
which gives you the instructions on how to use this template. So make sure to check that out with either
the PNG or PDF file open. You'll see a lot going on here,
but for now just pay attention to the section
that lists the overall dimensions. In this case,
that's around 17 by 11 inches, and this is the size of document
you need to create. Now, I'm
sure you're all aware of Canva.com. It's a completely free design software
that you can use to create both your cover and the interior pages. Now, with Canva opened up at the top,
click the create a design button, then select custom size. Now just make sure this is set two inches
and not pixels and then go here and enter those dimensions
we just got from the template. Okay, so we're in here in Canva now
and before designing the cover, the one thing I like to do
is actually add a new page and add in my competitors images so they're covers
and I already did that here. So I'm going to
is going to copy it in here. And basically why I do this is because
when I'm done or as I'm creating my cover, I'm going to eventually slot mine
in right here so I can see and even zoom out and say, is mine
visually interesting comparison to others? And it's also good for inspiration. So one thing I like to do is
I do like this one right here. It's a you know, it's a minimalist boho
coloring book for teens and adults and actually already
have the listing pulled up here. So we can see it as well
and see what the cover looks like. It's just super simple. And you can see these graphics right here were probably pulled from Canva
or some sort of free editor. At least it looks like it could have been. And I'm going to use that as inspiration
for this video. And again, I'm not going to really try
to do anything pretty here. I'm just going to show you
the concept of how to do this. You don't spend a lot more time
and be way more creative than I am. So what I'm going to do here is because
that's a boho, it's like minimalistic. I'm going to go over to the elements here
and type in boho to see what comes up. Now, I could actually sort of buy
graphics. One thing to note here, guys,
I do have the premium version of Canva, so I'm just going to come over here
and go to free. And so we just see the free ones. I said, you can do this for free. So I want to show you guys
how to do that for for basically free. So now I'm looking for a background here. I might even type in boho background. I just want to get a basic image. So I like this or color. So let me go out and spread this
across the page here and just get that all the way there. And it's kind of coming down
to check my competitor as well. It's a similar color.
It's a boho background, apparently. So what I'm going to do now
is that now that we have the background, I need to pull in that template that we just downloaded
so we know where to put text and images so that we're not hitting certain marks
that we're not allowed to be in. So what we can do is go to upload files and then pull in that template
that we just looked at earlier. Once that's download, you can pull it
in here and put it right over top. So what I'll do is I'll just actually
drag it all the way across it. You'll see it fits perfectly. And now basically to get rid of it
so that we can see what we're working on is
I can come over here to the transparency filter
and drop it down. So if I drop it down to zero,
you see our background. But like somewhere in this 30 to 40 range,
I seem to it feels like it works really well so really quick let me bring it to 100
can explain something here this orange or this pink here these are areas
where you're not allowed to be in. So when they're printing their book,
you're if you have anything past that line or touching the pink,
it's just going to come up as an error or won't even allow you upload the book. So you want to make sure
you're inside the pink lines here. And also this orange
or I'm sorry, yellow barcode. You don't want to cover that. Okay. So now let's
go ahead and start designing the cover. I'm going to bring it back down to that 40 transparency mark and start
adding in elements in text to the cover. So what I could do first is let's maybe
just get some ideas here. I can type in this boho to get
I get some more ideas and I'm going to do this
really simple guy. So let me grab some design ideas I like,
I like these little like blobs,
so I'm going to put it in here. And the one called the on canvas. When you find something you like, you can see these magic recommendations
will often appear and I click see all to see
all the ones that are very similar. So I'm just going to go ahead
and add those in here and just do this really fast, guys. Again, amazing designer
and maybe we'll put in a different color or maybe this pink color
because we don't have one. And so I'll pull that in here,
maybe change the design or the style a little bit. And so this is the world's
worst boho book cover, but now I need to add in some text
so I can just go over here, add a heading and bring that in here, resize it
so it fits within the purple line. So go ahead and do that here. I'm just going to actually just call. Right. How boho. Oh gosh, coloring book can't write in place that right in the middle
or somewhere in the middle there. And then obviously it's not looking good. So I need to go to effects here. You can add in a background,
you know, change the color. Maybe we just want to do, you know, a real
simple white background with black text so I can just go ahead and do that
here, resize it. Now we are doing a dot
coloring book, remember? So I just want to go boho adult
coloring book that looks pretty decent. And then you'll see if I actually change
the transparency now in the background that you starting to get somewhere, it's
not looking pretty, but I'm hopefully just showing you the idea here and how to start
with Canva making a free cover. So again, we want to cover this barcode,
but wondering the same thing that we just did to the cover, to the back of the book
and maybe add in some text as well. So what I can do now is export
this when we're happy with it. And on Canva, what you need to do is
you need to download it as a PDF, but the best way of doing
that is coming over to PDF print that will actually be the best
and most highest quality of downloading a PDF file that eventually gets thrown
into your KDP account. And again, guys, this is super simple. Hopefully you're just getting the idea
or the basics behind creating your book with Canva,
and these are some tricks to do that now. We need to do the exact same thing, but
this time for the interior of your book. So just like the cover
we need to download a template that shows us where the margins are
so that we don't go over them. I personally love this website created
by a fellow YouTuber, Paul Morales. Again, all links in the video description. After entering your email address, you'll see the full list of available
templates for our coloring book. Example,
we're going to download this one here the right page template
with Bleed and all. Bleed
means your images can stretch the full width of the page
rather than just being set within a box. Next, head back over to Canvas Homepage
and create a new design. Now, just like our example,
if your book has bleed, you want to type in the template
dimensions, not the book dimensions. So instead of eight and a half by 11,
it will be slightly larger here. Okay, now that I have this created,
I need to upload that template just like we did
previously. Come to upload files, download and it's right here and go ahead and drag that over over just to fit the canvas and wallah. Okay. So now what I need to do
is start adding in some images to this that people can fill in and draw because
we're doing a coloring book example. Now what I found on
Canva is if you type in the words aligner, you'll find a lot of graphics
and you can use the graphics filter here. And again,
I have a premium account something go to just the free ones to show you
that this can be done for free if you see in line or if you double click
or I'm sorry, click the three dots here, you'll see
a lot of indicators that are similar. So line up here in the title
and then sometimes down here you'll see the word line
or drawing or illustrator. And I found that when you use the word
liner drawing illustration, you'll find a lot of images like this
that are already cut out. They just have an outline over it
and that's what you need. If you're doing a coloring book, you don't want anything like this,
for example, where it has some color to it already. Yeah, there are some hacks that you can
maybe get rid of that, or you can. There are some ways
if you look up on YouTube to eliminate color
within any type of image. So I just type in the word dog. I could actually get this over here
and manipulate it in a way to have it just be an outline. It's a little bit harder. And I just want to show you
a real fast way of doing it and a little trick
that I found is type in liner. So I'm going to design this a real quick
example here to show you the process. And I'm just going to maybe
grab this page here or this graphic here. A popular question
we get asked is, can you use these images and resell them as your own? The answer is yes on canvas. You can. In fact, if you have a premium account, you'll get a ton more graphics
available to you. Then you can also use. The biggest thing is making it unique. So even if I just do this,
I should be okay. But what I could do as well
is start to design it a little bit. So I have an image here.
Maybe that's my main subject. I'll put it right in the middle there
and let's say I just want to design it a little bit more rather than having it
just be a one graphic
page is maybe I like these flowers, right? I will put them over here in the corner,
resize it. So now we have flowers there
that someone can draw in and I'll add another flower, maybe a different flower
up here at the top corner and just trying to make this unique. But either way you can use these Canva designs in your book
that you're making profit off of. And so I like it like that. You know, I could just keep adding more, maybe some mushrooms down here
in the corners to fill up all the corners. Maybe you could add
a design to the backgrounds so they can fill in the design
behind the subject. You can just look for that as well. And I could also type in a line Art Boho
to get an idea of some boho designs that match are that our brand
that we're doing here so you know anything would here would work
you know it doesn't really make sense, but I could add a snowflake up here
that's actually not a good example. So maybe we'll just do another flower
at the top left corner here. So you guys see
how you can start to do this. This is not a threat
saying steal my idea here, because if you do, I can't imagine
you'll get a lot of good reviews. But this is the idea of creating
your pages, using Canva, using line art as the key word you use or illustration
or drawing just to get started. But again, there are other websites
out there that you can source from rather than just using canvas
pre-built designs here. Okay. So after you did your first page
like this, I'd highly recommend adding another page and actually skipping it
before you do your next design. So this really applies if you're doing
a coloring book like we're doing here. And the reason is because after your first page,
the next page will be what's behind it. And as you can imagine, there's probably
going to be some bleed through, especially if you're using markers
on this coloring book. So I recommend skipping it
and then doing your next design from here, skipping the page, doing the next design
and so on. So you want to do this
for how many pages you have. It might take some time, but just know
that this is a free way of doing it. You can do it by yourself. You don't need to hire a designer
or be an artist yourself. So this is definitely doable. Might just take a few hours to do and you can always even like go back to your competitors listings here
and sometimes you can actually just click the book
and they have that see inside feature. You can get an idea of what they're doing. So this book right here, it's super basic. It's just that's a really basic image
right there. And you can see other examples here. And they were doing
what were they doing, 392 sales a month. And they just came out this year
in 2022 on a really basic book. So you can definitely do
this as well. Don't be discouraged. If you can't find the,
you know, the best graphics out there, you can always design them yourself, hire
somebody if you want something more upscale, but just know that it's possible with what
you can get for free on canva.com. And then once you're done
with all of your designs on all your pages again,
just like the cover come up to share, download and P D.F. print and that's going to be the best
quality that you need to upload to CDP. Okay,
so hopefully by now you're on the right track towards
creating your first medium content book. Now that you have both your book cover
and the interior pages ready, the next step is to publish it on the KDP
platform. Step three After you register and open up
your KDP account, you'll see that page just like this, where you can either add
an e-book paperback or a hardcover. Because we're doing a paperback,
we'll click that option. Okay, now
a lot of these sections are pretty simple and pretty self-explanatory,
so I'm just going to cover the most important sections here
that play the biggest factor in your book being discovered
in the search results by shoppers. And it all starts
with creating your title and subtitle. Now, real quick,
do you remember the title of this video? It's The Smart Way to create KDP books,
so the smart way of creating your title is to use the highest volume keywords
that your top competitors are already ranking for. We teach this exact same strategy
here in our channel because when you use the best keywords in your title
and in this case also your subtitle, your book will have a much better chance
of ranking higher in the search results. So to do this,
head over to your competitors page and if you have Douglass, go click
this icon to run a search for their top keywords. In Jungle Scout,
you'll see a list of all their keywords at this competitor's ranking for
it's already sorted by search volume. And as we can see here, this is
the strongest keyword phrase right away. The word relaxation stands out to me
the most. Also, I do see the word teen is showing up
quite a few times as well. So what you can do with this information
is go back to the cover that you designed in Canva
and add these words to your title. So this is really important. Your title needs to be printed on
the book itself or the spine of the book. So this is why
if you're using keyword research, which I highly recommend for the title
and subtitle of your book is to go back to Canva
and redesign your title from there. But first, I'd recommend
coming back to this KDP page and drafting it all out here. Maybe we do something like boho
coloring book for adults and relaxation for the title
and then for the subtitle. We can do something like over 50
minimalist stress relief designs and patterns. Now because the subtitle doesn't
need to be on the cover. You don't need to go back to Canva,
an update your new title with this one. So that's the most important step
when it comes to keywords, although you still have a description too,
right? So again, use your competitors keywords
as a guide to writing your description. Below that, you also have a section where you can enter up
to seven different keywords. For this, again,
you can enter in those top keywords, but also I'd recommend mixing in
some keywords that you haven't used yet. These can be either close variations or even keywords
that describe your target audience. Next, underneath keywords. This is where you can select up
to two different categories. The best way of doing this is by going back to Amazon
and pulling up your competitors page. Scroll down to the bottom and check
what categories they're in. You may have to do this
for multiple competitors, but essentially you're just looking for the top
two categories that make the most sense and they help
you find these categories on the KDP page. Simply just click on the link
and then the next page will show you a category tree that lets you know
exactly where to find your category. These are the most important steps
for creating your medium content book and really giving you the best chance
to stand out in the search results. Now, hopefully you're able
to make some money with this strategy and if you're looking for more ways
to create some additional income, check out this next video of the top
nine ways to make money selling on Amazon. Thank you so much for watching this. I'll see you over in the next video.
Remember now? Oh, I can see. Remember, I shouldn't point
just because I guess it would be. No, it's that way
and drafting it all out first. I said first twice. Okay.
