How To Make A Spiral Bound Book To Sell On Amazon - Low Content Book Publishing Lulu and Amazon FBA

in today's video i'm going to show you how to make a spiral bound book and how you can sell it on amazon welcome to my channel my name is caroline and i make videos to help you master your mindset and to make money online so that you can build a life you love there are so many people out there who i always see asking about how to make spiral bound books and if you are one of them or if you have been looking into or doing low content book publishing on kdp for any period of time you will know that you can't do spiral bound books through kdp at this point kdp only allows us to create paperback and hardcover books and if you saw one of my recent videos where i talk about how i had my kdp account terminated twice then you will know that i have been talking about or thinking about how to create and publish books outside of amazon outside of kdp and also wanting to find more printing options other than just having the really general paperback and hardcover books and if you haven't seen that video i will link to it at the top of the screen so you can go check it out but like i say we cannot print spiral bound books through kdp but there is a way that you can sell them on amazon on the amazon marketplace so how do we do this well first of all we need to find a different print-on-demand publisher and we can do that through a platform called lulu lulu.com is their website address i will link to it in the description below and lulu is essentially the same thing as kdp they are they are a print on demand platform so that means they will only print your book once it has been sold so let me just show you the lulu website and i will go through and show you how you actually make a spiral bound book through this platform okay so once you've created your free lulu account this is where you land when you log in if we just click over here on products we can see all the different product types that we can create with lulu so print books photo books notebooks things like that we want to create a notebook like book so i've chosen notebook and from here it shows you the different sizes and the different types of binding interior pages and things like that so this is really great lulu do have some pre-set interiors which you can download and use within any of your books so you don't even have to create interiors if you really don't want to so i'm going to download this weekly planner interior for this particular book and we just click start and so this is where we start our project so we want to choose a print book and we now set a goal so this is where you can decide whether you want to publish a book through lulu and to their distributors and retailers or whether you just want to print your book for yourself or for your own inventory in bulk or however many copies you want if you want to publish the book you can choose to do it through the lulu bookstore through their distribution system or just one or the other so here we enter in the book details so just what the project title is what language your book is going to be in and you just need to select a category that your book would fit into and there's not a massive amount of categories here to choose from so just do your best and just try and fit where you think it would go so then we can go on to copyright information so this is just basically the title and author and that sort of thing now because this might actually go live on lulu i'm actually going to take off the demo there and just call it a weekly planner you don't have to enter subtitle editions or anything like that so i'm going to leave that blank obviously you can if you want and then we just need to add in contributors all very similar to when you're doing books on kdp so just pop in an author name and i really love this they have a pre-formatted copyright statement that you can include into your books which is great and again like kdp lulu offer a free isbn if you do want to take advantage of that or you can supply your own if you want to have the option to sell your books with other distributors outside of the lulu marketplace and their distributors and then we can move on to designing the book so the really fun part so here this is very simple if you have just used the pre-made interior that lulu offered like the one that i downloaded you just upload it here and you can see there it needs to be pdf and a page count between two and 800 if you are going to be uploading your own pdf so there should be no issues with this particular pdf like i say i'm going to use the one that i downloaded from the lulu website it came with the option of a 100 page document or a 200 page document so that was really great and from here we can choose the specifications of the book in terms of the size and the type of pages and cover that we want to include so we're having standard black and white white paper with a coil bound book binding and for the cover i usually prefer to go matte over glossy there are only certain books i would choose to go glossy so in this one i'm gonna go mat just like i do with all my others and it will give you an idea of what the printing cost is going to be for that type of book with the selections that you made so now we have to do our cover so we need to first of all get a template for our cover there are a few different options here you can download the template make it in whatever graphic design program that you use you can use lulu's quick template cover which would have some pretty limited option i imagine on the type of design that you can do but that option is there for you as well and the last option which i love is they connect with canva so you can download a customized template for canva and all you have to do is create your document in canva add the template and it's the perfect size for the lulu covers and then you just click over on to the right there where it says design on canva and canva will open automatically and you can start making your cover it's really simple and i really love this so we head on over to canva we create a design with a custom size and we need to change it to millimeters and we just go back to lulu take those dimensions that they've provided there the overall dimensions and pop them into the width and height boxes here in canva and we can create our cover document from here we just need to upload that customized template that we just downloaded from lulu which will show us where all their trim sizes and where your print area is and all that stuff so we just pop it on stretch to fit and now we can see exactly where we can put images where we can put text so i'm not really sure exactly what kind of design i want to do i'm thinking something colorful so i'm just looking for some watercolor lines that i could maybe use on the background something fun and bright but i'm not seeing exactly what i've got in my mind here so i'm just going to search for something else instead maybe horizontal lines maybe not looking for watercolor lines i feel like the watercolor lines all looked a little bit childish almost so we'll see what comes up under horizontal lines but there's not much here either not according to the idea i've got in my head i might look for something else maybe just something colorful so let's just look for colorful and see what comes up okay so we've got some colorful butterflies some stars there's a rainbow there i like rainbows maybe i could look for something to do with rainbows we've got pencils now also don't forget to check the licenses on the images that you use with canva to make sure you can use it for what you're wanting to use it for i am just going to do a quick search for a rainbow and see if i can find a nice rainbow design so i'm just looking through the rainbow designs here i think i'm going to go with a rainbow let's see if i can find something that i like i don't want a bright bright rainbow like these really bright i want something a little bit more i don't know a bit more muted a bit more boho style of a rainbow if you do have canva or you're thinking of signing up for canva it is free you can use canva for free but i honestly find that the options under the free accounts in terms of images and things like that they're really limited and i find that they're not as professional looking as the pro ones if you are looking for a program where you can design all sorts of documents with access to images and fonts and all that stuff too i highly recommend upgrading to the pro version you will just have so much more options of images and graphics and things like that that you can use on your covers i'm going to give this one a try but actually that's not really the idea that i have in my head it's not really the kind of colors i was looking for so yeah i'm gonna keep looking i'm not 100 sure on that one so let's just see what other rainbow designs that we've got okay i like this one here that's sort of like these light purples colors that say dream big i like that one yes that's heaps better i'm going to use this particular image and just want to try and center it on the page make it a little bit smaller so just pop that in the middle of the page just double checking there's nothing else here that i might want to use i kind of like how that's got sort of like this little affirmation and what does that one say create don't hate i like that one too but i think i like the dream big one better so i'm going to stick with the dream big one and i think i still want to put something as the background i don't want it just all white with that one little graphic on it so i'm going to look for something maybe with some kind of dots or spots or something of a similar color as a little sort of background it's not going to be obvious i'm going to make it pretty subtle so i'm going to give these purple dots a go so i'm just going to put it there and spread it so the dots are actually bigger than what they were when they first got put on and just place them over the front cover and like i say i don't want them brightening your face so i'm just going to pull the transparency down to make them really sort of faint so they're not hugely noticeable but they fill up some of that white space that's all around that little graphic and then i'm just going to take that same image and copy and paste it over to the back cover too so the back cover is the same as the front cover and then we just want to position it so that it's to the back so that the graphic is the image that's right at the front because we want that to be bright we don't want it to be hidden behind any of the other images i want the dots to be in the background now i do want to put a title on here too because it is a weekly planner and i want that to be obvious so i'm just going to put a title on here of weekly planner and then i'm just going to look for a font that might match with the font that dream big says and canva have a massive range of fonts just like they have a massive range of graphics and images that you can use so i'm just going to scroll through try a few different fonts and see what i like now i like that one that actually looks quite similar to the dream big font not exactly the same but it is similar just have a quick look see if there's anything else no i think i'm going to go with the blueberry font i like that one and i'm just going to make it a smaller so it matches similar size to that graphic and the font or the words dream big and then i just want to drag it under here to be central under the image and then i want to change the color to match the image and so i've just done it this other shade of purple so i think that matches really well with the rest of the graphic just make sure it's centered under there and then i'm just going to group them together because i want to make sure that they are situated in the middle of the page so that there is the same amount of space above and below the graphic so it looks pleasing to the eye and so then i've just gone and deleted the lulu template because we obviously don't need to save the file with that and we then save it as a pdf print a high quality print because that's what we're going to upload and that's going to be the document that the distributor or that lulu prints with so then we just go back into lulu upload a cover file and we just upload that pdf that we just downloaded from canva and that is our two documents uploaded so if we just scroll down a little bit we get a preview which is very similar to the kdp print previewer where you can just flick through and make sure that everything is where it needs to be that everything's within the printing area that nothing's going to get cut off when printing and obviously the interior is fine because lulu made that interior so there's going to be no issues with that and if you're happy with that we move on and this is where we pop in the project details so i'm just going to pop in a description totally off the top of my head so this is going to be not very long and probably not the best obviously if this was a proper book listing that i was doing i'd spend a lot of time on the description and the keywords and things like that but let's just pop in something to explain what the book is get ready to become the most organized version of yourself with this undated weekly planner to help you schedule and plan your to help you schedule and plan work life or both featuring a cute rainbow design with affirmation dream big so then we pop down to your categories and keywords again you would ideally do research on this on what categories you want it to go in but i really love how this is a type and options pop up for you as opposed to kdp where you have to sit and search through all their categories to find one that matches i think this is a lot more user friendly so just pop in some categories that you think it might fit into and then we can add some keywords i haven't researched these so i'm just going to pop in whatever comes to my mind right now and this is where we can just pop in the audience most suited for our books and you need to just obviously mention if it does have any kind of adult content now in terms of pricing we can pop in whether we will have a revenue goal or we want a fixed price so with a revenue goal let's say you want to make five dollars per book and it will automatically populate these boxes to tell you how much you need to price your book to make five dollars per book or if you have a price in mind you just select fixed list price and pop in whatever price it is that you want to sell your book for and then it will give you all the different countries and their marketplaces and what your royalty will be when you sell a book and then the next section is regarding payees and that's just who gets paid when you sell a book so you just need to set up bank account or a paypal account or something like that for them to pay your money into and then here we just need to review everything that we've just uploaded and we just need to tick each little box to confirm that the information is all correct if not go back and revise it but if it's all good you just confirm that the details are what you want to go ahead with and we can submit oops i forgot one and then we just submit now here is where you decide whether you want the book to be public or private it tells you there it'll be available for sale on lulu bookstore or you can just have a url that you send people to or it's private meaning maybe you just want to have it in lulu and you're the only one that can buy it so that you can buy it in bulk or whatever you need to do i'm going to select just general access and it's going to be published on the lulu bookstore and then from there you also can choose to order copies if you want to sell them yourself on your own website or some other platform that's when you would go and order however many copies of the book that you want to order okay so we've made our book now what you do have a few options here firstly you can sell your book on lulu they have a marketplace basically think amazon kdp or the amazon book marketplace lulu have the same thing obviously not to the same scale as the amazon website now in all honesty i do not know much about the lulu marketplace i don't know how much people are making by selling on the lulu marketplace and i don't know anything about how many customers or how many books they sell on average daily weekly or even monthly but it is free to list your book there so if you're just wanting to have your book in as many marketplace as possible it's not going to hurt to put it on the lulu marketplace the next option for you is to create your own website your own online store and sell them through that online store you can integrate lulu with a shopify store so if you set your online store up through shopify you can link the two to make the process automated in terms of when you receive an order on your website the order is automatically sent to lulu so lulu can automatically fulfill that order for you the next option is to sell your book through the distributors that lulu works with so lulu works with other marketplaces other retailers to distribute your book out to more places now the way that this works is when you are distributing your book to these other retailers or marketplaces lulu doesn't print the book so lulu just connects you with these distributors you get your book selling on these marketplaces and when a book does sell the distributor themselves will print your book so if you go this route you are going to be limited to what that distributor can print so although lulu offers all these different printing options you have to be aware that if you decide to sell your book on one of their distributors you may not be able to use the same printing options as what lulu does so for example lulu does distribute books to amazon but as we know amazon only prints paperback and hardcarver books so if you want lulu to distribute your book to amazon we can still only print according to amazon or according to kdb's printing options which are paperback and hardcover so we still can't sell a spiral bound book through the lulu distribution channels on amazon as a side note if you are someone who has had your kdp account terminated but you still want to sell on amazon this would be a way around it print your books through lulu sign up for the distribution channel offering and you could get your books listed on amazon through lulu so there is still a way to sell on amazon even if you don't have a kdp account so the last option i have for you is really going to be the only way that you can sell spiral bound books on lulu here's how it works you create an account with lulu and you create your spiral bound books on lulu then if you haven't already you create a seller central account with amazon so what a seller central account with amazon is it is the place where you can sell physical products through amazon so you could sell anything jewelry clothing electronics appliances if you're someone who wants to sell physical products on amazon you need a seller central account so you've created your books on lulu the you then create listings on amazon through your seller central account for those books and from here you have two options you can decide that you want to fulfill your orders yourself this is called fbm or fulfillment by merchant to do this you would need to have your books printed you would have them sent to you so you might decide to buy them in bulk you might decide to buy one of your books 100 copies you list those 100 copies through your seller central account and when you receive an order you go take one out of your inventory and you package it and you ship it and you send it out to your customer now if you don't want to be dealing with that if you do not want to deal with any kind of packaging or shipping or even kind of customer service things you also have the option of fba so fba means fulfillment by amazon now the way this works is you would have your books printed you would have them sent to amazon and they would store it in one of the amazon warehouses and then when you receive an order for one of your books amazon picks the order packages it ships it and sends it off to the customer and with fba they also take care of any kind of customer service issues or return issues that you would have from any of your customers so keep in mind if you do want to sell things like spiral bound books or any other premium printing options offered by lulu you are going to have to invest up front you're going to have to purchase stock regardless of whether you're going to be sending the product to the customer or amazon is going to be sending the product to the customer you are still going to have to buy that stock up front that inventory is going to have to be printed before you sell it there are also going to be extra costs with doing this too so you're going to have the printing costs through lulu you're going to have the the fees that you get charged through your seller central account for listing on amazon and then if you decide to fulfill by amazon there are also some fulfillment costs to have them do that for you so you just need to make sure that you can still make a decent profit after you've had all them costs taken out for selling spiral bound books on amazon through a central seller account now it sounds complicated it really isn't and i have just sort of really basically gone over the general idea in this video i hope it makes sense if you do have any questions specifically about it let me know in the comments below i do have experience with selling on amazon through fba i did do fba selling several years ago so i do have an idea of how that system works if you do have any further questions about it but there are definitely going to be pros and cons about selling books this way on amazon so first of all the cons would be that you cannot just create unlimited books like you can through kdp you would have to be very selective you would have to be really only creating high quality books that you really think you're going to sell because you have to buy these books up front so it's going to be very different to kdp where you can literally just put up what you want as many as you want there are unlimited almost unlimited amount of books that you can upload with really without any thought to whether they are actually going to sell so that is something that's going to be different if you are going to go this way but of course the pros are going to be there is going to be far less competition with these types of books because they're not easily made and they are not easy to sell on amazon compared to when you do upload books through kdp so you're going to have far less competition things like spiral bound books as well and other premium printing options like linen bound books they have this higher perceived quality to them which in turn means you could probably price them a little bit higher than all those general paperback books that are out there or just those general hardcover books which amazon have started making and so you'll end up having a really unique product and i think that's really important with amazon because as we know there are so many books being uploaded to kdp and a lot of them are just the same people copying each other or just doing the same kind of designs on hundreds and hundreds of books so the key to selling books on amazon is making something really different and really unique and this is a way to do that i hope you have enjoyed this video and i've just shown you another way that you can go about creating books for amazon selling them on amazon or any other platform for that matter i really do think it's all just about having choice the choice to do things the way that you want to do them and different ways to do things and just finding the best pathway for you to get you to reach the goals that you have whatever they may be if you did like this video please give it a thumbs up and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Self Publishing Central

Views: 94,202

Keywords: lulu vs kdp, lulu book publishing, how to make money online, sell books online, side hustle, amazon kdp, book bolt, how to sell books on amazon, work from home jobs, how to start an online business, online business for beginners, easy ways to make money online, low content book publishing, low content books, how to sell books online, make money from home, make money fast, how to make money fast, kdp low content books, low content books amazon, low content books kdp

Id: E8HYg8BIi_I

Length: 24min 34sec (1474 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 20 2021