Make $1000s/Month on Amazon (easy side hustle for beginners!)

hey there everyone welcome back to my channel and if you're new here welcome my name is Gillian Perkins and I'm an online business strategist who specializes in passive income generation and that's exactly what we're going to talk about today I recently learned about a new strategy for creating passive income that has got to be one of the easiest strategies I've ever heard and the one that probably requires the least amount of time up front invested to create that passive income now I'm going to say just out of the gate the more time you put into the initial setup the more you can earn with this but you can set it up in as little as a few minutes and start making some money even from that so what I'm talking about today is about publishing low content books okay now I know that that might sound not that easy it might be like how in the world would I publish a book I'm not an author I don't think I could even write a book there are lots of things that could come up but like I said it's super easy so first of all let's talk about what a low content book is a low content book is a book like a journal or a note book or a calendar or a planner it's a book that isn't full of words but instead just has some sort of layout or formatting to it for people to use as some sort of workbook or notebook to write their own thoughts in so I'm sure that you can immediately see why a low content book would be a lot easier to create than your regular sort of Novel or non-fiction book and then as far as the aspect of publishing a low content book goes these days it's actually super easy to self-publish a book on Amazon and you can get your book to ring and you can start making sales on Amazon and even from other Distributors as well so in this video I'm going to be showing you how to really easily create your own low content book even if you're not a designer even if you've never created a book even if you don't have many Tech skills it's super easy and then also how to self-publish that book on Amazon in a matter of just a few minutes so let's get right on into it so first of all let me introduce to you the tool we are going to use to accomplish this it's this website called book bolt and it is a service kind of a software that you can sign up for to really easily design these low content books but also to do the research to figure out what low content book you should create that will be the most successful now not only is book bold really helpful and just saves you a ton of time and makes it so much easier it's also really affordable as you can see here on their pricing page it's just 9.99 a month and I think it's so helpful that I've actually reached out to them and asked them for a coupon code that you guys can use if you want to do this for yourself so if you check in the description you'll find a coupon code for 20 off your book bold plan making it just 7.99 I believe for your first month and of course you can also just get started with a free trial and make your first several books even just on that trial so let me show you exactly how this works first of all when you log into book you'll see that they have a lot of tutorials that guide you through all the parts of the process of researching and creating your book so if there's anything at the end of this video that you still have questions about this is a great resource next we've got some different tools for doing some research so we're going to get started In This Cloud module right here and this is a great place to just get your research started and to kind of figure out some opportunities so we're going to look at the top 100 bestsellers in the notebook category and we're going to look at books that are anywhere in the top 500 000 best seller ranking on Amazon so that's out of all the books on Amazon like what are the best selling books and then we're just going to leave this price range completely empty and even the keywords completely empty for right now just to kind of get an idea of what's going on here so what this Cloud tool does is it gives us data on these top selling low content books so as you can see right now the top selling low content books are all graph paper composition books which is interesting um I think that has to do with the fact that right now school has recently started so people need low content books like this and with each of these books you can see the title of the book who the author is who published it and whenever you see independently published that means that someone probably published it using the exact same system that we're using right now you can check out their reviews and of course you can also click on this to be taken to the book on Amazon if you want to see even more details about it but where it gets really interesting is when you take a look at the price that the book is being sold for and also how many sales they are making each month so some simple math multiplying this 3.99 times this 669 sales per month can tell you roughly how much this book is earning every month so for example 399 that's almost four dollars so we could multiply 669 almost 700 times four so 3.99 that's almost four dollars 669 approaching 700 so if my quick mental math is correct I'd say that means that they are making a bit less than 2 800 per month so maybe about twenty five hundred dollars a month from this one low content book and here's the thing most people who publish low content books don't just publish one they publish dozens if not hundreds because it's so easy to create and publish these that it's like why not also I want to be really straight with you here because I've seen some other people make videos about these low content books and kind of exaggerate how good this opportunity is when we're talking about that like 2500 per month that is definitely gross revenue that is not the profit that the person who created this book takes home we're gonna look a little bit later on at the price and how much of that is your profit how much of that you would take home but that is definitely a reason why people tend to publish dozens or hundreds of low content books because you don't earn that much from every single one but it can really add up really quickly so if we keep scrolling down this page you can get ideas for other low content books that are performing well on Amazon and you can take a look at the numbers and see how well they are ranking that's this right here the BSR the best seller ranking so for example this book is the 300 or sorry 3243rd best selling book on Amazon currently just as an example um and then you can also see how it has ranked on average for the last 30 days which is important to note because we don't want to just be looking at a book that happens to be selling a lot right now we want to actually see a book that is performing well over time so this can just get you started with ideas and then once you have some ideas you can come up here and you can search for a specific keyword whatever you want whatever you're thinking to maybe create and you can see what books are ranking well for that specific keyword to kind of refine your idea even more and find an idea that's performing really well that you can improve on once you have your idea pinned down then what you're going to do is Click over here on where it says research to switch over to the create module and then you're going to click right here on bookable designer to open up their design Wizard and start creating your book so when the designer opens up you are going to see something a little bit like this and it will be prompting you to create a new project and you're going to choose whether you want to create a cover or an interior and whether it's for paperback or hardback and what I'm going to do right now is paperback cover and into interior because I want to create the outside and the inside of the book and then I'm going to name this recipe Journal because that's what I've decided to create and this is really an important little tip here it can seem easier or seem like it'll work better maybe to look at the very best ranking books on Amazon and try to create something similar but really when you look at those best ranking books they are also going to be the very most competitive and most General sorts of categories and you're going to be able to see a lot more success make a lot more money and do so a lot more quickly If instead you go a lot more Niche and you create something that's much more specialized you will be able to rank more successfully for those terms which means you'll actually make sales and actually make money so that's why I'm going with a recipe Journal here then I'm going to stick with this 6x9 trim size right here because that's a really common and popular size for low content books on Amazon and then we're going to go with black and white interior with white pages you could also choose to have color inside your book if you have colored illustrations or you can use cream paper instead but for my book I'm just going to use the white paper and then I'm going to choose the bleed option and I'm going to change the page count to 60 because I want to have 60 Pages inside the recipe Journal I'm creating so once you have all those things configured properly you go ahead and click create project and it will create this new blank book essentially for you and there's some information here on the cover this is the cover you're going to design to help you understand exactly how the dimension should work out but honestly you don't really need this information this is just if you're trying to be more technical about it really if you just look at this right here you can see this is the back cover and this is the front cover and this is going to be the spine of your book and then this pink edge around this is the bleed and so basically Amazon is planning to cut your book right here on this blue or maybe very dark Navy line but the cutting is never exact and so it could cut as far out as the edge of the pink on the outside or as far in as this inner edge of the pink and so you need to make make sure that you don't put any important details or design aspects like text anywhere inside of that pink bleed Edge because it might get cut off and you also want to make sure that your design does extend all the way to the edge that outer edge of the pink because otherwise if it gets cut a little bit bigger then there could be like a white border on the edges if your design doesn't extend all the way so that's the basics of this how you design this cover is really really simple you just want to decide what elements you're going to add onto it and add them on I think one of the very easiest ways to do this is to upload a photo and you can find free stock photos that you can use so what I did here was I just went to pexels.com and this is a free stock photo website and then I just searched for food and honestly this very first photo that pop top I was like that one is perfect so I downloaded this for free and then I've gone ahead and uploaded it here to book bolt and so then I just click on it and it will add it to my design and clearly this is not what I want my book to look like right now so then I just grab the edge and drag it out to make it be exactly the right size for my book and to make it lay on the cover the way that I wanted to so I'm going to align it up here with the corner that upper right corner and then drag it down okay so now it's a good size it completely covers the front and back but I think it will look a little bit better if I move it all the way over so that the fork ends up mostly on the cover so as you can see this is already coming together really well this book would look pretty nice but we do want to add some text to the front because that is something that Amazon KDP I don't know if I even said that before KDP Kindle Direct publishing that's the Amazon service we're going to use to actually publish this book and even though it's called Kindle Direct publishing we can publish paperback or hardback books with that service anyway KDP has some rules about how to publish low content books or how to publish books at all what's allowed how things need to be formatted that's why it is so helpful to use a tool like book bolt because the formatting needs to be really precise and your book will be rejected if the formatting isn't quite right anyway all that to say one of kdp's rules is that you need to have text on the cover of your book typically sometimes people get away with no text but they often reject books if they don't have text on the cover so what we're going to do is we're going to add the words recipe journal to this front cover so I'm going to first start by adding a rectangle because if I just add text on top of that photo it's not going to show up or stand out very well it'll be kind of hard to see and read and right now it is black but I'm going to change its color just by clicking this color swatch up here change it to White and reduce the opacity so that it is somewhat transparent just like that and actually I want this to extend all the way to this Edge even though it probably will not be seen over here if it is if the book is cut at this larger size I want it to extend all the way to this Edge just for the design that I have in mind okay so then we're going to add some text onto here so we just need to click on this text module and I'm just going to click on heading and then I'm going to drag this onto my white rectangle and I'm going to resize these things in a moment but for now recipe journal and I'm going to start by choosing a font okay so I think I like this Alegria font so I'm going to go with that and so now I need to make sure that it's the right size and that it's centered right now it's a pretty good size but I think I'd prefer to be just a little bit smaller so I'm just going to resize it like this and then I'm going to center it horizontally on the front cover and then I'm going to resize my rectangle so that it is an appropriate size as a background for that text and I'm just eyeballing this right now I would highly recommend that if you are doing this and you're actually going to publish the book that you're a little bit more precise you spend just a little bit more time um but you also don't have to spend that much time it comes together pretty quickly and easily okay so I'd say that right now I've got this cover the way I want um so we're going to move on now to the interior so that was the cover right here now we're moving on to the interior I'm just going to click on that first interior page and then and this is another place where book bolt just comes in so handy what we're going to do is over here we are going to click on page templates and so here we've got interior page templates and we're going to decide which one we want to use and these are all just pre-created for you they're templates you can use and you can also design things on your own or edit these designs but these are just such an easy place to get started so I'm going to go with this journal layout and I'm going to go with the wide Journal because I feel like when people write recipes they want more space and then I'm going to select all pages to apply to all the pages except not the cover right so I'm going to unselect the cover and then we're going to go ahead and click next and we can decide to change the margins if we want I'm just going to leave it exactly as is though um leave all of it as is including even the line color but that's something you could totally change and then I just click submit and this is going to go ahead and apply this design right here to all of the pages of the Interior so right now I'm on page one but if I click on page two you'll see this page looks exactly the same and that was so easy okay we didn't have to format all of that so nice such a Time Saver so now we've got the book all designed that easy I mean that only took me a few minutes and that was with me talking through the entire process and so now all you need to do is click on Project to download this project so I'm going to click right here download this project and this is going to download the PDF of these two files the cover and the interior so that I can upload these to KDP and publish them so we are all ready now to go ahead and publish this book and as I said we're going to do this with Amazon KDP Kindle Direct publishing now the first thing you'll need to do if you haven't already is create KDP account it's super easy so I'm just going to skip on ahead to actually uploading the book but you come to KDP and then you need to click to sign in this will take you to your bookshelf and this is all the books that you have published in the past and what you need to do is just click to create a new book and then you're going to choose what kind of book you want to create we're creating a paperback book and then they've got this wizard that walks you through the process and makes it so easy now I've actually gone ahead and already uploaded the book because sometimes that upload process takes a few minutes so I just wanted to save the time and kind of cut to the chase here so I'm going to click continue setup on this book that I uploaded earlier and so the first thing you're going to choose is the language your book is in English then you'll type in your book title now important note here you don't just want your book title this is also a great place to include keywords because most likely people aren't going to be searching for your low content book by its title unlike how they might be looking for a book that has content in it then you're actually typing in the book's title for a fiction or non-fiction book but for a low content book people are looking for a journal or a recipe Journal well how can you get your book to rank better on Amazon one important way is with keywords and you can actually add these keywords into your book title so for example I've put here recipe Journal write your own recipes and the way I found those keywords is actually over in book bolt when you're in this research tab you can click on keywords and then you can click on search and basically what you do is you type in a keyword related to the book you're creating and then it's going to give you keywords that people are using to find similar products on Amazon so as you can see here they we've got a bunch of different recipe related keywords and some of them are very related so for example maybe Armenian or African recipes or all recipes those are related a recipe for seduction not so related right so this list is just ranked alphabetic but you can go ahead and sort it by Amazon search volume that's what what I'd recommend that you do so we want to see the most popular term first and then looking at these most popular terms we want to choose the ones that are most closely related to the product we're creating so for example no recipe recipes maybe we could add that into our books title or DIY recipes that could be a really good one to add in fact I think I'll go ahead and add that right now so I did some keyword research earlier and came up with write your own recipes as a popular keyword which is why I added it but I'm going to now add DIY recipe notebook because I know that that's another term that people might use for this you can also add a subtitle but that is optional but it can help your book to rank better so I would recommend doing it right now I'm just going to move on with the tutorial though um this book is not part of a series so we're going to leave that part blank it is just the first edition so we don't need to add an addition number for the author I've added in my name here that I did not spell correctly and there's my name Gillian Perkins and then we don't have any other contributors so we're going to leave this part blank but if someone was collaborating with you on this book then you could add their name there then description okay so I've just typed in recipe Journal here just as a filler but if you are actually doing this for yourself you will want to invest several minutes into writing a good description because that's something that can really help your low content book to stand out on Amazon from all the other low content books and all the other similar books that are on there because a lot of things on Amazon don't have very good descriptions sometimes they're written by someone who has an not a native English speaker for example so this is a place that you can really stand out then under publishing rights you'll want to choose I own the copyright and hold necessary publishing rights because this is something that you designed and because it doesn't include content that someone else wrote you own the copyright even if you don't file for a copyright just by the fact of you creating it that means that you originated it and it is yours and you can sell it now we come to the keyword section and this is where you'll want to go back to bookbold do some keyword research and add all those keywords in I know it says optional right here but it's not really optional if you want your book to rank well then we come down here to categories and you can choose what category and book Builders actually has a really useful tool here called their category finder and the reason why this is helpful is because on Amazon this looks like not that many categories but the thing is that within each of these categories there are dozens of subcategories and within each of those there are even more sub subcategories and sometimes even more within those and it can be really hard to drill down and find the right one for your book and that can take a lot of time but if you use the book bolt category finder then you can type in what your book is and it will tell you the best category for it it'll give you a few different options so you can use your own brain and figure out which one would be best and then this tells you how to find it so for example if we want to put in this Diaries and journals category then we need to click on literary collections and then Diaries and journals so for example oops over here we would start if this is hard to see now because I expanded this but we would start with literary Collections and then inside of that category we can find Diaries and journals and select that box and you can choose up to two categories as it says right here so I would probably also add my book to the cooking category and find the category that aligns best with this so I'd go ahead and just choose this General cooking category at least for right now so then we save that and then Amazon realized that a lot of people are starting to create these low content books and so they've actually been really catering to this so we want to select this low content book to help Amazon better understand exactly what we are selling because that'll help it to rank even better and then the last question is adult content is this book safe for kids basically and the answer is it does not contain any adult content so we check no meaning it is safe for kids so let me just click save and continue and that'll take us on to the next part of this process which is the paperback content so this is where you're actually going to go ahead and upload your design so first of all you can choose publish without an ISBN because because you have a low content book you don't need an ISBN at all then you can choose a publication date if you want but you don't have to because it'll just automatically choose one for you choose what color paper you have inside your book and whether there needs to be colored pictures inside choose that trim size choose if it is no bleed or bleed and you just want these settings to match what you chose on book bolt when you were designing your book and then you can decide if you want the cover of your book to be matte meaning not shiny or if you want it to be glossy and then you come to the manuscript section and this is where you actually upload your book's manuscript so you just click this yellow button and then you choose the file from your computer that you downloaded from book bolt and this needs to be the interior file so this one right here and I've already gone ahead and done that part and then you come to the book cover and you want to choose upload a cover you already have and it needs to be a print ready PDF click upload your cover file and again you can choose that cover file that you downloaded from book Bolt okay and I already did that you can see it loaded right here there's the design I created now the next thing is really important you need to click launch previewer and you need to open up your book design and make sure that it all looks correct because you don't want to publish your book and then find out there's problems with it because then you might have to pull it and you could lose your ranking and all sorts of things that you don't want to have happen and as you can see Amazon adds a barcode for you making it even easier and you just click these buttons to click through and look at the design and make sure it looks right on this design it's unlikely that there will be any sort of issue but I would still recommend just clicking through every single page making sure there is no issue so if that all looks good then you click approve I already did that so I'm just gonna exit the print previewer and once it is approved once you've approved it then Amazon will tell you exactly how much it's going to cost to print this book two dollars and fifteen cents okay does that mean you need to pay 2.15 no not really at least not up front that is the cost that's going to be deducted from the total that a customer pays when a customer buys your book on Amazon so for example if you sell your book for five dollars on Amazon then someone would buy it for five dollars this is how much Amazon is going to take just to cover the cost of printing the book and then Amazon is actually going to print the book for you and ship it directly to the customer so you don't have to buy copies of your book you don't have to pay to have them printed you don't have to store them you don't have to ship them to the customer Amazon does all of that and that's why I say this is like the easiest side Hustle the easiest passive income opportunity ever and anyone can get started with it one more thing about this printing cost right here you can order copies of your book from Amazon for that price so if you want to buy a bunch of copies of your book and sell them locally you could totally do that or maybe you just want to buy one copy of your book because maybe you just wanted to create this book for yourself you can totally do that too anyway so you want to make a note of this because that's going to be relevant for the next step which is choosing the pricing for your book how much are you going to sell your book for on Amazon so that brings us to the last part of this process you can choose whether you want to sell it around the whole world or if for some reason you want to only sell it in certain territories for this you can sell it in the whole world the reason you might want to sell in individual territories is if you only have copyright on your content in certain territories but you own the copyright so you can sell it around the whole world we're going to leave Amazon as that primary Marketplace and then we get to choose a price now you'll notice that right down here below the price they tell you the minimum price you can sell it for and the reason why it has to be more than that is because that covers Amazon's printing Cost Plus their base profit like the smallest amount of profit that Amazon is okay with so if you choose that price then you will make zero dollars from your book so if we choose three dollars and 58 cents then you can see that over here it tells you your royalty would be zero dollars on the other hand if you sell your book for ten dollars then they tell you your real royalty would be three dollars and 85 cents because you you get 60 percent of the profit that is earned after those printing costs are deducted so it's ten dollars minus the 215 printing cost and then the remaining part 7.85 60 of that is 3.85 so that's how much you would earn now if you want expanded distribution which means that your book could be sold in bookstores or on other websites basically other book distributors could buy your book in bulk and sell it then in that case you will earn 40 now honestly it doesn't really matter with a low content book because most of the time other Distributors are not going to be interested in buying your book um so it doesn't really matter if you check this box or not but you totally can if you want to now when you type in a price here Amazon immediately calculates for you what the price should be in all these different countries and territories so that makes it very easy you don't have to decide on all those prices now there are two important things I think you should know about choosing the price one is that here when you're in your bookbold account you will want to you when you're doing your research for your specific category you'll want to click on this Arrow next to result data and something specific that you want to pay attention to is the average price that books are being sold for in this category and that tells you the price that you most likely can successfully sell a book for in that specific category um so this you'll probably end up selling your book for somewhere like 599 6.99 something like that now you could sell it for more as your book is more and more successful you get more reviews and those reviews are positive then people will be willing to pay more money for your book but when you're first starting out the hardest hardest part is just getting those first few sales getting those first few reviews and so I would highly recommend that you actually choose a very low price something like 3.58 or just 3.99 just as a starting price now you're not going to stay there but by starting at that price you'll be able to get those first few sales so much more easily and that will get your book to start ranking and then you can raise the price over time and that's a better long-term strategy that is a starting strategy that will make you more money over time so once you've chosen your price then you come down here and you just need to click to publish your paperback book yes it is that easy we are already done we've done the entire process me talking you through the entire process in not very many minutes at all you click that button and your book does not immediately get published it can take up to 72 hours before it is live on Amazon when your book does go live you will definitely want to try to drive as many sales as you can if you have any family and friends who you could reach out to and ask could you please buy a copy of my book that will really really help and of course you can buy copies of it yourself it is against Amazon's terms of service to pay anyone for a review so definitely don't do that but if you can ask someone to please leave a review for your product then that can really help it to rank better now in this video I talked to you through kind of the first three parts of what I see as a four-part process we've got first of all the researching to figure out what book you are going to create then second of all actually creating that book third you have to publish book on Amazon and then the fourth part that we didn't talk about very much was how to rank that book on Amazon improve your ranking over time and make sales so if this topic was interesting to you and you want to learn more about how to do that part how to rank your book on Amazon how to actually Market your book successfully then please let me know in the comments and also give this video a like so that I know that you're interested in this topic and you want to see more videos on it also let me know in the comments if you are interested in publishing a low content book yourself if you're going to give it a try I would love to know so leave me a comment thanks so much for joining me for this week's video and for making it all the way to the end it seems like you liked this so if you haven't already clicked that like button do so now or give it a dislike if you didn't enjoy this for some reason give me a comment let me know why I always love getting feedback from you guys thank you again so much I hope you're having an amazing week I love you and I'll see you again next time

Channel: Gillian Perkins

Views: 691,701

Keywords: gillian perkins, gillianperkins.com, side hustle, side hustles, easy side hustles, passive income, sell books on amazon, how to sell books on amazon, amazon side hustle, how to create passive income, easy passive income, how to start a side hustle

Id: qLt-YbcgTGg

Length: 28min 56sec (1736 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 01 2022