If you're looking for a guide that will help you in publishing your low content books, this article will be really useful to you. Check out this KDP keyword research guide for low content books to help you on your self-publishing journey.
Today's article has three points and you're going to want to stick around for the third point. Because it is a secret as to where exactly to find the best keywords when it comes to publishing low content books.
So you're an author or somebody interested in publishing books on Amazon. You've been thinking a little bit about what types of books you should publish. Low content books would be books where you're not writing that much.
It might be a journal, a calendar, a sketchbook, or something along those lines. You've heard of people publishing in these niches that have resulted in them making an awful lot of money off of Amazon. At the same time, you're not sure if they're right for you.
You need to know which keywords you should be using in 2021 to make as much money as possible if you're going this particular route. This is exactly what we're going to explore in today's article. No need to be frustrated with this one.
You can grab a copy of my absolutely free Self-Publishing Secrets Checklist. To make sure that you are not skipping any of the critical steps to get your book self-published and selling.
From my side of things, when I first got started with self-publishing, I had heard about this concept of low content books. I wasn't quite sure what to think about them. I mean are they a scam?
You're putting books on the market without actually writing much of anything to make a sale. Maybe this is some sort of a scam that the reader, the buyer, the purchaser of these books is going to lose which would make it not ethical to go about doing this route. That was one of the first thoughts I had.
Check out this related article: Don't Overthink Self-Publishing!
I had heard of people making an awful lot of money. Some of these people making like $50,000 a month. It was an insane amount of money going through these particular books.
Maybe it was a scam, that was what I was originally thinking. But then I heard about the power of journaling daily, that is to say, the power that some of these journals we're delivering to the people. I even started journaling myself.
Now, I prefer to do it on an iPad then it doesn't cost anything. Many people like to do it by hand where you're writing on a piece of paper with a pen or a pencil or maybe even a fancy fountain pen. All of these things can help make it even that much better of an experience.
But there's no scam whatsoever involved in this. The book has nearly no content but can provide an insane amount of value to the person who buys it. Because maybe they want to help figure out what exactly one of them when it comes to journaling.
It can be calendars, keeping track of your calendar. Or maybe it's like a baby journal where you're noting down all of the different phases of development for your dog or yourself personally. Sometimes, when we write stuff down, it helps our brains concentrate a little bit better.
I take notes all the time, so even notebooks would help you organize your thoughts and figure out bullet journals. Or all sorts of stuff that can be helpful in this sense. So, I completely changed my mind about this category.
The key is you need to make it clear to your readers that when you're going through these particular books what they can expect. Yes, many of the pages are going to be identical. I haven't personally published in these areas, I even see on Ingram Spark where they say "we don't want your low content books".
Three Huge Categories
If 90% of the book is identical to the other portion of the book, well then we want to make sure that they would say, "no, we don't want to publish those particular books on our site". It is completely up to them, within their rights. But let's not pretend these books aren't important and don't make a difference.
Because they definitely do and that was my personal experience when it came to low content books. I have not purchased any nor do I write or publish any. But I have no problem with them.
Let's get into the keyword side of this. So KDP keyword research guide for low content books? I'm going to tell you exactly what you need to know.
The first big three categories that come to mind are calendars, journals, and sketchbooks. So what we're dealing with is somebody who's looking, they've got their book, they've got an idea of what they want and then you have these three areas.
But then we'd want to know what types of journals? Is it a baby journal? Is it a horse journal? A puppy journal? Maybe you've got fish you want to journal.
People really enjoy journaling on all sorts of stuff. The same goes for your calendars, a calendar where you can put a picture in each of the months. Maybe it already has pictures in there.
So you're finding low cheap content or low-cost content to put into those calendars that you can use and sell these calendars. That's another option, maybe a drawing or coloring book calendar. These are all options that are available to you if you're going to the low content route.
Check out this related article: How To Self-Publish Your First Book: Step-by-Step Tutorial
The final thing is a sketchbook, as I mentioned on the calendar, you can have sketching but also just a sketchbook. It would help a person train or learn to draw better. Or maybe to get their thoughts and ideas out which can be very helpful so again it doesn't require much content.
Just an idea of what they're going to draw and a bunch of blank pages to go about doing that. Now, when it comes to the keywords which is the whole point of this article, we're going to use KDSpy. This is the tool that I use when it comes to finding keywords.
I also use Publisher Rocket but KDSpy is the one, it's been my go-to tool now. I know some people like the Publisher Rocket, you can decide for yourself. I still like the KDSpy tool myself when it comes to doing it, to figuring out the sub-niches.
Because we are going to see as we go down into it, just looking at calendar or journal or sketchbook, it's too broad. There are just too many books, but we'll get into that because my secret answer of the day is going to help reveal this. That is the secret answer to how exactly to go about finding it.
I'm going to explain exactly how to use this tool. I haven't done so much of this in my articles previously but I think it will be helpful for you to better understand. The first thing to know when we're using KDSpy is that we just install the add-on that goes into your thing.
Into your browser whether it's Chrome or Firefox. They may have one for some of the other ones as well. But at any rate, you install it in there, you just hit the button at the top and it immediately opens up a menu.
Then we can go to Amazon where we can then search the Amazon store. What we're doing is we're looking at the Kindle store and we just type in the item that we're looking for. In this case, the item that we're looking for is a journal, so we're looking at the journal that they have, we're looking at how many hits they get.
Look For Top Keywords
We'll see how many items show up. So for example, it's 50,000 and then we're going to see how many of those have a basic sales rank. We make sure we look at the top 100 results for that keyword.
Then, if there are 10 that show up with that keyword for the journal, but this is where the magic and you'll see it also points out inside of the keyword. Under the eye that 50,000 of the books have a high average number of reviews.
This matters because we're dealing with social proof. But in reality, when running ads we don't need any reviews to get sales. Then I can start bringing in the reviews that we need.
So one of the key things to remember is that with KDSpy, we immediately can sort by the basic sales rank and see the number of books that are in the top hundred thousand. Why do that matter? Because those books are selling a copy a day.
It gives us a really good idea of how popular they are. And then comes in the top 50,000 books that are available in that keyword. We have 10 of them in the top 100,000 basic sales rank which means there's an awful lot of books.
That means the magic ratio that's 50,000 divided by 10, it gives us 5,000. It is our magic ratio for this particular book. Now, I like ratios that are less than 30. I would be looking for a magic ratio of 30 when we're going about doing this.
Check out this related article: Why KDP Keywords Are So Important!
This is for the results for those top 100 books for this given keyword. But what do we do if we end up with a book like this? Does this mean that journal is not a popular keyword?
A keyword that's going to work for you? Well, the answer is yes, it's not going to work for you. It's going to be too difficult to compete for this keyword.
However, this is the key here, you need to change the keyword to make it more specific. So we might say puppy journals. See what shows up for that one you see.
By getting more specific on our keyword, it's going to pull down the total number of results for that specific keyword or keywords. Then we're going to see the number of results in the basic sales rank. And when we find something that is in let's say under 50, I wouldn't go over 50.
Under 50 for the magic ratio maybe even under 30. Some of the books I published were the ratio between 10 and 20 were making a killing on Amazon. But within that ratio, it's going to give us that supply of keywords we need.
Another key trick on Amazon is to type in the word journal and then see what other words come up afterward. You can do the same thing on Google and the Publisher Rocket, tools to show you similar words. And pulls up a whole pile of keywords that we can experiment and test.
To figure out which ones are going to be best when it comes to these low content books. This strategy also works with any of your book niches but at least with the low-content books, it's going to give us that ability to find out these areas.
Where we have a lot of hungry readers who are buying a lot of books. But there are just so few books available in that niche. This is the secret answer for today. My question for you though is, have you considered publishing low content books?
If you have, write "Yes" below in the comments. If you've never considered it before, write "No" below in the comments. How do you find this Amazon KDP keyword research guide for low content books?
So that I will know exactly where you're coming from. Because it will help me make better articles for you in the future. Check out my other articles and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.