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The Side Hustle Show

339: Low Content Publishing: Can You Make Money Selling Blank Books on Amazon?

The Side Hustle Show

Nick Loper

How To, Entrepreneurship, Business, Education

4.71.6K Ratings

🗓️ 13 June 2019

⏱️ 45 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week I’m excited to introduce one of the hottest side hustles of the moment, and that is low-content self-publishing. What is low-content publishing? Let me explain -- self-publishing has been around for a decade, and we’ve covered that quite a bit in both fiction and non-fiction -- it’s one of my favorite and perhaps most passive side hustles. Write the book, hit publish, collect royalties for years. Cool, right? Well, it’s the whole write the book part where a lot of people get stuck. You might not know what to write about, and even if you do, it can be really time-consuming, and at the end of the day, it still might turn out to not be a huge seller on Amazon. What low-content publishing aims to accomplish is to accelerate your product creation by focusing on a very specific sub-set of books: journals diaries planners notebooks sketchbooks and more With these types of books, the value doesn’t come from your years of experience and a 35,000-word brain dump. Instead it comes from how you’ve structured the mostly-blank internal pages and prompts, and who you’re targeting as your customer. With Amazon’s print-on-demand KDP print service, you can upload these products as digital files, hold no physical inventory, and collect passive royalties whenever they sell. But there’s an art and a science to it, and that’s why I’ve assembled a panel of experts in today’s show. I’m joined by three experts in the low-content publishing space with more than 1,000 titles between them: Rob Cubbon from RobCubbon.com - Long-time listeners might remember Rob from episode 81, back in 2014. Rob’s been in the low-content game for the last year or so and in that time has published over 1,000 titles. Flav Maderios from SideBusinessLaunch.com - Flav was a guest on episode 300 of The Side Hustle Show last summer, where we were talking about his merch business. Since then he’s expanded to the self-publishing space with around 300 titles so far. Rachel Harrison-Sund from RachelHarrisonSund.com - Rachel built her low content business to 6-figures a year on a very part-time basis. But as you’ll hear in this episode, there’s some seasonality that comes into play, there are some competitive factors that come into play, and there’s a little bit of a gold rush feel to all of this. Tune in to hear how these low content publishers go about their product research (so they don’t waste their time), how they price and market their books to maximize sales and royalties, and how they manage such wide-ranging portfolios. Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: Low Content Publishing: Can You Make Money Selling Blank Books on Amazon?

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Sideos will show 339. This is low content publishing, the latest way to make money on Amazon that doesn't require any inventory investment and potentially very little writing.

0:13.2

Stick around to hear how it works.

0:15.1

What's up, what's up, Nick?

0:19.6

Loper here, welcome to this I had hustle show because sometimes it's not about finding

0:23.7

customers for your products sometimes it's about making products for your

0:27.6

customers hat tip to Seth Godin for that one and it's an appropriate lead-in to today's episode because we're

0:34.2

exploring a new way to let customer demand drive your direction.

0:38.2

Specifically I'm excited to introduce one of the hottest side hustles of the moment and that is low content self-publishing.

0:46.0

Let me explain what I mean by that.

0:48.0

So self-publishing has been around for a decade and we've covered that quite a bit on the show both in fiction and

0:54.4

non-fiction it's one of my favorite and perhaps most passive side hustles

0:58.8

write the book hit publish collect royalties for years.

1:02.8

Cool, right?

1:03.8

Well, it's the whole write the book part where a lot of people get stuck.

1:07.8

You might not know what to write about,

1:09.8

and even if you do, it can be a really time-consuming process and still at the end of the day it might not turn out to be a huge seller on Amazon.

1:18.0

What low content publishing aims to accomplish is to accelerate your product creation by focusing on a very specific

1:25.3

subset of books. Journals, diaries, planners, notebooks, sketchbooks, stuff like that where the value doesn't come from your years of experience and a 35,000

1:36.6

word brain dump, but rather from how you've structured the mostly blank internal pages and

1:42.3

prompts and then who you're targeting as your customer.

1:45.0

With Amazon's Print On Demand KDP Print Service,

1:49.0

you can upload these products as digital files.

...

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