Side Hustle or Sad Hustle? : Low content books

     

    To start off with no, your not going to make any money with low-content books. Very few ever did and very few ever will but I'm definitely getting ahead of myself let me explain. 

  If you don't already know Low-content books, as the name suggests, are books with minimal text or content. These may include notebooks, planners, journals, or other books with blank or repeating pages. They are often used for writing, drawing, or other creative content. 

And from first glance making them looks really easy! Just design a cute book cover and boom your wallet will be full of sweet low effort cash! However, due to market saturation, the current idea is that it is nearly impossible to make money using low-content books but a lot of people (YouTubers especially) think that this is still a viable method but spoiler alert! No, they don't.

For YEARS now low content books have been promoted to artists, especially as a side hustle since the only real work required is designing a book cover through an easy design program like Canva or Bookblot and selling it through Amazon KDP (a platform that prints and sells books on Amazon). 

I experimented with low-content books for a few months. By the fourth day, I noticed something interesting: when I searched for a specific keyword on Book Bolt and looked at the top-selling notebooks, the top sellers had around 100-200 sales. However, if I scrolled down the list even slightly, I saw that everyone else had only one sale. For example, when I searched for the keyword "cat," 82% of sellers had made only one sale. (It's worth noting that sellers who made no sales at all do not appear in keyword searches at all, like my own experience.)

I didn't let that deter me though I was only two books in and believed that if I just did more research I would eventually make money off of the work I was doing. So I read blogs, watch youtube tutorials, and made 10 more books in less than a month and once again I noticed a pattern as I continued to fail. Nothing was ever good enough. I was always in the wrong niche, never specific enough, and doing too much and too little at the same time. I needed to buy book bolt premium and buy my own books and install god knows how many extensions to do even more research and then... I still didn't sell anything

 I even realized that most of the YouTubers I was watching were making any significant gains from selling low-content books either. Even ones that were finance focused and were very open about their income streams in other videos don't have low-income books even as a footnote. The only reason that in the modern era, low-content books are promoted is that book bolt does a LOT of brand deals with the content creators. I'm definitely not saying that these are bad people for doing their job but I am saying that the only reason anyone will ever tell you to go and buy Book Bolt premium is that they're paid to not because they're really into low-content books. 

That all being said there's still the chance I'm wrong I gave up after making about 20 low-content books only 12 of which I successfully published. Two months in I simply found low-content books a waste of time and didn't pursue it any further. There might be a million-dollar 'cat doctor riding a whale' notebook niche out there that will sell a million copies using only clip art from Canva but I for one am not holding my breath for this sad hustle.

Photo by Yellow Cactus on Unsplash