How to make and sell journals on amazon KDP: Beginner’s Guide

In recent years, making money has become easier and more reliable by working online, and it’s reasonable to say that this is just the beginning. So if you’re looking for a creative and unique way to make some extra money, why not learn how to sell journals on Amazon and make money? Selling journals on Amazon KDP seems simple: the platform enables authors to publish a wide range of books, including fiction and non-fiction, as well as works with low or no content, such as notebooks and journals. Making them is simple and enjoyable! In this Beginner’s Guide, I will explain how to create a journal to sell on Amazon KDP, from finding a niche to creating the journal and publishing it. and how to launch a low-content book business even if you have no idea where to start.

It's a beginner’s guide, so I will not go into detail about the things I will mention in this article so as not to confuse you, but I will include links that will help you if you want to know more, and I will assume that you know nothing about Amazon KDP.

What is Amazon KDP?

Amazon KDP, or Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, is a service for self-publishing both digital and physical books on Amazon. It’s a “print on demand” service, meaning books are only printed when ordered by a customer, eliminating the need to hold or store inventory. It’s a simple process of uploading book information, such as the cover image, contents, title, and keywords, to the KDP dashboard, and Amazon handles the rest, including customer service and royalty payments. This is a great alternative to traditional publishing and allows for faster listing of books for sale and the potential for many sales due to Amazon’s vast customer base. and the most important thing is that we can sell journals on Amazon KDP for free and with ease.

What are low- and no-content books?

Creating low- and no-content books is a great way to sell journals on Amazon KDP and make a profit. By using Amazon’s Print on Demand service, you can create and upload your journal once, and then get multiple sales without having to worry about storing and shipping inventory.

Additionally, creating journals with low or no content can save you even more time, as they are super fast and easy to create. You can create journals for all different hobbies and lifestyles, making it a business that you can continue to grow for years. With a little creativity, you can make and sell journals on Amazon KDP to generate passive income and reach a wide audience.

Typically, a low-content book will have just a few page layouts that repeat over and over, such as a weekly or monthly planner that uses the same weekly layout repeatedly with just the date changes. This type of book is considered low-content because it does not require a lot of writing or creating to get the book published.

On the other hand, no-content books are the same thing, but they may only consist of a single page that is repeated over and over with zero writing in it, such as lined or dotted journals and notebooks, which we will cover in this article. With both low-content and no-content books, the main differentiator and creativity come into play with the covers you create.

What Is A Journal (notebook)?

A journal serves as a personal diary of experiences, thoughts, and events. For generations, people have kept journals to record their thoughts and daily activities. Many people still maintain journals today as a way to express themselves and practice self-care. Journals can be used for a number of things, like keeping track of your everyday thoughts and feelings, writing down your dreams, and documenting your traveling experiences. Some people use journals as a creative outlet, while others use them as a way to process their emotions and get through challenges.

Essentially, a journal is a notebook with a goal in mind. Journals are used for personal writing, and notebooks are used for organization. They can be the same size, but journals are typically lined with a strap, whereas notebooks can be spiral-bound. but in Amazon’s KDP, they are the same thing because spiral-bound books are not yet available for POD service.

Related Can amazon kdp do spiral-bound books?

Why selling journals on amazon KDP?

There are many benefits to creating and selling journals on Amazon KDP. First journals are a widely sought-after item and can be sold year-round, making them a consistent source of revenue. They also make great gifts, which can expand your customer base. Additionally, creating journals is a fun and creative outlet that can be both personally and financially rewarding.

Another advantage of making journals to sell on Amazon KDP is the potential for high profits. If you create high-quality journals, you can charge premium prices for them. Even if you only sell a few journals per month, the profit can add up over time. as you can see from the different prices above.

The possibilities for journal creation are endless. You can create journals to sell on Amazon KDP for a variety of niches and interests, making it a business that has room for growth and expansion. One of the most appealing aspects of journal creation and sale is the potential for passive income. Like digital products, printable journals only need to be created once but can be sold repeatedly.

There are many low-content book ideas that can be created and sold on the Amazon KDP platform, Here are a few examples:

30 Low Content Book Ideas (with prompts) to Kickstart Your KDP Business

How much money can you really make from kdp?

Step By Step Guide To Making Journals To Sell Online

Now that you understand the potential of selling low- and no-content books on Amazon, it’s time to dive into the process of creating and profiting from these books. The process of selling journals on Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) can be broken down into three main steps:

Step 1. Finding a Niche for your journal

Before diving into creating and publishing a book, it’s important to make sure that you are selecting a niche that has a chance of selling. We call this step the “niche research phase.” Choosing a niche with high demand and low competition will increase your chances of success. It’s important to note that if you pick a niche that is already saturated with 100,000 books, it will be harder to compete and sell your book. as you can see above in the screenshot. Instead, aim for a niche with 2,000 books or less that has a proven track record of selling.

So you’ll need to identify the most in-demand niches and what gaps in the market exist that you can fill with your journals. This will help you create a journal that appeals to a specific audience and has a better chance of selling well.

in the niche research step, you will hear a lot about a book BSR so I will explain it to you before starting our niche research process.

What is a BSR?

Best Seller Rank, or BSR, is a ranking system used by Amazon to show how well a product is selling in comparison to other products. It’s a score that Amazon gives books that reflects how well the book has sold in comparison to other books on the platform.

as you can see this journal has a BSR of 881 which means it is selling very well, the lower it is the better as it means it is selling better.

Easy steps to Find a Niche

After knowing what a BSR means, here are some easy steps to help you find a good niche for your low-content book on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform:

• Research the market: Take a look at the best-selling low-content books on Amazon and identify the categories and niches that are selling well. You can analyze the market and uncover the most in-demand categories by using Amazon’s best-seller lists or other tools such as book bolt.
• Find market gaps by looking for niches with high demand but less competition. Because there aren’t many books available to meet the need, there is a market for your journal. you can achieve that by picking a broad niche and niching down until you find your purpose. It’s also important to check the BSR of the books, the lower it is the better as it means it is selling better.
• Check the competition: Look at the number of books already published in the niche. Choose a niche with 2,000 books or less that has a good track record of selling, this can be confirmed by checking the BSR of the books in that niche. Having a lower BSR indicates a higher selling rate.

By following these steps, you can find a good niche for your low-content book and increase your chances of selling journals on Amazon KDP. Remember that the niche research step is the most important and difficult step, and it is the one that will make you successful in this business if you master it. So don’t stop learning and don’t give up.

There are too many tools that can help you in the process of this step, such as knowing the BSR of a book without going to its specific page and more. You can check them out here.

Related:
Best kdp Niche Research Extensions for Low Content Books Success
The best 5 BSR Extensions for Amazon KDP

Step 2. Keyword Research for your journal

After you’ve chosen a niche, your next step should be to find as many low-competition keywords as possible! There’s no point in making journals to sell on Amazon KDP, but no one can find any. These keywords are typically long-tail keywords; they’re what buyers type in the search bar to find a specific book, which you can find by following these steps:

1. Identify your target audience: Understand who your target audience is and what their needs and interests are. what are the keywords that they can type to find your book etc, you need to think like you are the buyer. This will help you choose the right keywords to target.
2. Use keyword research tools: There are several free and paid keyword research tools available, such as Huge Amazon Search Suggestion Expander, Productor for Merch by Amazon, and Keywords Everywhere. These tools will help you find relevant keywords and phrases related to your book and its niche.
3. Analyze the competition: Use the keyword research tools to analyze the competition for the keywords you’ve identified. Look at the search volume and competition level for each keyword.
4. Create a list of keywords: Create a list of keywords that are relevant to your book and have a high search volume and low competition. so that you will need it later to publish your book.

Step 3. Create a journal to sell on Amazon KDP

This is the fun and easy part of the whole process. In this step, I will teach you how to create a journal to sell on Amazon KDP for free. The first thing you need to know is the size and dimensions of the interior and exterior of your journal.

KDP interior size dimensions

We don’t need all of these calculations to create our journal; I’m just explaining them to you to let you know.

What is Bleed?

You’ll see that the page size is affected by bleed. If you want any photos, backgrounds, or illustrations in your book to reach the edge of the page, include bleed in your interior file.

KDP cover size dimensions

As you know, the cover size of any book is affected by the number of pages it has, so the more pages your journal has, the bigger the spine will be, which means a different size.

After covering the basics of creatine, let’s create a journal for Amazon KDP.

Creating the interior of your journal

For the purposes of this tutorial, I’ll show you how to make a blank-lined notebook using only free tools.

There are numerous ways to design your interior, including using Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. or If you don’t have these programs, you can do the same thing in Google Docs or Slides. but in this tutorial we will not create it from scratch; we will download our premade interior for free.

go to bookbolt interior and choose the interior type you want;

There are a lot of free interiors that you can choose from; in our case, I chose the journal one.

Next, enter the size of your book, the number of pages, and whether you want to bleed or not.

Finally, click “download” to save it.

Here we go. Our interior is ready, fast, and clean. without any complicated calculations.

So let’s go create our cover.

Creating the cover of your journal

We will do the same thing about our cover, but with some extra steps. First, we need to download the template for our cover, with the right dimensions. In this step, we will use a tool that Amazon KDP provides, the KDP Cover Calculator. Go to the website and follow the following steps:

this is the book information, Enter the same information as I did; I will explain it later. Just enter the same size and page count as your journal. then click “calculate dimensions.”

We will need the full cover dimensions in the design step; note them down, and the template will be our guide. download it.

This is our final template. Amazon explained some information that you might need to understand. Now let’s move on to the designing step.

Designing KDP Cover In Canva

You might already know that Canva has a free version, so let’s learn how to sell journals on Amazon using Canva, which we will use in this tutorial. Create an account from here and let’s get started.

Go to your account, click “Create a Design,” select a custom size, and then enter the dimensions from the previous website (full cover dimensions). as you can see

Click “Create new design.”

This is the page where you will design your journal cover. We just need to add the guideline that we already downloaded. grab the picture and put it on the page;

Resize it to the full size and change the transparency to 20, so that you can work without distraction. So get started and unleash your creativity.

There are plenty of free elements that you can use to create your design; just type in what you want in the search bar and go ahead.

I will not dive into explaining all the processes of designing journals in Canva; I already wrote an article about how to sell journals on Amazon using Canva; check it out at the link below.

How to Create a journal in Canva to Sell on Amazon KDP: Beginner’s Guide

Don’t forget to delete the guideline image after finishing designing; your book will look like this, for example:

Now we need to download our cover in PDF format; click “share,” then download and choose the PDF print option, as you can see below.

Then download.

Congratulations! You should be proud that your book’s interior and exterior are ready to publish and start making some money.

Step 3. Filling your journal metadata and hit publish

The next step is to write a title, subtitle, and book description, as well as complete the 7 KDP backend keywords.

Here is when keyword research comes in handy. You should already be done with your keyword research and have compiled a list of high-demand, low-competition phrases. These keywords are ready to use in your book’s title, subtitle, and backend keyword slots.

First, you need to create your kdp account from here, if you don’t have one already.

go to your Bookshelf, and click create. then “create paperback”.

Next, you will need to choose the language of your book and fill out the title and subtitle slots.

Next is the name of the author, which could be your name or a pen name, and the name of any contributors.

next are the descriptions and the 7 keywords slots;

You will need to describe your book to the buyers, including why they should buy it and the features it has, for example.

Check the “I own the copyright” box, and for the keywords, enter the ones that we already collected from our keyword research.

Choosing the categories is your next step. You will be able to select two, and if you have trouble deciding which categories you need to select, you can use bookbolt categories finder to find the right categories for your book niche.

Check the “low-content book” box and “no” for adult content.

Leave this like that.

Next is the book information that we talked about earlier.

Here should be the same as the book information we entered when we were calculating the dimensions; this is the information that all journals have in common, so it’s up to you if you want to change something.

in this part, we will upload our book, first the manuscript which is the interior we downloaded earlier,

and the book cover, check the second option so that you can upload the cover we designed in Canva.

After you’ve uploaded your book, click “Launch Previewer” to see how it looks and if there are any formatting issues you need to fix.

As you can see, our book is good to go, so click “Approve.”

After you approve it, the print cost will appear. Click “Save and Continue” and let’s go to the last step.

The final step is to set a price for your book; set a price on Amazon.com and it will be applied to all the other marketplaces; you can also enroll in expanded distribution, which will allow your book to be available to other online retailers, libraries, universities, and booksellers, but keep in mind that the royalty will be 40% lower than the usual 60%.

Last but not least, you can request a proof to get a printed preview of your book before it goes live.

And finally, you can hit the publish button, and hooray! Congratulations! You made it here; you published your first journal or your first low-content book. Keep in mind It can take up to 72 hours for your book to be available for purchase on Amazon, so don’t panic if it takes a little longer than normal.

Finally

I hope you get something helpful from this beginner’s guide and you understand every section. It’s time to launch a low-content book business and make some money; it’s that simple and easy as you can see.

the key points of how to make and sell journals on amazon KDP:

• Choose a niche for your journal: Identify a specific hobby or interest that your journal will cater to. This will help you target your audience and create a journal that they will be interested in purchasing.
• Create the content: Depending on the type of journal you are creating, you will need to come up with content for it. For low-content journals, you may only need to create page layouts that repeat. For no-content journals, you only need to create a single page that is repeated.
• Design your journal cover: Use a tool like Canva to design the layout (if you want) and cover of your journal. Make sure it is visually appealing and professional-looking.
• Format your journal: Make sure your journal is properly formatted and ready for upload to KDP.
• Upload your journal to KDP: Use the Kindle Direct Publishing platform to upload your journal. This includes providing all the necessary information such as title, description, keywords, and pricing.
• Promote your journal: Once your journal is live on KDP, you can promote it. You can use social media, email marketing, or any other marketing methods to reach your target audience, but personally, I don’t, I keep amazon doing its magic.
• Keep creating and uploading journals: Keep creating and uploading journals to expand your product line and increase sales.
• Monitor your sales: Keep an eye on your sales and make adjustments as necessary. You can use the KDP dashboard to check your sales, your books, and other metrics.

The process of creating and selling journals on Amazon KDP is quite simple. Firstly, research the right keywords that pertain to the specific journal type you wish to create. Once you have a clear understanding of the niche and target audience, you can proceed to create high-quality journals. This will ensure that you won’t have to put much effort into marketing, and the business will become passive.

It’s important to note that journals are not the only option, you can diversify your book library by creating other types of low-content books, such as planners, recipe books, coloring books, etc.

Consistency is the key to success in Amazon’s low-content publishing. While there will be a lot of failure in the process, and the majority of your published journals may not sell, the more books you publish, the higher your chances of coming up with a successful book. So, it’s crucial to never stop publishing, and eventually, you will see the results.