Passive Income: I Sold Blank Books On Amazon, here's how...

People are making thousands of dollars each month in passive income by selling blank books on Amazon. I received $4,333 in royalties! I am generating a decent income every single month that is doing $78,000 a month on Amazon KDP.

But is this too good to be true? Today, I want to put this to the test by making and selling my own low-content book, and I'm setting myself three rules: 1. I'm not allowed to write a single sentence in the book.

2. I have to do it all from my laptop. 3.

I need to finish it in less than an hour. The first thing on my plan is to find easy-to-use software, so I'm just going to log into Book Bolt, as it appears to be the most straightforward for someone like me with no computer design skills. Right, so now we need to decide what kind of book we want to sell.

There are lots of different low-content books, such as notebooks, journals, and diaries. But instead of just guessing, I'm going to use Book Bolt's research tab to find out what's actually popular. After searching products and keywords, it seems like planners sell very well.

Obviously, I've set myself a bit of a challenge to do this as quickly as possible; however, you can spend as much time as you like to research and find gaps in the market to dominate. This should do well all year round, as it isn't seasonal, like a 2023 New Year's planner, for example, and won't become outdated. There's a lot of other evergreen book options too, such as manifestation, prayer, and dream journals.

It's probably a smart idea to make sure that the book you sell has a high search volume, low competition, and high monthly sales. Saying this, there are a lot of competing products when it comes to selling planners, but I know from my many years in business that high competition in a market doesn't necessarily mean that you can't make sales. It might cost us a few sales initially because we don't have the trust and sales history that others do, but once we get the ball rolling, then we're in business because obviously, there's a massive market.

Next, let's make the cover. I'm going to name my project "Daily Planner" to keep it simple. I'm going to use standard 6x9 paperback size and keep the bleed option on for the best result.

Since it's a yearly planner, I'll make it 365 pages long. If you're making a different kind of book, it may be best to keep it shorter—around 100 pages—to reduce printing costs and improve your profits. As you can see, we've got two sides: the right-hand side is the front cover, and the left-hand side is the back.

Now we've got to add some personality to this front cover. If you're doing this as well, make sure to avoid copyrighted photos, as you aren't allowed to legally use these. By clicking on this picture icon, it actually brings up Pixabay, which has thousands of copyright-free images that we can use on our cover.

I'll be honest; instead of using a fancy photo, I feel like going for a black minimalistic look with my journal, so I'm going to drag this dark background to fit the cover. I'm even going to expand it over the edges a bit to make sure it prints correctly, because the last thing we want is a load of refunds. To further promote sales, it's a good idea to create a brand for these books.

This way, if one book sells well, customers may recognize the brand and purchase the others. I will use the brand I've already created for my podcast, "Strike It Big," so I'll write my header in, and I think it could use a bit of imagery to bring it to life. Let's see what we can find on Pixabay.

Oh, this is quite nice! Let's drag this in and see how it looks. Obviously, there's not much personality on this cover, but I'm on a time limit, so you get the idea.

I'm sure you could probably make it look nicer, but as I said, computer design isn't my strong suit. At least you know if this sells, then yours will probably do better. Now we're on to the inside.

If I click on this icon and select "# Planner," it gives me a lot of different template options for the inside of the book. This means I don't have to write a single sentence. You can create as many pages as you wish—have every page the same, every page unique, whatever you want.

But as my book is a planner, I need something designed in a way for people to lay out their schedule and goals. There are so many different options in here, but I'm settling on this one and adding it to all pages, as I like how it allows you to plan your day down to the hour. I always get distracted by different things, so this would really help me out.

Actually, I think it'd be nice for people to be able to make some notes, so I'm going to add a few extra pages for that. So that's the inside pretty much done. I've obviously whipped this up fairly quickly, but with some proper planning and time, you could create a real masterpiece.

The moment has finally arrived to export my book and get it live on Amazon KDP. This is where all the magic happens. It's free to sign up to, and most importantly, you don't have to make a minimum amount of sales to get paid.

The money starts rolling in monthly, 60 days after the month in which you make your first sale. Say you made your first sale in May; you'd. .

. Get paid 60 days after the end of that month, so by the end of July, I'm going to go back to Book B and select "Download Current Project. " This splits the book into two different files—one for the interior and one for the cover.

We'll need both of these later on. Next, I just need to go back to Amazon, which will only print my book when someone orders it, meaning I don't lose any money if it doesn't sell. They ask for all the usual details, like name, address, and payment preferences.

Once I'm on the homepage, I'm just going to hit "Create," select "Paperback," and fill out all the necessary details. And you know what's really cool? I get to list myself as an author!

I mean, I bet my teachers won't believe it, as I'm the most dyslexic person there is. Well, they probably would believe it, looking at my cover design and the lack of content in the book. I also need to write a title.

If I head over to the Research tab and click on the cloud, then Book Bolt will search for the top 100 bestsellers in whichever category we pick. Obviously, we're going to be looking at the planners, and this gives us a ton of information about what titles are actually working. So I'm going to call it "Strike It Big: Daily Productivity Planner," because those are some of the keywords that seem to be working.

For the description, I'm going to do the same and search on Amazon to see what's working on the most popular ones and add something similar. Now we’ve got to talk about the main reason people don't get sales, and from my research, this seems to be that they don't use tags correctly. I can go to "Keywords" and search for "daily planners" to see exactly what has been searched for most on Amazon and Google.

You can use up to seven tags, so I'm going to make sure to pick the ones with the high search volume. Another way to actually rank on Amazon and be found is to use categories that are not as popular; then you'll start to rank higher. The rest of this page is quite self-explanatory, so let's crack on with the next step.

You want to make sure that "Publish without ISBN" is selected because an ISBN number doesn't apply to low-content books like diaries and planners. It's important to look at the preview of the book and make sure everything is perfect. It might take a while for the preview to load, but trust me, it's worth the wait.

The moment of truth arrives, and that all looks pretty good to me. Now it's time to set the price. I'm going to go with $14.

99, which means I'll make $3. 69 per sale. There's absolutely no risk for me because Amazon only prints the books once they've been ordered, so I don't have to buy in bulk and pay for stock that might not sell.

After it's been checked by Amazon, it'll be live and ready to make sales. So, it's a couple of weeks later, and I've got some good news: we've made some sales! The book took around 72 hours to be approved, but for the first three days, we made zero sales.

I actually thought after going through all of this, I was going to have to tell you not to bother, but something crazy happened: on the fourth day, we made our first sale. I've made millions of dollars from my businesses, but honestly, making my first book sell felt brilliant. At the moment, we're sitting at 10 books sold, bringing in a total of $149.

90. Of course, this isn't all profit. We have to take away $113 for Amazon's cost, and also, I had Book B's free trial of the Newbie membership, which usually costs $9.

99. You can get the pro version if you want to take this more seriously, but for what I wanted to do, the Newbie was enough. They've also hooked me up with a discount code because I've used them so much in this video.

So, if you use the code "Mark Tilbury," then you can actually get an additional 20% discount. I'll drop the link in the description. So, if we take that into account, we've made a total profit of $26.

94. I'm going partying! I get it; this might not sound amazing, but just think how quickly I made this book, and it's already making around $27 per week.

Imagine if I had 20 books with loads of reviews, all making 10 sales a day. You could scale this side hustle to making thousands every month if you put your mind to it! If you want to discover seven more passive income ideas, then I'm going to leave that video right up there, but don't click on it just yet.

Make sure to subscribe if you want to grow your wealth. Okay, I'll see you over there!