KDP Journey as a Non-Writer

[M4XW3LL]

i want to know about this thing i've heard they say that when you post after a while it gets berried
i would like to know let's say i want to do a valentine day journal can i post it now or to not get berried i should wait till "x" amount period of time "2months, month" till valentine then post it
i'm confused i was thinking to upload as much as i can but it would suck if it gets berried

You can test it yourself, upload 50 valentine's day journals now, and 50 in January.

 

[M4XW3LL]

I haven't had the time to work a lot on this journey because of other ventures that I'm not documenting here, that's why I'm posting updates less often.

Here are my stats for September

#1
Sales: 31
Royalties: $41.39
Books live: 111
Best selling product: coloring book with 12 sales in total (you can go through my posts in the thread and guess which one it is)
Best performing market: UK with 47.3%
Second best: US with 46.3%

#2
Sales: 30
Royalites: $52.75
Books live: 667
Best selling product: low content book with 2 sales in total
Best performing market: UK with 54.4%
Second best: US with 21.2%

 

[M4XW3LL]

Time for the monthly update. Here are my stats for October:

#1
Sales: 41 (+10)
Royalties: $55.10 (+$11.36)
Books live: 353 (+242)
Best selling product: coloring book with 15 sales in total (you can go through my posts in the thread and guess which one it is)
Best performing market: UK with 56.2%
Second best: US with 34.5%

#2
Sales: 80 (+50)
Royalites: $60.94 (+$8.19)
Books live: 1525 (+858)
Best selling product: sugar skulls coloring book with 4 sales in total
Best performing market: UK with 59.6%
Second best: US with 31.8%

The earnings are far from great, but I'm still keeping the prices low until I earn some reviews and get a stable BSR.
I've published more than 1k journals this month, and I wouldn't be able to do this without bookbolt. I think they're still running a sale with the coupon 20offsale.

Win of the month is a 5 star review on the gag gift coloring book:

 

[slidings]

Congratulations so far, I think in time you're going to be doing great numbers with this!

Win of the month is a 5 star review on the gag gift coloring book:

That coloring book looks very well done, did you create it yourself or hire an illustrator? I'd be interested to know what your investment was to have it made, as I'm doing low content myself and wanting to venture into coloring books but using an illustrator to fill a book would be costly so I've hesitated. Thanks so much for all the detail and keeping up with this thread!

 

[Rayfish]

Well done on your journey so far, I am wondering, to begin with would scraping high quality designs for colouring books from the internet and compiling them into a book work? Would be quicker than designing them yourself (even with plugins), and you could make minor changes, like change size and rotate slightly? How does the Kindle shop know if two books have all the same patterns but just on different pages?

 

[M4XW3LL]

Congratulations so far, I think in time you're going to be doing great numbers with this!



That coloring book looks very well done, did you create it yourself or hire an illustrator? I'd be interested to know what your investment was to have it made, as I'm doing low content myself and wanting to venture into coloring books but using an illustrator to fill a book would be costly so I've hesitated. Thanks so much for all the detail and keeping up with this thread!

Thank you. For my mandala coloring books, I use different software, http://amaziograph.com/ is one of them. For my more advanced niche coloring books I hire illustrators. The coloring book that got the reviews, I created myself by making some patterns of the background, and using those penis looking letters which I compiled into words.

For how long have you been doing low content? Please share some of your stats in the thread if you don't mind.

Well done on your journey so far, I am wondering, to begin with would scraping high quality designs for colouring books from the internet and compiling them into a book work? Would be quicker than designing them yourself (even with plugins), and you could make minor changes, like change size and rotate slightly? How does the Kindle shop know if two books have all the same patterns but just on different pages?

Thank you!

Hiring a lawyer in case of a lawsuit would cost you more than hiring an illustrator to create coloring books for you. This is a marathon for me, so I'm not planing on doing blackhat stuff.
I guess you could test your idea and report back in this thread if you do.

 

[Rayfish]

Time for the monthly update. Here are my stats for October:

#1
Sales: 41 (+10)
Royalties: $55.10 (+$11.36)
Books live: 353 (+242)
Best selling product: coloring book with 15 sales in total (you can go through my posts in the thread and guess which one it is)
Best performing market: UK with 56.2%
Second best: US with 34.5%

#2
Sales: 80 (+50)
Royalites: $60.94 (+$8.19)
Books live: 1525 (+858)
Best selling product: sugar skulls coloring book with 4 sales in total
Best performing market: UK with 59.6%
Second best: US with 31.8%

The earnings are far from great, but I'm still keeping the prices low until I earn some reviews and get a stable BSR.
I've published more than 1k journals this month, and I wouldn't be able to do this without bookbolt. I think they're still running a sale with the coupon 20offsale.

Win of the month is a 5 star review on the gag gift coloring book:
View attachment 123002

Thank you. For my mandala coloring books, I use different software, http://amaziograph.com/ is one of them. For my more advanced niche coloring books I hire illustrators. The coloring book that got the reviews, I created myself by making some patterns of the background, and using those penis looking letters which I compiled into words.

For how long have you been doing low content? Please share some of your stats in the thread if you don't mind.



Thank you!

Hiring a lawyer in case of a lawsuit would cost you more than hiring an illustrator to create coloring books for you. This is a marathon for me, so I'm not planing on doing blackhat stuff.
I guess you could test your idea and report back in this thread if you do.

Do you think legal action would be taken? Are these generated puzzles and patterns under any kind of copyright? Like, if you went and copied all the Suduko puzzles from an online magazine or something, and randomly put them into books, I really doubt it would ever be detected (there are so many possible puzzles and patterns, how would they track and match copied ones?)

 

[slidings]

Thank you. For my mandala coloring books, I use different software, http://amaziograph.com/ is one of them. For my more advanced niche coloring books I hire illustrators. The coloring book that got the reviews, I created myself by making some patterns of the background, and using those penis looking letters which I compiled into words.

For how long have you been doing low content? Please share some of your stats in the thread if you don't mind.

Thanks, Amaziograph looks cool. You seem to have the knack for design. I have recently bought some Illustrator Add-Ons for mandalas and coloring art, but while they make it easier, creativity is still a stumbling point for me!

For the past 5 months I've been doing low content books at a fairly slow pace. I don't get much spare time, and what I do get is split between Merch and KDP. I currently have 210 books live, mostly lined journals, but some with slightly more custom interiors. I've made only $150 to date on KDP, with each book priced for roughly $2.00 profit. The journals tend to sell a couple of times when they are fresh, then disappear, though the odd one continues to get a sale here and there. In an effort to find greater success my next move is planned to be either an activity book or coloring book, but I'm still thinking over what I can do relatively quickly so I don't get stuck on one book right before the peak of Q4.

 

[Rayfish]

I made a simple script which scrapes puzzles from a big website which has millions of puzzles, it pumps them out in this format currently (will work on parsing it more to output it as a proper initial puzzle and final solution)

110110110101110110010000111110111000100010001000111011111000010011011101011011011
548362917967154382321978456716235849459817623832496571273589164184623795695741238

the 1s and 0s is a mask, where a 0 represents the number is visible, and 1 represents the number isn't shown to start (blank square), and the number below is each cells value for the solution, going from left to right for each row... wonder if this would be useful for people?

 

[M4XW3LL]

I made a simple script which scrapes puzzles from a big website which has millions of puzzles, it pumps them out in this format currently (will work on parsing it more to output it as a proper initial puzzle and final solution)

110110110101110110010000111110111000100010001000111011111000010011011101011011011
548362917967154382321978456716235849459817623832496571273589164184623795695741238

the 1s and 0s is a mask, where a 0 represents the number is visible, and 1 represents the number isn't shown to start (blank square), and the number below is each cells value for the solution, going from left to right for each row... wonder if this would be useful for people?

I don't quite understand what kind of puzzles are those. Do you have an example to show us?

 

[Rayfish]

I don't quite understand what kind of puzzles are those. Do you have an example to show us?

Oh sorry, I forgot to say these are Sudoku puzzles.

This puzzle (where - is a blank square) (just showing first row, to keep it quick and simple)
4 1 - - 9 - - 2 7
The full solution for this puzzle is: 418395627539726148762148953856271394347569812921483576675814239283957461194632785
The mask for this puzzle is: 001101100110000111011001011101001101011111110101100101110100110111000011001101100

So if we take the first 9 values (I did 1 row, so just 9 values for 1 row):
4 1 8 3 9 5 6 2 7 (solution)
0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 (mask)

(0 is shown, 1 is blank, so this gives)
4 1 - - 9 - - 2 7
and the solution for this line would be
4 1 8 3 9 5 6 2 7

So that is how you would generate the initial puzzle with blank squares and the full solution using these two numbers, hope this helps.

Working on parsing it and just outputting the initial and final puzzle as rendered images, it also is able to grab easy to very hard puzzles (easy, medium, hard, very hard)

 

[M4XW3LL]

Oh sorry, I forgot to say these are Sudoku puzzles.

This puzzle (where - is a blank square) (just showing first row, to keep it quick and simple)
4 1 - - 9 - - 2 7
The full solution for this puzzle is: 418395627539726148762148953856271394347569812921483576675814239283957461194632785
The mask for this puzzle is: 001101100110000111011001011101001101011111110101100101110100110111000011001101100

So if we take the first 9 values (I did 1 row, so just 9 values for 1 row):
4 1 8 3 9 5 6 2 7
0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1

(0 is shown, 1 is blank, so this gives)
4 1 - - 9 - - 2 7
and the solution for this line would be
4 1 8 3 9 5 6 2 7

So that is how you would generate the initial puzzle with blank squares and the full solution using these two numbers, hope this helps.

Ah now I get it. I already use a puzzle generating software https://puzzlewiz.io/ . I got a 20% discount using this coupon: summersale20

 

[Rayfish]

Ah now I get it. I already use a puzzle generating software https://puzzlewiz.io/ . I got a 20% discount using this coupon: summersale20

I saw, just posting this method because I was interested in this journey and may try it, but I like to test things out using free methods before investing into them, and I like to develop things. I think I will work more on developing some automation things for this, maybe have it automate 200 puzzles and create a PDF from them, is this basically what puzzlewiz.io does? do they have demos of there tools, I couldn't see any demos or previews of what the tool actually does

 

[M4XW3LL]

I saw, just posting this method because I was interested in this journey and may try it, but I like to test things out using free methods before investing into them, and I like to develop things. I think I will work more on developing some automation things for this, maybe have it automate 200 puzzles and create a PDF from them, is this basically what puzzlewiz.io does? do they have demos of there tools, I couldn't see any demos or previews of what the tool actually does

Yes, that's what puzzlewiz basically does.
There are some demo videos on youtube I think, and they should have a free trial if you want to test it.

 

[ucefel]

great work ,thank u so much for sharing

 

[[email protected]]

Thx alot for sharing! this has sparked some creativity and going to look into this.

 

[Torred09]

A couple of years back when kdp and createspace were separate i had a few creatspace accounts that i did not mind burning.

I abused the shit out of trademarks for low content books and found something quite interesting.

The average book made me about $3000-$5000 each month in royalties and each account lasted about 8 months before it got banned. So each account made me about $24,000 - $40,000 before it got banned.

But like anything quick bh money comes with a risk.

If you dont mind burning accounts you will make a lot more abusing trademarked low content books than non trademarked.

How did you do? more detail, please!

 

[GringoMonkey]

How did you do? more detail, please!

I did exactly what the op did only with trademarked materials.

So for example the op might create a fantasy journal, i would do the game of thrones fantasy journal.

As i said previously, eventually the account gets banned, but you can make a few thousand $ before that happens.

But i used createspace and they paid monthly, now it has been rolled into kdp you have to wait 2 months to get paid, so the risk increases.

 

[M4XW3LL]

November is over, so it's time for the monthly update. Here are my stats for November:

#1
Sales: 56 (+15)
Royalties: $87.77 (+$32.67)
Books live: 444 (+91)
Best selling product: coloring book with 18 sales in total (you can go through my posts in the thread and guess which one it is)
Best performing market: US with 68.5%
Second best: UK with 27.3%

November was better in US market for account #1


#2
Sales: 106 (+26)
Royalites: $86.51 (+$25.57)
Books live: 2402 (+877)
Best selling product: a gratitude journal for kids with 12 sales in total
Best performing market: UK with 58%
Second best: US with 28.5%

You can see that the earnings are pretty much the same between the quality account #1 and quantity account #2. This is going way slower than I though, and with holiday season going on it's even more unsatisfying. I expected more from November.

However, I will keep the journey going, as I believe this is a marathon and I can bring it to three figures a month very soon, and four figures a month in a year.

 

[Dorothy Cobb]

Keep the good work going. You need to spend more time on researching than uploading. You can check out tangent template for more diverse interior.