Since I see that there's interest in my journey, I decided to show you what sells well during the current pandemic situation. This has also affected KDP sales with mine being down about 25% in total, but I have experienced an increase in sales for certain types of books which I’ve decided to talk about.
Like any other business, the current pandemic situation with Covid-19 has also affected the print on demand industry. Amazon is giving priority to items that their customers need most, by limiting visibility and increasing shipping times to non-essential products.
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I don’t consider this bad, having in mind that Amazon is doing the right thing by prioritizing shipments for more important products during the coronavirus pandemic.
I’ve had an uptick in sales for coloring books, kids activity books, and puzzle books. This was kinda expected since people are staying at home and trying to kill time in any way they can.
I will go through different types of activity books for kids and how you can create them.
Letter Tracing Books
These are very popular activity books among preschoolers and kids of ages 3 to 6. They are very easy to make, and you can get creative by using cliparts that represent a certain letter. If you can create drawings that could also be used for coloring, it would add some great value to your books.
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You can use this font to create these types of books: https://www.fontspace.com/national-first-font-dotted-f5860
It's free for commercial use.
Dot-to-dot - Connect the dots
These types of activity books are popular among kids of all ages. You can categorize them by age, depending on the complexity of the clipart.
Find some cliparts that give you commercial usage rights, throw them into software like Photoshop, Illustrator, Affinity, Gimp, or any software that you’re familiar with and does the job.
Draw dots along the lines and add numbers next to them. Delete the lines from the clipart layer and only leave some recognizable elements.
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Find the differences
You can hire a freelancer to draw the images for you, and then just create the differences yourself by adding or removing elements like an eye, a leaf, or any other element that makes the puzzle more challenging.
Add the solved puzzle on the back of the page, so the kids can check if they got it right.
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Maze Books
Creating a maze book for kids is pretty simple. All you need is a maze, and two cliparts that match to each other (like the hippo trying to score a goal, and the goalkeeper).
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Find Two Identical Pictures
A fun game for kids of ages 3 to 6 and one of the easiest activity books to make.
Get some cliparts and throw them on a page. Repeat one of the images twice and you’re done.
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Paths Maze
Very similar to the maze activity book, but this one has to be solved by following the lines.
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Let’s Count Books
Fun activity book for kids of young age, and pretty simple to create. Grab some cliparts of the same category (like sweets in this example) and just throw them around the page.
At the bottom, list each clipart once and add a box next to it which is used to write the number after the elements are counted.
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Keep in mind that these should be black & white books, since using color books are very pricey on KDP, and you need to price quite high to make a profit (which means you can't price competitively in the market).
