Kindle Direct Publishing {Homeschool Mum Small Business}

When I took my designs up to the local gift shop in our village, one comment the owner made was that once you have designs you can then use them on pretty much anything. She’d had one lady who had started out offering five greeting cards and was now selling cups, plaques, prints…all from her shop! Obviously, this depends upon people liking your designs enough to pay for them, but it did give me an idea. I have been producing about one design per month, so why not attempt to use these designs in multiple items…beginning with Kindle Direct Publishing.

Why Kindle Direct Publishing?

The reason I chose this particular outlet was that it costs nothing to start. Next week I will be ordering my greeting cards, but to do this, I will have to pay almost £100 up front. And that’s £100 without any guarantee that they will sell. Or that I will be able to recoup the money. Not so with Kindle Direct Publishing.

I already had an account from when Charlotte published her first book. She has since moved to her own account. So, I logged in and had a little poke around to try to figure out what I wanted to create.

No Content, Low Content or Medium Content Books?

Right now, I don’t have any high content books (ie a novel) and although I have one in the pipeline it is not ready to publish yet. I’m not sure it ever will be. Putting my writing out in public is very scary for me. I wrote my novella back in 2018 and have not had the courage to publish so far. Anyway, I knew I wouldn’t be publishing that yet, so my choices for publication were limited to medium, low and no content.

Medium content books include workbooks, activity books, puzzles etc. I do have some of these ready to go, but they are linked to my Mesopotamia Unit Study and I’d rather publish all of those together. Low and no content books have little or no content, or content which tends to be repetitive. These don’t tend to sell as well as medium content books but are the easiest to create. They are, therefore, perfect for the beginner creator.

How I created my Low/No Content book on Kindle Direct Publishing

I decided to start with a simple blank notebook. This would have literally no content and would use one of my designs on the cover. I began the process, clicking on ‘Create a Paper Back’. I then filled in all the information. My book would be in English, entitled ‘Sea Life Notebook’, authored by myself and I wrote a brief description of the book. I chose my primary market place and keywords.

Next, I had to define the size (which I set at A5 – perfect for little hands!), indicated no bleed and chose a glossy finish for the cover. I then popped over to Canva to create the interior of my book. Apart from the first page, this would be 120 pages which were entirely blank. The pdf was uploaded into Kindle Direct Publishing.

Lastly I uploaded the cover. I used Canva again to create the cover, using my whale design. Because of how my art journal sits, and because each of my paintings are a double spread of an A5 notebook (therefore creating an A4 landscape spread), my designs don’t easily fit onto an A5 portrait notebook. I enlarged it to cover the whole front of the book, playing about with translucency until I had the look I desired. I added a name box and uploaded it onto the cover creator on Kindle Direct Publishing.

Using the angelicscalliwags logo I had previously designed for my small business, I created the back of the book. I set the price which I would sell it at (£4.99). And I sent off for a test copy to see how it looked in real life.

Let’s Talk Money!

For your information, for a book selling at £4.99, I would receive only 94 pence for each book sold. Printing costs amount to just over £2 after which Amazon takes 60% of the remaining profit. This leaves me with 94 pence. Obviously, I would need to sell many, many books to make it worth my while. However, what you have to remember is that unlike an Etsy business selling goods that I have to process, pack and send, Amazon do this for me. So, this is proper passive income.

The Test Copy

I really recommend getting a test copy. Here is mine:

I was really impressed by the quality and the size. I liked how my logo looked on the back and really liked the glossy front cover. The paper was of good enough quality that I would personally enjoy using the notebook and 120 sheets was the perfect amount. The book was not too big, nor was it too small. That said, it did have a couple of issues.

Firstly, the book did not quite look how I wanted it to look. The translucency looked lovely on screen. However, it did not look so good on the actual book. And secondly, enlarging the painting did not work. It was back to the drawing board.

I went back into Canva and completely redesigned it using the whole picture in full colour. I placed the painting at the bottom of the cover and enlarged the name space to take up the whole of the top of the cover. Feeling that the back needed rewording a little, I did that and then pressed publish.

It is currently under review and will hopefully be in the Amazon store within the next three days.

Edited to add:

I wasn’t 100% happy with the cover I made. I knew how I wanted my cover to look but I didn’t know how to achieve it. I did some research and figured out how to isolate my sun, turn it upside-down, crop it and add it to the top of my drawing. I played around with some positioning, adding a couple of birds, the name label and some dots at the top. It suddenly all came together and I am really really happy with the resulting design:

What do you think? Which is your favourite?

Developing the Product

It is my goal to have a blank notebook, a lined notebook, an alternating blank/lined notebook, a dotted notebook and a graphed notebook in the same design. Once I have those up I will be doing the set all over again but with a different design.

I may look into supplying these books either in my Etsy store or on this website. This will be a purely financial decision, dependent entirely on whether or not it is financially viable for me to do so.

But first, I need to hear back from Kindle direct Publishing that the manuscript (such as it is) has been accepted…