KDP Income Report October 2021: Low Content Publishing

It’s that time again for me to post an income report for October.

As far as creating book content went, I didn’t publish too much. I actually when to Spain in October and was also trying to work on creating a free low content publishing mini course – which I recently put on gumroad.

I’m also in the process of creating some editable interior templates on my shop. If you have any specific requests or suggestions, let me know.

In any case, I published 5 new books in October. I didn’t run any Ads to the books I published – so far, 2 of those 5 have started selling.

One of the books I published was a Halloween related and I used Ads right away on that book, as it was so competitive.

In the end, I think I just about broke even with it but it was worthwhile, as I now have a 5 star review and hopefully it will take less of a boost to start making sales next year.

In addition to that, I also edited one book that hadn’t had sales that I published last year – I improved the interior and completely changed the look of the cover. I’m now going to run Ads to it.

Meanwhile, some of those books I published in September have started selling more regularly as well.

Two of the books that I published in a saturated niche in September, now have 5 star reviews and this has led to more organic sales. In this case, spending some money on Ads immediately to get the books some sales and visibility paid off.

While the niche is a saturated one – it is also one that is very cover dependent. Meaning, the interior is not so much the selling point and so, if you have a cover people really want – they will buy it even if you don’t have reviews yet.

How Much Did I Make In October?

I made over $6000 in sales in October and partially this was due to one crazy high day of sales! If you’ve seen my other income reports, you will see that this isn’t unusual.

I do quite often get one day where I have bulk orders. What is unusual, is that it’s occasionally for books that I don’t even sell regularly.

More often than not though, there are books within certain niches that tend to get more bulk orders than others.

So, on that one particular day in October, I made over $800 in a day and this really boosted my overall monthly earnings.

What About Expenses?

Total Ad Spend:

I am running Ads in the US, Canada and UK: $242.57 in total.

(Plus 20% VAT – around $290).

Other Expenses:

Canva – Where I create most of my interiors and covers.

Helium 10 – I’m just using the Cerebro tool at the moment, which I’ve found useful for keyword research.

Creative Fabrica: My go-to source of graphics with a print on demand license and great fonts.

Bookbolt – keyword research/puzzlewiz etc (my coupon code: natniches for 20% off)

Vecteezy – various graphics

You can find a full list of my tools here.

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Total – £72.51 / $97.14

So, my expenses are very low for October and with a great result. As you can see, I really don’t spend much on Ads and a majority of my income is from organic sales.

I will invest more into Ads as I create more books.

What Are My Plans For The Rest Of Q4?

I do have some book plans in the pipeline, but I’ve also started trying to create digital products for an Etsy shop I opened a while back.

I actually bought two Etsy courses sometime ago, which were really great and informative, but I didn’t dedicate the time required to create the products I needed.

I’ve just started to create some of the photo mockups in CANVA and am pretty pleased with how that’s going so, I’m going to spend sometime next week creating products for that.

There are also interiors I want to upload to gumroad – both free and paid.

I’d been a bit slack finding enough time to dedicate to other things aside from KDP, so I decided it was time to really find the time to work on other things as well, (including my blog here!).