Post by K'Sennia Visitor on Dec 22, 2020 2:24:45 GMT
We haven't had a new thread in the main forum for a long time, because I can never think of anything to post about, so I decided to make one about my lcb journey.
LCB is short for low content books, and is also used no content books, which technically are NCB's, but all the course creators and Youtube peeps use LCB for both of them.
I technically started my lcb journey last year with an essential oils recipe journal and a "things I learned in 2010" journal. I can't recall anything about the process. I did sell one copy of my recipe journal.
And then I went back to ebooks, but in Nov of 2020 I decided to try it again, and to try and get serious about it. It ended up being a lot harder than I remembered it being, and I almost gave up a few times due to not being able to get any of my books approved, but I didn't give up, and now have 11 lcb's published. I've had 5 sales, 1 from a stranger, and 4 from my dad.
But the thing with lcb's is that it usually takes hundreds or thousands of individual titles before you see any money, so 11 is nothing, and is just practice fodder. The lady whose course I took, Rebecca Holman, has 4,000 lcb's, and I assume makes okay money with them. She also creates courses, sells pintables, and does a lot of affiliate marketing. So I have no idea how much of her income comes from her books, especially since she doesn't share any of them.
I have two of her courses, one on journal creation, and one on activity books. Her courses are pretty good, and not super expensive. She gives you most of the information you need, but leaves a few important things out, which is maddening.
In order to successfully do low content publishing and no content publishing, you need two programs, Microsoft PowerPoint (any that came out after 2016) and tangent templates. It is possible to do it without those programs, but it's a lot harder, and try as I might, I could not get anything approved by amazon until I started using PowerPoint.
The reason why you need PowerPoint is because amazon will not publish paperback books unless the images are all 300 DPI, and getting that 300 DPI to stick in other programs can be really hard.
When you set up each powerpoint book you go up to file, options, save, embed fonts in the file, and embed all characters. Make sure you hit okay to save your settings. These settings are super important to make sure your books pass KDP inspection. You also need to go to back to file, options, advanced, Image size and quality, do not compress images (this is really important because compressed images will not be 300 DPI) then you'll click on the box that says high fidelity (this is not high enough, underneath that option is 300 PPI) Click on the 300 PPI, then hit okay.
The next thing you need to know how to do is to size your slides appropriately. So you click on Design, then scroll all the way over to a small white box up at the top that says slide size, hit the little down arrow, click on custom slide size. For the interior if there's no bleed all you need is to choose what the dimensions that your book will be like 6x8, or 8.5x11, which are the two most popular sizes. So you'd put the 6 in width and the 9 in height, choose portrait, and hit okay. You can choose either ensure fit or maximum fit, it doesn't matter, I always choose ensure fit.
Now where it gets tricky is if your interior is going to include bleed. Bleed means that your images extend outwards and touch all sides. This part will get cut off during the printing process, so you need to make sure that nothing important is touching the sides. If you don't want bleed then there should be a 0.5 of white space on all sides. But if you want to add a pretty border that goes all the way across, and it won't hurt anything to have the border chopped off, then you need to tell KDP that the book has bleed. And the dimensions you need to input are different.
Now for me this is really complicated cos I can't do math. If you're good at math or have previous design experience then this is no big deal, but if you're like me it feels overwhelming. This is why you need tangent templates. Tangent Templates gives you a handy dandy calculator called the KDP helper that tells you exactly what to put in the box for bleed, and it will also tell you how to size your slides for the cover, because those numbers are also completely different. Which makes sense since the slide needs room for both the front and the back cover side by side in one image.
Another thing to remember is that these numbers change depending on your template size, depending on the number of pages in the book, and even on the type of paper you pick! So you really need an easy way to figure all those numbers out. Until the day I finally broke down and purchased tangent templates figuring out how to size the covers seemed an insurmountable task.
The KDP helper will also tell you what to put into the box on Canva, if you use that program. I've used it for one book, but I needed to insert the Canva images into PowerPoint to get them accepted because of the no compression/embed fonts options.
Before I had tangent I would make one slide the same size as my interior, and then use KDP's cover creator. Cover creator is awful because of how few template options they offer, and you'll end up with a nice-ish looking front cover and a different looking back cover. And then I still had it yell at me about images not being 300 DPI, even though they were that size.
Once I learned how to size my slides large enough to create a properly sized cover, with 2 sides, they went through much easier. Plus, they looked slightly better. I still have a long way to go before I master design, but at least I have now mastered getting my books approved, which is a huge barrier in the beginning when you don't have all the information and no one will tell you.
I need to work on design and on research next.
