Creative Fabrica: This is a stock photo/ illustration/ design website where you can find everything from low-content interiors to all kinds of amazing graphic designs to use in your books. They run great deals during holidays, plus they have solid “print on demand” licensing. They have thousands of KDP interiors— so many, in fact, that just looking through them will give you ideas for future projects. Go over and check out the KDP interiors at: https://www.creativefabrica.com/subscriptions/graphics/kdp-interiors/ref/3114257/
Tangent Templates: I might be biased because I am friends with the developers of Tangent Templates and think they are awesome, but I have used every low-content service out there and I still don’t think there is a better value for your money. Tangent Templates has over 50 “generic” interiors (including college-ruled and wide-ruled paper, sketch paper, music paper, ukulele paper, and many others (all in a variety of lengths that can be downloaded in a multitude of file types), a custom interior generator, a planner interior generator, a KDP Helper that will help you determine the exact size your cover needs to be (as well as providing you with a downloadable template you can use for designs), and so much more. Tangent Templates is the only tool out there that is a one-time flat fee, so if you’re looking for a “one and done” expense, this is the way to go. It’s $59.99 and you get a ton of stuff. https://templates.tangent.rocks
BookBolt: This is an amazing service you can use for interiors, research, cover creation, and a lot more. https://bookbolt.io. BookBolt has a ton of tutorials so it is great for absolute beginners (like, this is the first you’re even hearing of low-content publishing and you are already overwhelmed). I like their research tools and I sometimes use their “interior generator” tool, but just be warned that their interiors are all in the form of pdfs, which can make them a little bit difficult to open up and edit.
These are all paid services, and all of them are totally worth every penny.
If you absolutely cannot afford anything like this, use something free (like the free version of Canva, Google Docs, or whatever software came with your computer) to make all of your interiors yourself initially, build up your library, and re-invest the profits in paid services once your books start making money. I personally think the time you’re going to save by investing in something like Tangent Templates or Creative Fabrica is absolutely worth it, but I totally get that some people want to start from absolute zero and I am trying to be aware and inclusive of that approach.
As you might have also surmised by now, you will need graphics (illustrations, photos, patterns, and so on) to add to the interiors of your projects and to use for their covers. Just to get this out of the way upfront and to dispel a myth you might have seen on the internet, it is NOT ok to just Google “your niche” and use whatever images come up. Do not do that!
The reason you can’t do that is pretty simple, actually: you’re creating a “print on demand” product for commercial resale, so you need to have the proper licensing in place before you publish. You think this is no big deal, but I want you to start off strong and grow your low-content publishing empire, so just go with me on this. You need the right licensing. Don’t use random crap from the internet.
So, graphic design. You need designs that match or exceed books on Amazon that are already selling for that search term. The question is where to get those graphics, and let me answer that from two different angles— designer and non-designer.
If you are an artist/ designer……
Provided that you took my advice and actually learned how to do proper research, niche validation, and keyword research for your projects, this is your time to shine and I am jealous of you. You, my artistic friend, can take your already-existing original art or designs and put them on everything you make, plus you can use your “mad skills” to create original designs that will for sure out-perform the competition. Go you!
Obviously, the best thing for you to do is for you to draw or design all of your own artwork and make low-content books out of it. If all of the artwork was made (or designed) by you, you can use it as you please (provided it doesn’t depict a trademarked character or something that violates Amazon’s terms of service, of course). You probably already have a ton of original artwork you can start repurposing right away so you can hit the ground running, and being able to draw or design gives you a huge advantage because you can quickly execute new ideas as soon as you’ve done proper research.
For non-designers, do not despair! There are resources out there for you.
You don’t have design skills. That’s fine! You’ll just need to find yourself one or more reliable sources where you can get graphics that are a) appealing to you and the aesthetic you are going for, and b) are properly licensed. Spend a little time on each of these sites, just familiarizing yourself with what each has to offer before you are actually “in the thick” of trying to make your first project, because at that point you will be overwhelmed and more likely to make bad decisions.
Finding good images with the proper commercial (print-on-demand) licensing is one of the biggest challenges of low-content publishing, so I have compiled a list of sites (both free and paid) here for your reference. These sites are just a jumping-off point, and you’ll need to research the licensing for each image before using it as the basis for your designs. Generally speaking, you want the highest-resolution version of the image possible, and if you can get a “vector,” that’s even better because that gives you the ideal combination of the image being high resolution AND scalable, which is important when you start putting images into your books.
Free
- Pexels: https://www.pexels.com
- Raw Pixel: https://www.rawpixel.com
- Public Domain Archive: https://publicdomainarchive.com
- Vecteezy: https://vecteezy.com
- Biodiversity Heritage Library: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/
- Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/free-to-use/
- Public Domain Vectors: https://publicdomainvectors.org/
- Pixabay: https://pixabay.com
- British Library: https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/
- FreePik: https://freepik.com
- WikiMedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
- Vector4Free: https://www.vector4free.com/free-vectors/Commercial-use
Paid
- Creative Fabrica. This site is the hands-down favorite among print-on-demand publishers, and for good reason! They have millions of graphics, are well-priced, and their print-on-demand license allows you to use graphics (and interiors, fonts, etc) without making substantive changes. Make sure the graphics you choose have this license:
- Vecteezy Pro: Upgrading your account to the “pro” version allows you to use graphics without attribution and gives you access to higher-resolution versions of graphics so you can pull them into other programs and modify them.
To create these all-important pdfs, you’ll obviously need some interiors and some graphics (which I covered in the last two chapters), then you’ll need a way to put everything together and export them, and that’s what we’re talking about here. Some of these recommendations are going to overlap with some stuff I already mentioned, and for that I apologize. I’m trying to be thorough here, people!
I’ll start with Canva; because it is the best known, the easiest to use, and pretty much the industry standard for low-content publishing at this point.
1 Canva: www.canva.com.
If you don’t know about Canva already, I’m excited for you, because using Canva has honestly made me a better, more confident designer over the years. I used to be so intimidated by PhotoShop (who am I kidding? I still am) that I never even bothered to start projects. I’ve been using the Pro version of Canva for at least the past five years, and I can honestly say it is my top recommendation for getting ideas out of your head and into the world.
An “introductory” account with Canva is totally free, and you can actually do alot with it— probably enough to get you through your very first low-content publishing project. I’m not trying to pressure you to buy things, but I think if you’re leaning in this direction, you’re better off just signing up for a Pro account from the beginning because of the increased features and licensing protection the Pro account offers. If you love Canva and want to make/ edit all of your interiors in there, your best bet is to either use interiors that are included in Canva or sign up for Creative Fabrica and only use interiors that can be edited using Canva.I did that search for you, and the results look like this: https://www.creativefabrica.com/search/ref/3114257/?query=kdp%2520interior%2520canva&hasPod=true&campaign=KDPInteriors
- Affinity products: This is a nice compromise for those who are a little more technically skilled (like at PhotoShop) but don’t want to drop that big chunk of money on the monthly fee every month for the Adobe Creative Suite. This is one of the best deals out there for software that performs like it is much more expensive. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/, and training at https://courses.affinityrevolution.com/
3. Adobe Creative Suite: www.adobe.com: In a perfect world, we would all be designers and we would use Adobe Illustrator to create (or edit) the interiors, then InDesign to compile the whole book, though I suppose if you have any sort of skill in the Adobe suite of products at all, you are probably not reading this right now because you already know what you’re doing and don’t need my instructions. I did want to include all of the options, though! The whole Adobe Creative Suite is something like $65/ month.