Selling Printables on Etsy is the Quick WIn for KDP Books

A question that often hits my email inbox frequently is, “Do you create Printables to sell, or are KDP books more your market?”

That is a beautiful question and one that I have no problem answering. BUT…… First, I must outline my publishing business strategy to all my reading friends.

I LOVE creating books to sell on Kindle Direct Publishing!! Doing the research, making all the little notes of where opportunities lay in various categories, and developing a method to make a book that I am proud of as an author is always my highest goal.

The explanation I like to share with other publishers is that my first and utmost goal is to create the book. The research I do is always based on the end goal of creating the cover, hitting the “combine” button to make a pdf, and then putting all the info in blank text boxes before hitting submit to Amazon for review.

What works best for me in keeping the book creation top of mind is that I can break it down into small manageable chunks. These manageable chunks lead to printables. The printables are the inner pages created to meet the book's end goal.

Allow me to add a visual to reinforce my process of:

• Book Goal

• Printables

• Distribution

These are the three pillars I work with in my publishing business.

Book Goal

You have researched book ideas and found some validation of what direction you want to go in creating your book. Your research shows the potential of making money from your idea. Now we start the process of creating the book.

Imagine your book was a fresh stack of “sticky notes” on a….. well, a sticky notepad. If you can visualize a sticky notepad being your book with all the perfectly lined pages, bound by the glue on end, and something you can quickly flip through. Of course, we are visualizing this as a book without a cover while looking at the sticky notepad. But…. let’s pretend that the notepad has a cover so we can complete the visual of a bound book we created or are creating.

I like to use this as an example because most people can imagine what I will describe in the next part concerning printables.

Printables

Now, let’s reverse engineer that visual I described as the book with the sticky notepad.

I like to refer to each individual sticky note (a piece of paper) as a “Printable.” Just as you jot an idea, note, or reminder on a single sticky note to tear from the binding glue to stick someplace as a reminder, these little notes become printables that will lead to the “BIGGER” idea or a trailing concept which we can later pull back together and assemble into a book.

Here is a better-detailed illustration with single sticky notes. I like to create a small set of ideas, concepts, or notes that will help build back to a book if the pages rebound. These small sets of ideas are laid out in a short burst of three to five pages. (or notes) Typically, I like to go no more than an hour in one setting to create my printables for the book.

After I get a few notes (pages) created from these approximate one-hour sessions. I will create them into designs with various iterations until I find something I feel will be the finished book.

I take these little notes I created (using the sticky note visual) to the following distribution step.

Note: not all my sticky notes will make it to a finished book. The reason is vast and can range from a lost interest in the book concept or idea. The market research shows that the book is seasonal, and I am in the wrong season (which I will table and complete later). Or another project got more priority, so the book's work will be picked up later.

Distribution

Now that I have all these sticky notes lying around (for visual concept) it becomes a strategy to monetize off the time spent building up to the finished book.

I like to call the distribution of the printables (individual pages or a set of sticky notes) a way to gain “Quick Wins.” The quick wins come in distributing the printables that will eventually lead to your book on marketplaces such as Etsy, Creativefabrica, and even DesignBundles.

Let’s stop here for a second…… What I just wrote was “Quick Wins!”

The quick wins are what help fuel you to continue on the journey of creating income from your books. Oftentimes, and no matter how much work you put into researching your book, you create something that you feel will be a SURE THING, only to fall short and into disappointment.

Selling printables is a way to:

1. Gain income quickly on another platform

2. Diversify your income stream

3. Monetize your time from the short-term to the long-term

4. Get a Quick Win that will feed your motivation to continue on with publishing.

Often I hear from other publishers that they created the book XYZ and listed and NOTHING happened. No income, it was a “waste of time”, and you can make money publishing books. Self-doubt will set in, and you will find yourself going down the road of self-sabotage.

I know something about self-defeat and self-sabotage when making an income selling digital products, KDP books, and printables.

The trusted and tested method for me to keep working and creating books is to leverage my time and distribute small parts and portions of my book pages as printables.

Now, you may be asking, “Why do you sell the pages of your book when someone could just steal those printables and make them into their own book?”

Amazing question!!

Here lays the honest answer, I don’t sell my finished pages that will go into my book as printables. I sell the iterations that lead up to the final book.

One final note on the distribution of the printables (going back to sticky note visual) is that these pages are a way to test the market on concepts or ideas to gain validation; you are spot on; there may be demand.

In Closing

Creating your book for Kindle Direct Publishing can be overwhelming when approaching it as a finished “sticky notepad.” Breaking the creative process down to just tearing off a few sticky notes will help relieve the daunting task of creating the finished book.

Finding a way to distribute your iterations of the book before the final launch on the Amazon KDP platform will add to your motivation to keep investing time in building your publishing business.