18 Niches Side Hustlers are Crushing with Amazon's KDP

Aug 05, 2024

This word search is selling about 10,000 copies a month.

…With no celebrity or publishing house pushing sales…

…And no cost of goods or basement full of books to ship…

Completely self-published with Amazon’s KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) platform.

By my napkin calculations?

…At a 70% profit…

This self-publisher is making around $62k a month - from this one book.

…And the author has more low/medium content books.

Author might not be the right term?

A person doesn’t have to be “a writer” to create a book like this.

Especially with AI.

Nearly anyone could put out a similar book in the time it takes to get lunch from a Drive-thru.

“Order up!”

I’ve put together a list of niches, everyday self-publishers like you and me, are making great incomes with, as a side hustle.

Let’s open up Poe, Claude, or Chat GPT - it’s time to get our book on!

Low to Medium Content Nook Niches

Almost all these genres could be books for kids or adults…

To keep this list semi-short? I’ll list the genres and you can decidewho to publish for:

Word Search
Memory Activity books
Crossword Puzzles
Sudoku
Summaries/ work books (e.g. Cliff’s Notes)
Cryptograms
Coloring books/ color by numbers
Journals
Brain Teasers/Riddles
Dot-to-dot
Logic puzzles
Recipes
Jokes
Fact Books
Scavenger Hunt
Ledgers
Questions and Answers (e.g. 101 Common Q&A for Gardeners)
Find the character (e.g. Where’s Waldo)

“James, these niches are saturated!”

There are multiple ways to niche down any of these genres by adding modifiers like: animals, seasons, travel, nostalgia, cuss words, history, careers, hobbies, country/location, religion, holiday.

With the modifiers you could create: 101 Penguin (Animal) Jokes, 80s TV Show (Nostalgia) Word Search, or Dot-to-Dot Famous Paintings (History).

*Special notes for Summaries and Workbooks.

I love these kinds of books for 2 reasons.

They sell based on popularity and demand we don’t have to create.
Because you’d have to buy and read (or buy and feed to AI) the source material to summarize? There’s a minor barrier of entry. Don’t under-estimate how many people will drop out because of even the slightest hurdle.

Check out this Bible Summary.

In the past it would take someone with incredibly high levels of subject matter expertise, and months of full time work, to summarize each section concisely…

…I’d guess this was probably done by AI…

And probably finished in a half an hour.