How to Create Low and No Content Amazon KDP Books - Self-Publishing Course
Romney Nelson · Best Selling Author and Course Instructo
A working self-publishing playbook from someone who actually sold 30,000+ books, but the delivery is rough and padded with self-promotion.
Romney Nelson's course is built on real credentials: over 350 published books, several regional bestsellers, and a self-publishing history that goes back to 2019. That track record shows up in the content, if not always in the delivery. The instructor has clearly done the work he's teaching, and the course reflects hard-won lessons rather than recycled theory.
Structure and content
The course moves in a logical sequence: business model, account protection, goal-setting, niche research, cover design, interior creation, and the KDP upload itself. Early lessons cover the mechanics that most beginners overlook, like the 60-day payment delay, the 60/40 royalty split, and the difference between no content books (blank journals) and low content books (workbooks, tracing books, log books). A short lesson on account protection is one of the more useful stretches, warning against copyright infringement, cover duplication, recycled interiors for low content books, and paid reviews, all real ways sellers get suspended.
The middle of the course covers niche and keyword research using Publisher Rocket, a paid tool the instructor relies on for competition scores and earnings estimates. This section is concrete: it shows how to interpret page count, average price, and monthly search volume to judge whether a niche is worth entering. The cover design lessons walk through a live Canva session, dragging elements, swapping backgrounds, and adjusting fonts and colors for a children's book cover, which gives a genuine sense of the workflow rather than just describing it abstractly.
What holds it back
The course's biggest weakness is production quality. The narration is halting, occasionally garbled by transcription artifacts and stream-of-consciousness tangents, and lessons frequently trail into loosely connected thoughts before circling back to the point. A viewer has to work to extract the instructional core from the delivery. The pacing also drags in places, particularly during the live software demonstrations, where simple steps stretch out with false starts and corrections.
There's also a fair amount of course-ception. Several late lessons exist mainly to promote the instructor's other Skillshare courses on children's books, email marketing, Amazon advertising, and Ingram Spark, which dilutes the value of a course already billed as covering "everything you need to know."
The KDP upload walkthrough, where the instructor fills out metadata, keywords, categories, ISBN, trim size, and pricing on a real dinosaur-themed dot-to-dot book, is the strongest practical segment. It shows real error states, like a quality check flagging text too close to the bleed line, which is the kind of detail that only comes from someone who has hit that wall before.
A lesson on AI tools is refreshingly balanced, weighing the speed of AI-generated descriptions and cover elements against the risk of Amazon flagging AI-heavy publishing and the loss of the human quality that differentiates a book from a flood of generated competitors.
Bottom line
This is a legitimate, experience-based introduction to low and no content publishing that will get a beginner from zero to a live KDP account with confidence. It is not a polished production, and anyone who already understands the basics of print-on-demand will find much of the first third redundant. For a true newcomer willing to tolerate a rougher presentation style, the practical value is real.
The standout
The Publisher Rocket walkthrough, which shows how to read competition scores, average monthly earnings, and search volume to pick a keyword before writing a single page.
What you will learn
- How the KDP royalty split, print-on-demand model, and 60-day payment cycle actually work
- How to protect a KDP account from suspension by avoiding copyright, trademark, and review-manipulation pitfalls
- How to research low-competition niches and keywords using Publisher Rocket
- How to design a book cover in Canva using graphics, font, title placement, and white space
- How to complete the KDP upload process end to end, including trim size, bleed, ISBN, and pricing
- How to weigh AI tools for descriptions and research against long-term quality and legal risk
Best for: A complete beginner who wants a full, low-cost walkthrough of publishing a low or no content book on Amazon KDP from account setup to upload.
Skip it if: Anyone who already publishes on KDP, wants polished production values, or is looking for a deep dive into scaling or paid advertising.