There are dozens of ways to turn your book into additional income streams. But few are as easy as creating low content supplemental books that mostly steal the content right out of your book (of course, since you wrote the book, it's not really stealing).
Low Content Books Must Be Crafted with Care
There are 4 main types of “low content” supplemental books you can write and publish, based on your book—workbooks, journals, planners, and coloring books. While many marketers sell programs that promote the idea that creating these types of books is super “quick and easy,” please take your time and craft these books with care. Quality does matter. I would recommend that you purchase some of the best-selling books in these genres (especially in your topic area) to get a feel for what’s possible and what’s selling well.
The Four Types of Low Content Books:
Keep in mind that journals are a self-awareness tool, planners are a productivity tool, and workbooks can be a bit of both. All four types of “low content” books sell better in print editions, although you can reformat the journals and workbooks and publish them as ebooks.
- Workbooks: These help the user to apply what they’ve learned in your book. Workbooks include a variety of prompts and exercises They can walk you through your book’s content chapter by chapter or through a specific process within your book from beginning to end.
If your book is related to your coaching practice, you can structure a coaching package around your workbook, using it to structure the time you spend with your client.
- Journals: These are more self-awareness based and can include writing prompts from the book as well as use quotes from the book as prompts. Since stand-alone journals are often quite creative, consider including some fun and creative prompts even if your book’s tone is more serious. Since people like journals they can write in, journals often only come in print editions. However, there are journaling ebooks that present questions which people are expected to answer in a blank journal they provide themselves. If you want to publish an ebook edition of your print journal, be sure to reformat the book and remove all of the blank spaces that you've given people to write in.
The Difference Between a Workbook and a Journal
Although the exercises and prompts can seem quite similar in both a workbook and journal, they have some basic differences.
One of them is the amount of explanatory text used. A workbook tends to have more text. Some authors simply take their book and expand it, giving readers space to write in the book as they answer prompts and reflect on exercises. I wouldn’t recommend this, as you don't want people to feel they've paid for what's essentially the same book twice. You can use some of your book’s text to introduce each workbook section, making sure to give enough information so that people don’t have to go back to the book before engaging with any of the workbook's prompts or exercises. You want the workbook to be able to stand on its own. A workbook also may have a wider variety of content types than a journal.
A journal should also be able to stand on its own. It can have some introductory text to the journal as a whole, as well as to each section, as well as a variety of prompts and exercises. But it tends to have less text and more self-reflection types of prompts. A journal can also take a broader view of the book it’s supporting. Michele Obama created a guided journal to accompany her memoir, Becoming. The journal isn’t directly based on her life or on her book. Instead, it embodies the theme of becoming. It supports those using it to “discover, and rediscover, the one thing that will always be true to you and you alone—your story.” However, in addition to general self-discovery writing prompts, she’s used quotes from her memoir to inspire the user's journaling.
- Planners: These are most often daily action-based companions to your book, used to help your reader work steadily toward achieving the goal your book has provided the map and the tools for. They’re primarily a productivity tool. While there is some content up front, most of it is about how to use the planner to support the journey toward your goal. In addition to tracking your time, actions, and progress, you can add sections to the daily and weekly pages that help people stay positive and motivated, as well as learn from both what’s going well and what’s getting in their way.
Here’s an example of the daily pages included in Brendon Burchard’s bestselling High Performance Planner. His planner also has weekly and monthly pages, as well.
- Coloring Books: These don’t often accompany nonfiction books, but coloring books are still quite popular and some of them are based on short, uplifting quotes. If your book lends itself to lots of helpful or inspiring quotes, you can include short quotes as part of the design to be colored in, as well as longer quotes that are printed as text and surrounded by artistic colorable designs.
