The definitive Book Bolt Review: Does it make money?[Updated 2021]

Will BB help you make money on KDP? I’ve been using it for years as a paid member, and here is my definitive, long term Book Bolt review. Let’s get right into it…

Introduction

What is Book Bolt?

Book Bolt is a software that has all the tools needed for a successful low content book business. It is by far the most complete as it covers all of the steps of the low content book creation process from keyword research to exporting PDF cover and interior files. It is from the same people behind Merch Titan, an excellent Amazon Merch tool. The website is bookbolt.io

Busy? Here’s what you need to know:

The complete Book Bolt review is below, if you are short on time, here’s the skinny of what you need to know.

Pros	Cons
✔️ Everything you need to make money with low content	🛑 Interface can be confusing at first
✔️ Keyword research tools	🛑 Cover designer a bit stiff
✔️ Traffic estimator
✔️ Many interiors (30 plus)
✔️ Cover designer
✔️ Easy bulk uploader
✔️ Puzzle book generator

I have used BB for years so I asked the owner to give my readers a coupon, he agreed. Simply click the button below and put the code at checkout for 20% off.

Get 20% Off with code “NICHEPERFECT”

The skinny of my Book Bolt review: If you are in low content publishing or think of getting into it, you NEED Book Bolt. It’s built from the ground up for low content book publishers and if you are just starting, all you need to make money is a Kindle Direct Publishing account and Book bolt.

It’s 5 tools rolled into one (Keyword research, interiors, exteriors, design and uploader) and each one are worth the price ALONE. So getting all five makes getting Book bolt a no brainer. You can also get it at 20% off with the book bolt coupon code “nicheperfect“. Get it here.

In short: It’s a must-have swiss army knife for low content book publishers, even if you just use one of the blades.

Also, before you ask there are no direct alternatives. That’s it for the short version of it, here’s the in depth Book Bolt review:

Book Bolt Review: A low content book swiss army knife

If you want to make money with low content books, the closest thing that can describe the Book Bolt software is a swiss army knife. It’s not just one piece of software, it’s 5 rolled into one. There’s more but they all fall under 5 broad categories.

That is why all you need to make money with low content books is pretty much an Amazon KDP account and Book Bolt, it covers everything a low content book publisher would ever want. That’s what makes it so great, and that is also what makes it possibly overwhelming at first glance. When you log in, you are greeted with this page:

So…yeah, there’s a lot to it. But as you can see, the software authors made tutorials for every step of the way. The tabs on the left selects the “app” and you can go into the keyword research module, tutorials module, and more. Right off the bat, there is a usability problem. Where’s the interior generator? Where’s the book cover generator? Why isn’t it on the left? Hence I’ll start this Book Bolt review with…

Book Bolt review downside: The usability needs work

Using Book Bolt WORKS. Everything does. It’s just that the usability needs a bit more polishing. To be fair, it IS in beta, but here are a few frustrations:

• Unclear what a tool does. What is “Cloud”? (Automatically searches the top low content books)
• As you can see from my Book Bolt review comments below, the designer tool acts up sometimes
• The interface is simply not that great

In order to update this Book Bolt review, I didn’t realize a few things have changed since the last time. They’ve added a dropdown menu that separates Research for Creation.

There is no longer a wait time for keywords and the re-login has been fixed. The only downsides are the fact that you need multiple Chrome extensions if you want to do research while browsing Amazon and want batch upload. The other one is the fact that some of the tools would be better off consolidated together

Is it a deal breaker? Nopes. Like I said, this is beta and the little usability issues do not compare to the amount of software you get. Before getting into a review of the features, let’s get into…

How Book Bolt helps making money in low content

There is a formula to making it in low content book publishing. It’s keyword research + Product + Description. If you want to add fuel to the fire, you add ads to the mix.

So it’s all about finding niches that you can compete in, creating low content books (and price it correctly) and writing compelling descriptions. Here’s how Book Bolt helps:

• It has keyword research features (+ a chrome extension if you want to do it direct on Amazon)
• It has low content book interiors it can generate
• It has a cover designer (with the correct cover size automatically generated)
• It has price history
• It has spy tools to know what’s selling (and you can get keywords from the descriptions)
• And to add fuel to the fire there’s mass cover creator
• And also quick uploading features (this makes it worth it ALONE)

Now you know why I said it’s a swiss army knife, right? In short…

It’s the ONLY software you need to make it in low content

Unless you plan to make all the low content books interiors yourself and you have graphics software already, chances are, you will have to invest some cash to do low content publishing. You’ll need to invest in interiors, possibly graphics software, research tools and more. If you are a normal person without the graphics software or the knowledge of how to create interiors, all you need is Book Bolt. With a few clicks it generates the interiors, makes it easy to make exteriors and you have a product ready to sell. You can see the complete process in my Book Bolt tutorial.

Because of the nature of the beast, you probably won’t end up using ALL of the features of Book Bolt, but only a few. I’m a graphic designer and I use professional graphics suite, so I don’t use the exterior designer. However I use the cover designer to output the correct size of the cover for the amount of pages. The interiors saves me hundreds of hours creating this stuff.

So if you are reading this Book Bolt review to figure out if it’s worth it, it absolutely is. Just a few of the included tools make this worth the price alone. Which tool depends on the person but for me it has to be the research tools, templates and the uploader.

Let’s make a deep dive into our book bolt review and check out the features one by one…

Feature 1: Find exactly how a book sells

If you are going to sell something, you better make sure that there is a demand for it. This is where the products tab come in. Punch in a keyword and you get the results of the top low content book with a show of the best seller rate (the ranking of all of Amazon’s books) but more importantly the amount of estimated sales.

So you not only get a feel for the competition and what they are doing you also get an estimate of the traffic a particular keyword has with similar keywords that can jolt your creativity. The keyword count shows the top ones so that you can use them an rank high right off the bat.

Feature 2: What’s working well for a particular seller

The seller tab allows you to reverse engineer a particular seller to find out their top titles but also what keywords they are ranking for.

Feature 3: Find out what’s selling right now

With the “Cloud” tab, you can find out exactly what’s selling right now. Simply put in the top result you want and the type of LCB like music sheets and click search. This will output the top results, for example on top it searched for the top 100 Guestbooks. This is different then the other search tab because with this you don’t really need to know what you are searching for, it simply outputs what’s selling really well.

Feature 4: Find out what keywords a title is using to rank

The BOOK Scout is a complete reverse engineer tool. Put in ONE book’s ASIN  and you will know everything about it. This is the only limited tool at 25 lookups per day but you will be hard pressed to actually use it all. After a minute what it does is it reveals the keywords that particular title is using. Use the same and the A9 Algorithm will probably rank you similarly.

Feature 5: Create an idea board / favorites list

This tab is a collection of your saved books that you’ve encountered during your research. This is great to use as an idea board where you collect titles you can get inspired from.

Feature 6: Find out how much traffic and competition a keyword has

If you want to find out how many keywords a search term has, click on the keyword tool tab. This will not only give you the estimated amount of Amazon searches, but also Google searches AND the competition level from low to high. If you want to do ads there is an estimate of how much click will cost you. So if you search for Nurse notebook it might be popular but it is also very competitive. Once you save this you can then save them and upon clicking, have the Google trends interest to see if this is a topic that is winding up or down.  

Feature 7: Know what categories to put your books in

One of the worst parts about uploading your titles is figuring out where to  put the book. Input a search term in this tool and it will tell you exactly which is the appropriate category to put the title in for maximum relevance.

Feature 8: Book Bolt lister: Worth the asking price alone

If you are reading this Book Bolt review for THE reason to get it, this is it. Book Bolt comes with a Chrome extension that helps your uploads to KDP quickly. You save your description and select the categories and keywords and call it back when it’s time to upload with a keyboard shortcut (like ctrl+alt+1). This allows you to upload 30+ notebooks in a hour, and there is absolutely no other way to do this besides lister.

This is way different then something like “Text expander” or “Phrase express”. If you tried to replicate lister with these, it would take like 10 shortcuts, and you would still need to select each field and then input the shortcut. Plus you would have to manually input the categories.

Pro tip: Just use one shortcut. I started to run out of space in my keyboard, and I simply use one shortcut and simply select “is active” to select the batch I want. It’s simple math that the more books you have up, the more money you make, and lister helps upload things FAST and crank up your number of uploads.

Feature 9: Easy Amazon KDP Research: KDP Spy

Also included with Book Bolt is KDP Spy, another Google Chrome extension. Simply search Amazon and click on the KDP Spy icon. It will search the listings and tell you what the estimated sales are and how much they are making. That red notebook for example is making an estimated $5595. Nice! You can sort the data by number of sales, etc.

One word of warning however, sometimes it picks up other Amazon products, like here I searched for “Notebook” and in the results there were Samsung laptops listed too. Not a big deal, just make a mental note that not all of the results are 100% KDP, sometimes 3% of the results are other products.

I much prefer this then going on the Book Bolt website, it makes research very practical.

Feature 10: Interior wizard has all the different interiors and templates you would ever need

As a graphic designer, making KDP interiors for different sizes is a pain in the butt. The interior wizard lets you generate interiors for different sizes in a snap. Select the size, amount of pages and done. Even better is the amount of interiors available. Just looking at the variety interiors make your brain kick into overdrive of what you can do both in terms of no content and low content.

Anyone can add a few dashes in Word to create a lined notebook, but the interiors offered by Book Bolt take it to another level. You are probably looking at $1000 worth of interiors with many added from time to time. From the last time I used the interior designer to taking a screenshot, there’s been 10 more added. All of these interiors (about 150 from the time of writing) are business opportunities than can exploited. The pro version adds activity book generators to the mix.

All of these, once generated output a well prepared PDF. But these only output say 120 pages of the same thing, what if you want to add a front and back page? This is where the Interior designer pro feature comes in.

Interior designer pro is a new feature that was added recently when the first edition of this Book Bolt review was published. The regular interior designer exports all the pages and they all are the same, this pro module allows to mix and match the interiors and also upload you own, for those who want to have more control over their interiors but don’t have Indesign or Affinity publisher.

Feature 11: Cover designer makes design easy

Book Bolt also comes with it’s built-in design suite. What I like most about it is it takes into account the spine size. Nothing is more frustrating than designing a cover, only to have it rejected automatically because the size was wrong. I don’t know how they do it but the design suite knows exactly how thick the cover should be.

As a graphic designer, this is surprisingly powerful. You can add the basics like text and graphics, but there’s some stuff that impresses even me who’s been doing this stuff for 10 years. There’s built-in Pixabay integration (Free images you can use commercially)

But that’s not all, there’s also layers, masking and effects. Effects that make the cover grungy, etc. The complete design suite is really a nice point to consider if you don’t have a design suite. I have uploaded thousands of books and never had a problem with the cover size the Book Bolt designer gave me.

On a more “advanced” note. The design app recognizes transparency direct from Pixabay, and pushing a graphic up and down layers is pretty easy:

One of the most frustrating aspects of creating and uploading books is getting the correct size of the spine. The more pages, the ticker the spine needs to be and if you do not set the right dimensions your title might be returned from a customer.

No need for good luck, one of the best parts of the cover creator is that is creates the right proportions of your cover with the correct spine size. Even I as a professional designer export directly from this because it pays close attention to the needed size.

Conclusion

I hope you have enjoyed my Book Bolt review. By now, you get it, there’s MANY features, and it is the ultimate tool to sell no content books. Nothing out there comes close to it. This is great for those looking to make their first book to those who are already have an established publishing company or publishing house of Low content books. A free trial is available and if you are ready click here to get it at the best price of 20% off with code “NICHEPERFECT”.