Book Bolt Review: Is It Worth the Investment for Authors?

Are you looking to tap into the potentially lucrative world of low and no-content publishing on Amazon?

Book Bolt is an increasingly popular tool designed to simplify the process of researching, creating, and publishing these types of books. 

As a Book Bolt user myself, I wanted to share a thorough, unbiased review to help you decide if it's the right platform for your publishing business.

What Exactly is Book Bolt?

In essence, Book Bolt is an all-in-one software suite specifically built for low-content and no-content book publishers using Amazon's KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) platform.

If you're unfamiliar, low-content books like journals, planners, and activity books contain minimal original content, providing space for the user to fill in their own content.

No-content books take this a step further - things like sketchbooks, sheet music, or blank recipe books.

These book styles can be created and published quickly and inexpensively compared to traditional books, making them an attractive passive income opportunity.

The catch is it takes a lot of market research and time to create and publish the books - which is where Book Bolt comes in.

An Overview of Book Bolt's Toolkit

Book Bolt combines multiple tools into one integrated platform:

• Product and Keyword tools for researching profitable niches and analyzing competitor books
• Designer tools with customizable templates and graphics for creating book interiors and covers
• Ready-made templates for automatically generating your own notebooks, puzzles, planners, word search books etc.
• KDPSpy Chrome Extension for pulling competitor data from Amazon

Rather than having to gather and learn multiple programs, Book Bolt has pretty much everything you need (other than the KDP account itself) in one relatively easy-to-learn package.

Let's take a closer look at how these features work and how useful they really are.

Uncovering Profitable Niches

The most important part of success with low-content books is identifying niches with good demand but not too much competition. Book Bolt has several tools to make this research faster and easier.

The Cloud tool lets you quickly see the current top-selling books in your choice of low/no-content categories and niches on Amazon.

You can filter the results by price, BSR range and search keywords to hone in on the best opportunities. It shows you key data like the book's estimated monthly sales, price history and BSR (best sellers rank). 

This makes it simple to gauge a niche or sub-niche's overall competitiveness and profitability. You can easily see what types of books and interiors are selling well and generating the most revenue for publishers.

I've personally uncovered some great, underserved niches this way that I may not have found manually searching Amazon.

To dig deeper, you can use the Keyword tool to analyze the search volume and competition for specific keywords, and the Product Search tool to look up the sales data and keywords for any competing books.

There's also a Seller tool that lets you look up any KDP publisher and see all their books, estimated monthly sales, pricing, and publishing history. This is helpful for dissecting the strategies of successful publishers in your niche.

While all this data is useful, keep in mind that you still need to apply your own judgment and not just chase the current trends. Evergreen topics with consistent sales are usually a safer bet than hopping on a temporary "fad" niche. But Book Bolt makes it much easier to make informed decisions either way.

You also have a KDSPy Chrome Extension that Book Bolt provides to pull data straight from Amazon. The idea is excellent, but the extension often has technical issues, so I don't recommend using it.

Instead, a better and more reliable option is available, which I have found very useful for analyzing competitor data. That extension is KDPSpy Pro, which has more features and works reliably. 

Creating Your Books

Once you've selected a niche, Book Bolt simplifies the process of actually creating your low or no-content books. It has separate built-in tools for making covers and interiors.

The interior tool comes with an impressive library of around 150 pre-made templates in a variety of popular formats - lined journals, weekly planners, expense trackers, sheet music books, sketchbooks, comic panels, and many more.

There are also numerous puzzle and activity book interiors like sudoku, word search, dot-to-dot, mazes, coloring pages, etc.

You can easily customize these templates to your needs, adding your own text, images, and design elements. You can also mix and match parts of different interiors and create your own interiors from scratch. It's all in a simple, drag-and-drop interface that's easy to learn, even if you don't have prior design experience.

If you want to create puzzle books, Book Bolt will even auto-generate the puzzles for you using intelligent templates. Just select your puzzle type, difficulty, and other options and it will create unique, professional-looking puzzles in seconds.

I can attest this is a huge time-saver for someone who has made puzzle books manually.

For covers, Book Bolt has a similar, easy-to-use designer tool. Just choose your book size and page count, and it will automatically create a blank canvas with the proper dimensions.

You can then add text, shapes, images (including free ones from Pixabay and Unsplash) and more. It keeps things simple but has enough customization to create nice-looking, genre-appropriate covers.

Overall, integrating the interior and cover designers within Book Bolt is very handy. The big templates library is excellent for inspiration and quickly spinning up new books. And creative elements like the puzzle generator can add a lot of value to certain niches.

Book Bolt Print-Ready Files for Rapid Publishing

In addition to the research and design tools, Book Bolt has some key features to simplify the publishing process itself. Once you've created your book's interior and cover using Book Bolt's tools, it will automatically generate print-ready PDF files that meet KDP's requirements.

The interior and cover PDFs are in the correct CMYK color format and have the proper trim size, bleed, and resolution for the book size you selected. You can download these files with a couple of clicks, and they are ready to upload directly to KDP without the need for any further adjustments.

This is a huge time-saver compared to having to manually convert your files to CMYK, set the trim and bleed, and ensure the resolution is high enough for print. Book Bolt handles all the technical details behind the scenes.

How Much Does Book Bolt Cost?

Book Bolt currently has two subscription tiers.

Newbie ($9.99/month)

• Keyword & product research tools
• Cover & interior designers
• Amazon search volume data
• KDP Spy extension
• 24/7 customer support

Pro ($19.99/month)

• All Newbie features, plus:
• Puzzle creation software

Both subscriptions include a 3-day free trial to explore all the features risk-free. The Pro plan includes the automatic puzzle generator for an additional $10/month, which can be extremely valuable for puzzle book publishers.

You can get 20% off the monthly price of either tier by using the coupon code jussi when you sign up. 

This drops the Newbie plan to just $7.99/month and the Pro plan to $15.99/month.

Book Bolt Pros & Cons

Here are some pros and cons of Book Bolt based on my experience using the tool:

Pros

• Book Bolt combines book research, interior and cover design, and publishing tools into a single platform, streamlining the low/no content book creation process.
• The extensive library of customizable templates for interiors across many popular low/no content genres saves significant time compared to designing from scratch.
• The cover tool provides an intuitive way to create book covers using free and paid graphical elements.
• Compared to combining multiple single-purpose tools or subscribing to multiple interior template clubs, Book Bolt's $9.99-$19.99/month pricing provides good value.

Cons

• While Book Bolt is designed to be user-friendly, there is still a learning curve to use all the tools and features effectively. 
• Book Bolt only provides value if you actually use it regularly to publish books. You need a publishing plan and consistent action to make it worthwhile.
• I have found the research section of Book Bolt to be a bit less intuitive and clunky compared to the sleek design tools.
• Some individuals have reported problems with customer support, although I haven't personally experienced any.
• While the interior and cover tools have a good amount of creative flexibility, you are still somewhat constrained by the available templates and design elements compared to using dedicated professional design software.

Is Book Bolt Worth It?

As an experienced user of Book Bolt, I find it provides a ton of value for the price, especially if you are serious about low/no content publishing.

Having all the tools integrated into one dashboard makes the whole process very efficient. The ability to rapidly research a niche, create interiors and covers, and publish is great.

The templates and time-saving features like the puzzle generator help you publish professional grade books quickly, even if you lack design skills.

For comparison, if you were to subscribe to separate specialized tools for research (like Helium 10, Publisher Rocket) and book design, Book Bolt easily pays for itself.

The main thing to understand is that Book Bolt is a tool, not a magic wand. You still have to put in the work to find profitable niches, create quality books, and market them.

Low-content publishing isn't an overnight path to riches - it's a methodical numbers game where more books equals more revenue. Book Bolt is built to make the numbers part of that equation much quicker and easier.

I do think it provides value for beginners who are learning, as the research tools can help you avoid unprofitable niches, and the templates give you a foundation to build on. But it provides even more value for experienced publishers looking to scale up their book production.

The main downsides are the learning curve to fully utilize all the features (though there is good training available) and the monthly subscription cost may be a bit steep if you only publish occasionally.

I'd say you really need to commit to publishing regularly to make it worthwhile, but if you do, it will more than pay for itself in time savings and increased output.

The free 3-day trial is helpful for test-driving the software before you commit.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, this detailed look at Book Bolt's features, pricing, and overall value has been useful for you! I tried to share my unbiased perspective as an experienced user to help you make an informed decision.

To sum up, if you are looking to streamline your low/no content book publishing efforts and publish more rapidly, I think Book Bolt is worth adding to your toolkit. It has made the process much more efficient for me, and I continue to get a lot of value from it.

Of course, a tool is only as good as the person using it, so make sure you pair Book Bolt with a sound publishing strategy, quality books, and effective marketing. Focus on providing genuine value to your target readers, not just churning out books to game the system.

Used well, I believe Book Bolt can help you substantially scale your publishing business and income.