New Journals

Being an indie author, I’ve made it my business to learn all kinds of cool stuff about publishing. There’s a branch of self-publishing where people create something called ‘low-content’ books, which are any type of book that doesn’t have a lot of text, like sketchbooks, journals, planners, etc. All you need is a cute cover and some lined pages, and you’ve put together a journal.

I don’t have much design experience, but I can at least put together a competent book cover, so I decided to put a few designs out there and see what happens. To keep them separate from my books, I’ve published these journals under the name Journalu (get it? Journal-you! I thought I was being clever). If they don’t sell a ton, that’s fine. At least I had a lot of fun putting them together.

Most recently, I found the Barbie movie inspiring, so I made these three nostalgic designs without treading on copyright territory.

Check out the whole collection I put together on this website: JournaluPress.com.

To be fair, much of the ‘low-content’ book sphere is populated by want-to-be-entrepreneurs looking to make a quick buck (or the elusive passive income) by publishing hundreds of low-quality, low-content books. KDP has created some strange rules, like limiting the number of books you can publish in a day, as a reaction to people trying to spam the platform with loads of low-quality journals.

Print-on-demand books aren’t the best vehicle for journals, but they do an okay job. Self-published coloring books typically have coloring pages on only one side since print-on-demand books don’t use heavy enough paper to hold up to lots of coloring, and people generally enjoy them. That’s one of the things I like about self-publishing—we get creative to work with the medium we have available to us, and it forces us to come up with some pretty cool stuff, like my Puzzling Escapes series.

Feel free to grab a fun new journal from my latest collection or buy one to help support me. Heck, I appreciate you venturing over to my website and am just glad to have you here. Take care, and keep reading!