Publishing in the Amazon KDP Void

They say you can just generate some simple copy on ChatGPT, generate some black and white drawings using Midjourney and publish a simple coloring book on Amazon KDP for some easy side-income. That is if you believe the numerous Youtube tutorials.

Easy money for low effort. Turns out it’s not really low effort as the images generated by Midjourney end up with weird artifacts a lot of the time and those need to be fixed manually in some graphics editor. I ended up editing about fifty images in Affinity Designer before being able to publish the finalized PDF on Amazon KDP. And after numerous rejections due to not understanding the correct bleed settings well enough my manuscript was finally accepted.

I dare say the edited images themselves look ok to my amateur eye so surely it must attract some attention right?

But as it turns out publishing in the void without an audience just results in zero sales. Is the AI generated e-book side hustle dead or do I first need to build an audience and continue creating these books until I hit some sort of traction? Did it even exist to begin with or are the people pushing those types books all grifters and is Amazon KDP simply loaded with AI generated trash?

All the Youtube content has got me interested at trying my own hand at generating some extra income by selling content generated with the use of AI tools such as ChatGPT but so far I’m just spending money on credits with nothing in return.

While I sit here in the airport waiting for my flight to Curaçao I can’t help but wonder what my next steps should be.