Welcome, dear readers. After a long period of absence on the platform I'm coming to create much valuable content for you. My content will be centered around self-development, spirituality, psychology, marketing and passive income, together with a bit of technology.
In one of my previous posts I told you what low-content publishing is.
To sum up this post, low-content publishing is a form of self-publishing. The biggest platform here is Amazon. It's main focus is releasing simple products in form of journals, planners, activity books, etc. If you're creative, and able to make fruitful research, you can produce many products. Believe me, many of them sell very well.
You don't need to be a professional graphic designer, because you can use Creative Commons vector and raster images. Great addition to your products will be awesome free fonts. In my next posts I'll introduce sources of free files ready to use not only without fees, but also without giving any attribution, and all of this can be used for commercial purposes, too.
What is more, you don't need to make any investment. Low content books are released on Amazon as print-on-demand products. It means that you don't pay for print or for having your books uploaded. The fee is paid by customers when they order your product and you get your royalties.
An excellent example of very profitable low-content books are children activity books. Christmas is coming, so people will buy tons of Christmas activity books for kids.
I told you a little about the tools you can use in my previous post. I want to develop this topic. In my next posts I'll write more about each of these tools, and now I'm going to present them to you in few words. All od this programs are released under Open Source licenses and work under Windows, Linux, MacOS, and BSD. If you struggle with poverty during the pandemics, you may repair your budget with little effort, believe me.
Scribus
This is one of my favorite programs. It's a great alternative to Adobe InDesign. It's a program for desktop publishing, so its philosophy is completely different from text editors like Word. It gives you huge possibilities, you can make awesome layouts with Scribus. What is more, it's well-integrated with other Open Source technologies and tools, which make it even more powerful.
The main con is its user interface. Your first impression with this program will be not so nice. The interface looks scary, poor and outdated. Don't fear it, though. In fact Scribus is based on modern technologies and you can make wonders with it. It's a common feature of numerous open source programs - they're not as nice and intuitive as their commercial equivalents, but they aren't worse if we consider their functionality.
LibreOffice Draw
LibreOffice is an open source office suite. It's a whole set of applications, but for me Draw is the most important one. LibreOffice Draw feels like a hybrid of vector editor and desktop publishing program. While it's not as feature-rich as Scribus or Inkscape, which are full-fledged solutions, it's fast to learn. It's comfortable and intuitive, too. You can start making your products immediately. Using Scribus, on the other hand, you have to prepare for a pretty long process of acquiring basic skills.
I strongly recommend using LibreOffice Draw 7.2, because it has some interesting features absent in earlier versions. Starting from the most recent edition, you can place multi-column text in text boxes. In previous versions it was necessary to make separate text boxes for each column.
Inkscape
It's the most powerful open source vector editor. It gives you huge possibilities. You can make awesome designs with it - both for your products' interiors and for their covers.
Inkscape is extendable with huge variety of plugins. It can also export ypour work to many formats. While its user interface isn't as friendly as in Adobe Illustrator, when you get to it, your workflow will be really intensive.
Xfig and Ipe
Those two programs are really interesting, although their appearance reminds early 90s to me. They are actively developed, though. They're both very simple vector programs available only for Linux. If they're very simple, why should you consider using them?
In Xfig and Ipe you can create various shapes in a fast and intuitive way. Xfig is a little similar to 2D CAD programs, because you may construct shapes like you were making geometric constructions. Ipe also reminds me geometric construction programs. You can create various shapes and compositions much quicker than in Inkscape or Scribus. Then you can export your work to SVG or PDF. In fact Xfig and Ipe are great for making abstract geometric coloring books.
GIMP and Krita + G'MIC and GEGL
Gimp and Krita are two open source programs for raster graphics. Krita is used to digital painting more often, but you can use it as an ordinary graphic editor.
One of my favorite tools you can run from the level of Krita and Gimp's interfaces is G'MIC which is an open source framework for digital image processing. With this tool you can produce awesome effects. In fact it's used in many mobile apps which are paid. Those all stunning effects, filters and other stuff are quite often made using G'MIC.
To use it purposefully, you'll have to learn a lot of digital image processing stuff and a bit of math. You can use it employing your intuition, though. I don't know all the laws which stay behind various effects and transformations, but when you use G'MIC from the level of Krita or GIMP, you can use simple graphical tools with live preview. Most of effects I produce are random, but they're so superb that this doesn't matter. I'll show them to you in my next posts.
Another framework you can use in a comfortable graphical manner is GEGL. You can use it with GIMP. The effects I make with it are awesome.
Pixelitor
The last tool I want to mention today is Pixelitor. I use it to produce nice text effects. I use it mainly for covers. You can also generate interesting effects using it, including various procedurally generated backgrounds.
I hope this post will be useful for you. you don't need to be a graphic designer to produce awesome products. You can use the programs I've just presented her, mixing them with various graphics on CC0 licenses and free fonts. The most important thing is your idea. If you have it, you make just put ready elements together.