KL Adams | Updates

The "Easy Passive Income" Journal Business Just Got a Lot Riskier

KL Adams — Tue, 4 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you've spent any time on TikTok or YouTube in the last couple of years, you've probably seen the pitch: publish journals and planners on Amazon, no writing skill required, just upload and collect passive income. Some version of this has been sold as a side hustle to thousands of people who have never written a book in their life — and honestly, until recently, it kind of worked.

That's changing fast.

Amazon just rolled out a wave of 2026 policy updates aimed squarely at this exact business model, and if you or someone you know bought into one of those "publish 50 journals a month" courses, it's worth understanding what's actually happening before your catalog runs into trouble.

What the low-content model actually was

The pitch was simple: use Canva or an AI tool to generate interior pages — lined pages, habit trackers, writing prompts — slap a cover on it, and upload it to Kindle Direct Publishing. Then do it again. And again. Volume was the whole strategy. Some courses encouraged publishing dozens, even hundreds, of nearly identical titles under the theory that a few would eventually catch a wave of organic traffic and start earning passive royalties.

For a while, this worked well enough that it became its own influencer niche — people selling courses on how to sell journals nobody read cover to cover, teaching other people to do the same thing.

Why Amazon is cracking down now

A few things converged at once. With millions of titles now being uploaded to KDP every year, Amazon has been raising the bar on originality, disclosure, and formatting standards. Generative AI made it trivial to mass-produce "unique" variations at a scale that simply wasn't possible when people were manually laying out journals by hand. And Amazon's bot detection has gotten sharp enough to notice unnatural publishing patterns — services that used to help authors run free-book promotions have reportedly paused certain bounty programs because Amazon is watching for exactly this kind of activity now.

The result: Amazon is enforcing faster removal of duplicate uploads and mass-generated, low-differentiation content. On top of that, KDP now requires authors to disclose when AI was used in creating their content. AI itself isn't banned — but not disclosing it can get a title pulled, or your account flagged, even if that wasn't the intent.

Who actually carries the risk here

This is the part that doesn't get said enough: the people most exposed by this shift are usually not the ones who profited most from it. The influencers who sold the "publish journals for passive income" courses already got paid — for the course. The people who bought in, built a catalog of fifty near-identical planners, and are now sitting on inventory that may get flagged for duplication or undisclosed AI content are the ones left holding the risk.

If that's you, or someone you know, this isn't a moment for panic — it's a moment to actually read the KDP content guidelines directly rather than relying on a course that was recorded before these rules existed. Volume-based, minimal-differentiation publishing was never a particularly durable strategy. It just took Amazon a while to build the enforcement to catch up with it.

Where it gets genuinely murky

Here's where I think the policy needs more nuance than it's gotten credit for. "Disclose AI use" sounds simple, but it's being applied to wildly different situations. Someone who generated two hundred journal interiors wholesale with AI is doing something categorically different from a novelist who used an AI tool to brainstorm a plot point or catch typos in a line edit. The reporting on these policy changes doesn't draw a clean line between AI-generated content and AI-assisted human work — and that ambiguity is exactly where well-meaning authors, not just the mass-upload crowd, can get caught off guard.

If you're an indie author using AI anywhere in your process — even lightly — it's worth getting familiar with exactly what KDP means by disclosure before you publish, rather than assuming your use case is obviously fine.

The bigger picture

None of this means AI has no place in publishing, and it doesn't mean self-publishing journals or planners is inherently a problem. What it means is that the "publish in volume, disclose nothing, let the algorithm sort it out" era is closing. Platforms that host millions of titles have to protect the reading experience somehow, and duplicate, undifferentiated content was always going to be the first target.

For authors actually writing books — fiction, nonfiction, or otherwise — this is good news in the long run. A marketplace with less noise from mass-generated filler is a marketplace where real, original work has a better shot at being found.

Sources:
The Selling Guys, "Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing: Ultimate Guide 2026" — thesellingguys.com/kindle-direct-publishing
WriterCosmos, "Amazon KDP Announces Major Publishing Rule Changes for Authors in 2026" — writercosmos.com

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KL Adams is a literary blogger and fiction writer specializing in dark fantasy, vampire fiction, and paranormal romance. Follow on WordPress, Inkitt, Wattpad, and Ream for reviews, reading lists, and stories that haunt you long after the last page.

Check out my Gumroad course: https://kladams53.gumroad.com/l/hisznv

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Hybrid Publishing Is Now the Default Strategy, Not the Exception

KL Adams — Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There used to be two doors. Traditional publishing or self-publishing. You picked one, and the choice defined your career.

That binary is gone.

The line between traditional and indie publishing has blurred more than ever, and the authors navigating it best aren't choosing sides anymore. They're splitting the difference on purpose.

Here's what that looks like in practice: an author licenses print rights to a traditional publisher, who has the distribution muscle to get physical copies onto shelves in ways an indie simply can't replicate. But that same author keeps ebook and audio rights, selling them independently at royalty rates a Big Five contract would never offer. Two formats, two strategies, one book.

It's not a compromise. It's leverage.

And it's not just theoretical. One traditionally published thriller author made headlines this week for going fully indie on her latest release, after two books under a Big Five imprint. Two traditional titles under her belt, an established readership, agent relationship intact presumably — and she still chose to self-publish the next one.

That's the tell. When an author with real traditional-publishing options walks toward indie instead of away from it, it's not desperation. It's math. She's not rejecting traditional publishing. She's treating it as one tool in a toolbox, useful for some books and not others, rather than the finish line every writer is supposed to be racing toward.

For those of us writing in genre fiction — dark fantasy, paranormal romance, the corners of the shelf where readers are hungry and loyal — this shift matters more than it might in literary fiction. Our readers don't care which imprint is on the spine. They care about the next book, how fast it's coming, and whether it delivers. Hybrid strategies let authors serve that appetite on their own timeline while still chasing the shelf-space and prestige that traditional deals can offer for the right title.

The old assumption was that indie publishing was the fallback position — what you did if traditional didn't work out. That assumption is dead. What's replaced it is a much more interesting question for every author to ask about every book: what does this title actually need? Does it need a bookstore front table, or does it need speed, higher royalties, and creative control? Increasingly, the honest answer depends on which book you're asking about, even within the same author's catalog.

That's not fragmentation. That's maturity. The industry finally caught up to the idea that a writing career doesn't have to be one path chosen once. It can be a portfolio, built book by book, with the author holding the pen on strategy as much as story.

Sources:

The Books Central, "Self-Publishing Trends 2026: What Indie Authors Need to Know" — https://thebookscentral.com/blog/self-publishing-2026-indie-author-trends/

The Ink Plots, "The Friday Five: Top Indie Author News This Week" — https://www.theinkplots.com/p/the-friday-five-top-indie-author

KL Adams is a literary blogger and fiction writer specializing in dark fantasy, vampire fiction, and paranormal romance. Follow on WordPress, Inkitt (https://www.inkitt.com/KLAdams), Wattpad (https://www.wattpad.com/KLAdams53), and Ream (https://reamstories.com/kladams) for reviews, reading lists, and stories that haunt you long after the last page.

Check out my Gumroad course: https://kladams53.gumroad.com/l/hisznv

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✨ A Beautiful Velveteen Update

KL Adams — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Beautiful Velveteen has been reimagined.

I've spent the last several weeks deep in the manuscript, strengthening the story with richer character interactions, deeper emotional tension, and even more of the gothic romance atmosphere readers love.

Expect lingering glances, haunting estates, dangerous secrets, slow-burn chemistry, and the kind of immersive gothic world that refuses to let go.

This isn't a new story—it's the version Beautiful Velveteen was always meant to become.

I'm incredibly excited to share it with you soon. 🖤

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Beautiful Velveteen Has Been Reborn — And It's Out Now

KL Adams — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Some stories deserve a second life.

Beautiful Velveteen — Sebastian and Kennedy's story — has just come back into the world completely reworked. This wasn't a light polish. This book went through a full literary overhaul, sharpened line by line until the prose finally matched the intensity of the story I always wanted to tell. If you read the original version, this one will feel familiar and completely new at the same time. If you're coming to it fresh, you're getting the best version of it that has ever existed.

Sebastian and Kennedy's dynamic hasn't changed — the tension, the darkness, the pull between them is all still there. What's changed is the craft around it. Every chapter has been tightened, deepened, and refined so the atmosphere lands the way it was always meant to.

This is the first book in the Beautiful series, and it sets the tone for everything that follows — including Beautiful Chaos and Beautiful Bella, both currently in development.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H2XF95NT

If you've been waiting to start this series, or you fell in love with it the first time around, now is the moment to dive back in.

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KL Adams is a literary blogger and fiction writer specializing in dark fantasy, vampire fiction, and paranormal romance. Follow on WordPress, Inkitt (https://www.inkitt.com/KLAdams), Wattpad (https://www.wattpad.com/KLAdams53), and Ream (https://reamstories.com/kladams) for reviews, reading lists, and stories that haunt you long after the last page.

Check out my Gumroad course. (https://kladams53.gumroad.com/l/hisznv)

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The Genre Is Thriving. So Why Are Vampires Dying?

KL Adams — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There's a new industry report out, and it's the kind of data that makes you sit back in your chair a little. Fantasy just posted its strongest average sales performance ever recorded. The genre is, by every measure, at its peak. And yet buried in the same report is a number that stopped me cold: YA Paranormal Vampires are down 106% over the past twelve months.

Let that sit for a second. The genre is booming. Vampires are cratering.

So what's actually going on, and what does it mean if vampire fiction, dark fantasy, or paranormal romance is where your heart lives as a writer?

The Genre at Its Peak

According to the Summer 2026 K-lytics report — the closest thing indie publishing has to a census of the science fiction and fantasy market — the top 100 Fantasy bestsellers are moving about 42,000 copies a day and generating roughly $4.47 million a month in author royalties combined. Science Fiction is 18 months into a genuine rebound of its own. By every top-line metric, readers have never wanted more fantasy than they want right now.

But underneath all that health is a genre going through what the report calls "the great dilution." Competition grew 18% in a single year — nearly 180,000 new titles, or about 490 new books published every single day. Demand at the top has stayed flat for a year and a half while supply exploded. The pie isn't growing. It just has a lot more forks in it.

Where Vampires Fit In That Picture

This is the part that matters for those of us writing in the paranormal space. The genre's overall health doesn't distribute evenly across subgenres — it never does. Some categories are surfing the wave. Others are being pulled under by it.

YA Paranormal Vampires falling 106% in a year isn't a blip. That's a category in serious contraction, and it's not alone — Sci-Fi Westerns and Sci-Fi Romance also posted steep declines, even where Sci-Fi Romance still ranks high in absolute terms. Meanwhile, Norse & Viking Fantasy is a case study in a different trap: it still scores as a "hot" category on paper, but its trend line has fallen nearly 40% over the same period. Attractive at a glance. Deteriorating in motion.

That distinction — what looks hot versus what is actually rising — is everything right now. A category can host plenty of past bestsellers and still be the wrong place to plant a new book, because bestseller shelves show you where yesterday's winners ended up, not where there's room for you today.

So Where Is the Room?

The report singles out Cozy Fantasy as the single best opportunity in the entire genre map right now, alongside GameLit and LitRPG, both of which are undersupplied relative to reader demand. Dark Fantasy and YA Dark Fantasy are holding their ground too, especially in cross-category positioning at premium price points.

If you write paranormal romance the way I do, the read isn't "get out of vampires." It's "know exactly which corner of the vampire and dark fantasy world you're standing in, and whether the ground under it is rising or sinking." A slow-burn, atmosphere-heavy dark fantasy with romance at its core is not the same market as YA paranormal vampire fiction chasing an early-2010s trend cycle — even if they share fangs.

The Actual Lesson

Genres don't age. Trends do. Vampires aren't dying because readers stopped wanting to be haunted, seduced, or unsettled. They're contracting in the specific form that had its moment nearly fifteen years ago and hasn't evolved much since. The readers who want that ache, that slow terrible pull toward something beautiful and dangerous — they haven't gone anywhere. They've just moved into whichever shelf currently satisfies that hunger best.

The job, as always, is to be standing on the ground that's rising, not the ground that used to be crowded with winners.

Sources:

K-lytics, "E-Book Market Research: Science Fiction & Fantasy, Premium Edition, Summer 2026," k-lytics.com; Author Media, "The Week That Changed Indie Publishing: KDP Royalties, Book Pirates, and AI Audio Theft," authormedia.com

KL Adams is a literary blogger and fiction writer specializing in dark fantasy, vampire fiction, and paranormal romance. Follow on WordPress, Inkitt, Wattpad, and Ream for reviews, reading lists, and stories that haunt you long after the last page.

Check out my Gumroad course.

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Exciting News!

KL Adams — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I've got a new home for my author updates!

To make it easier to stay connected, I'm moving my newsletter and reader community to BookBub. If you've enjoyed my updates, indie author spotlights, behind-the-scenes writing, book recommendations, and exclusive content, I'd love for you to join me there.

Nothing else is changing—you'll still get the same passion for all things indie books, dark romance, and writing. This move simply gives us a better way to stay in touch and ensures you never miss a new release, freebie, giveaway, or exclusive reader content.

If you're already subscribed, thank you for your support. If you're not, now's the perfect time to join the community.

See you on BookBub!

— KL Adams

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Why Amazon still wins: the real story behind the 83% ebook market share

KL Adams — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you've ever wondered why almost every self-publishing conversation eventually circles back to Amazon, here's the number that explains it: Amazon controls roughly 83% of the US ebook market. Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo — combined — don't come close.

But here's the part that surprises a lot of people, and it's not the part you'd expect. Amazon doesn't win because it pays authors the best rate. In many cases, it doesn't.

Apple Books and Kobo both pay a flat 70% royalty on ebooks with no delivery fee. Amazon's advertised "70%" only applies within a $2.99–$9.99 price band, and it comes with a per-megabyte delivery fee that can quietly bring the effective payout down to around 55% for some files. On a pure percentage basis, Apple and Kobo are often the better deal.

So why does Amazon still dominate?

Volume. Even at a lower effective royalty percentage, Amazon's sheer reach means most authors still earn more total dollars there than anywhere else — because that's where the readers are. A 55% cut of a much bigger pie usually beats a 70% cut of a much smaller one. That's the entire story of Amazon's market power in one sentence: it isn't the rate, it's the reach.

This is genuinely useful to understand, especially if you're new to publishing and assume "highest percentage" automatically means "best platform." It doesn't. The right move for most authors isn't choosing Amazon or the others — it's understanding what each platform is actually good for. Amazon for reach and Kindle Unlimited page-read income. Apple and Kobo for higher royalties and international audiences. Barnes & Noble for a foothold in physical US retail. Many authors eventually go "wide" — publishing everywhere at once — specifically to capture higher rates elsewhere while keeping Amazon's audience, too.

None of this is a reason to fear the platform or feel locked out. It's the opposite: once you understand that Amazon's advantage is distribution, not generosity, you can make sharper decisions about where your books actually belong.

Sources

EarnifyHub — "Amazon KDP Review 2026: Is It Still Worth It?": earnifyhub.com/learning-guides/amazon-kdp-review-self-publishing-2026
Book Builder — "Self-Publishing Royalties 2026: Real Rates, All Platforms": book-builder.net/blog/self-publishing-royalties-compared
Parkbury & Dunn Author Services — "Book Royalties Explained: How Much Do Authors Make in 2026?": parkburydunn.com/book-royalties-explained-how-much-do-authors-make-in-2026

KL Adams is a literary blogger and fiction writer specializing in dark fantasy, vampire fiction, and paranormal romance. Follow on WordPress, Inkitt, and Wattpad for reviews, reading lists, and stories that haunt you long after the last page.

Check out my Gumroad course.

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