Can PLR Be Used for Kindle Publishing?
Can you use PLR content for Kindle Publishing? This is a common question that many PLR buyers have. Imagine the sheer number of opportunities available to PLR buyers if they could take the sea of PLR products out there and quickly put them for sale as Kindle books.
Here’s the unfortunate truth – in days of yore, this method of making money with PLR was possible. You could sell PLR on the Kindle publishing platform then. However, marketers being marketers had to make a mess of the entire opportunity, as they always do when they try to cut corners and exploit the situation.
What happened was that the Amazon marketplace ended up getting ‘spammed’ by thousands of books that were just replicas of each other. Multiple sellers were rapidly uploading their PLR eBooks hoping to cash in.
The Kindle marketplace became littered and cluttered with shoddy PLR eBooks – and customers were buying different copies of the same product.
Of course, since Amazon looks after Amazon, it quickly took steps to remove these PLR eBooks masquerading as unique content. It came down hard on the sellers and cleaned up the marketplace very quickly.
Once that was done, Amazon issued a rule that can be found in its list of content guidelines: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200672390
More specifically… this rule is the one you should be aware of…
“Public domain and other non-exclusive content
Some types of content, such as public domain content, may be free to use by anyone, or may be licensed for use by more than one party. We will not accept content that is freely available on the web unless you are the copyright owner of that content. For example, if you received your book content from a source that allows you and others to re-distribute it, and the content is freely available on the web, we will not accept it for sale on the Kindle store. We do accept public domain content but may choose not to sell a public domain book if its content is undifferentiated or barely differentiated from one or more other books. Also, we do not allow companion books based on copyrighted works (e.g., summaries, study guides, etc.) to be published outside the U.S. without written permission from the copyright holder.”
Guess what?
PLR is non-exclusive content. So, you CANNOT use it for Kindle publishing.
But… don’t give up hope just yet. There are a few ways to overcome this limitation.
Research
Use your PLR content for research. Since Amazon wants unique content, just use the research from your PLR to write your own Kindle book. Yes, it requires effort since you’ll need to do the writing… but at least you’ll save time on research. It’s a huge timesaver. If you have several different PLR eBooks on the same topic, you’ll have enough data points to easily write a book in no time at all.
Rewriting
Another way to overcome the limitation will be to rewrite the PLR content you have. Of course, your rewriting must be so good that the content must look brand new and unique. The Amazon algorithm probably has a way to detect if the content is unique or PLR. Trying to fool a billion-dollar company is almost impossible because of the resources they have.
Hiring a ghostwriter
If you hate writing, hiring a ghostwriter to rewrite your PLR eBook is the best way to go about creating a brand new book. Always remember to run your book through Copyscape.com to check if it’s unique. Ghostwriters can make mistakes too. So, be extra sure.
There are thousands of dollars to be made with Kindle publishing, and PLR content can give you a head start… but there is work involved.