About Us - Corvin & Cleo Van Stone

To move some of our unsold inventory, we set up a Google-ranking free funnel and offered a free product or discounted bundle. That brought in a small amount of profit and helped reduce our warehouse fees, but we never sold it all. Still, it was something.

The silver lining? At the same time as that product launch, we had published a cookbook to complement it. We love cooking, and with some luck, the book hit the best seller list on Amazon via Kindle Direct Publishing. No hacking. No ad issues. No shady competitors. It was our first real taste of KDP success, and it gave us hope.

But cookbooks were tough to make. So we drove to Barnes & Noble looking for inspiration. That day changed everything. We discovered an entire world of books that didn't require writing—coloring books, puzzle books, notebooks, activity books, and more. We were floored. That's when we learned about low-content and medium-content books. We dove into learning everything we could about them. We created our own puzzle book software, our own planner and notebook tools, and started building books non-stop. We also published more cookbooks, how-to guides, and children's stories—which did really well. This year, we're growing those into full brands. Covers weren't our strength, so we hired a talented designer who later became a great friend. We even went to her wedding!

We worked 7 days a week, day and night, for over a year and a half. Eventually, we built up a large catalog of puzzle and activity books with stable, consistent income. We also built keyword research and niche tools because the ones that existed didn't meet our needs or were too expensive.

We combined our knowledge of SEO and Amazon and created our own research tool and niche-scoring algorithm. If the score was over 50, it was probably good. If it was under 50, we passed.

We started sharing tips and helping other authors in Facebook groups. We loved giving back and connecting with the KDP community. Eventually, we decided to release our research tools to the public—for free. Thanks to some amazing people like Rebecca Holman, others in the community, and many kind YouTubers, our tools went viral. People loved them and shared them. That's when we realized we had a real business.

We created the Self Publishing Titans website, released even more free tools, and launched a Facebook group to support users. We loved helping other authors and still do.

Eventually, people started asking us to make a course. For a long time, we said no. We didn't like being on camera and felt awkward about it. But the requests kept coming, and we finally decided to try. Our goal was to help others more deeply and show everything we do step-by-step.

In 2022, we began planning the course. It took months. We created outlines, recorded 80 videos, and included over 100 custom resources. We even brought in a designer to help build out the downloads. We released the course to a few trusted friends first—real critics—and the feedback was amazing. So we launched it publicly, and it quickly became a big success. With that momentum, we released our first paid puzzle tool bundle and have been improving and expanding ever since. We continue to publish books and create new tools to support authors—always with the goal of making self-publishing easier and more accessible.