I thought picking my top 3 dividend investing books was going to be something that was easy to do. I was wrong there are a lot of good dividend investing books available. However, picking the best 5 out of all of these books turned out to be a challenge. As a result, I came up with a list of three criteria that each book had to have to make it to my top 3 list. Here is the criteria I uses:

The Book Must Offer More than Just Selling Dividend Investing as Good

In other words, the book must not simply be focused on the power of dividends, but must provide some sort of strategy on how to use dividends in your own portfolio.

The Book Must Be Considered a Classic in the Investing World

Just as One Up on Wall Street is considered classic investment text, the book on the dividend list must also be considered a sort of classic.

The Book Must Be Easy to Follow and Understand

I have read a lot of books that simply are just too complicated or try to make things more difficult than they need to be. The books on this list must be easy to follow.

With these three pieces of criteria in mind, here are my picks for the top 5 dividend investing books.

#1 The Single Best Investment Lowell Miller explains his strategy as a simple formula: High quality + High yield + Growth of yield = High total returns. This is further explained on page 166 as, “Remember, we are not trying to beat the market here, nor are we even seeking what others might call the best stocks. We’re trying to create a compounding machine that will be robust and durable for at least an entire investing life, one that will provide equity-like returns with some measure of reliability and predictability over time, one whose income will rise. And because its income rises, the investment will also rise in market value. That overall explains what dividend investors are all about! My main criticism with the book is that it goes into a lot of details on utilities, as these are typically more common high yield investments. I think an investors emphasis should be on growth of yield as opposed to high yield.

#2 The Ultimate Dividend Playbook Morningstars dividend focused book is a new book, however I strongly believe it does a very good job of explaining the concept of dividend investing and how to select quality dividend stocks. Called The Dividend Drill, it helps investors to evaluate a dividend stock on three critical elements; is the dividend safe, can the dividend grow, and what’s the return? My main criticism of this book is that it often tries to sell Morningstars dividend focused newsletter. I have never tried this newsletter but plan to take a look at it and report back to my readers here. Overall however, I am not a big proponent of newsletter services.

As we go into the summer and summer vacations, I would recommend the above three books travel along with you to read on the beach, plane, boat, car, etc. What other dividend books do you recommend?