Numerous publications on RNA-seq have demonstrated the power of next generation sequencing technologies for transcriptome analysis. Vendor-specific protocols used for RNA library construction often require at least 100ng of total RNA. However, under certain conditions much less RNA is available for library construction. In these cases, effective transcriptome profiling requires library construction from subnanogram amounts of RNA. Several commercial RNA amplification kits are available for amplification prior to library construction for next-generation sequencing, but these kits have not been comprehensively field evaluated for accuracy and performance of RNA-Seq for picogram amounts of RNA. To address this, four types of amplification kits were tested using a commercially available reference RNA over a range of concentrations from 5 ng to 50 pg. The reference RNA used was also spiked with a control pool of RNA molecules in order to further evaluate quantitative recovery of input material. Additional control data sets were generated from libraries constructed following polyA selection or ribosomal depletion using established kits and protocols. Sequencing runs were carried out on the Illumina platform. Numerous performance metrics were examined and compared among the kits and dilutions used. The main conclusion is that kit selection will depend on the nature of the starting material, apart from simply amount, and the nature of the experimental information desired.