Image used with permission from artist Jenny Pearson.
ADULT COLORING BOOKS
Coloring books for grown-ups are all the rage these days.
- 2 of the top 5 books overall on Amazon are adult coloring books.
- An adult coloring books has been #1 overall on Amazon periodically for the past few months.
- 994 adult coloring books have been published in the last 30 days.
- It takes about a sale per day to be in the top 500 of all adult coloring books, which shows that very many are selling. The top books are selling several copies per day.
- At least one of the bestselling adult coloring books has sold over a million of copies.
STRESS RELIEF & RELAXATION
Adult coloring books have much appeal:
- They provide stress relief: You get absorbed in coloring the design, getting your mind off your problems.
- They are relaxing. Don’t try to overthink it. 🙂
- Almost everybody can color.
- It seems like a simple activity, yet many of the designs are complex, and you yourself can make it complex with your choice of color. Or you can keep it simple.
- People like to get together and have coloring parties, contests, etc. It can be something fun to do together.
- They make great gifts, too.
EXAMPLES OF ADULT COLORING BOOKS
Secret Garden by Johanna Basford has been #1 overall in all of books on Amazon, and has received national publicity for it.
Balance by Angie Grace lists CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform in the publishing field and is #29 overall in all of books (and #1 in two different subcategories).
Coloring Book for Teens or Adults by Jenny Pearson is among the many new releases. It was published just a few days ago.
There are all kinds of adult coloring books:
- mandalas
- anatomy (cool concept)
- cats
- animals
- flowers
- Christmas
- cultural
- there is even one featuring “ugly sweaters” (that’s what it says)
HOW TO PUBLISH A COLORING BOOK
Many artists are tempted to try and publish an adult coloring book.
- The top books are selling very well.
- As of today, there are only 3700 books listed under coloring books for grown-ups.
However, it’s not easy; sales aren’t automatic.
- 994 books were added to the coloring books for grown-ups category in the last 30 days. This category is presently being flooded.
- Most customers gravitate toward the top sellers. It’s not easy to gain exposure.
- Even if you click the last 30 days filter, there are still 86 pages of adult coloring books. A newly published book will be on page 86. Nobody will find it there.
- Indeed, I discovered some adult coloring books that have never sold a single copy (there was no sales rank).
- Most of the books have appealing designs on the cover, in my opinion. It will take more than just making a great book to get sales.
Yet it can be done:
- There are self-published adult coloring books ranked in the top 100 overall in all of books on Amazon.
- A few of the 994 published in the last 30 days are already selling well (even though many are not).
As always, the trick is learning how to be among the few that sell well, rather than the many that don’t sell much.
I have some tips to help with that:
- Interact with people, do some pre-marketing, build some buzz. You need some early support to give you a few sales in the first few weeks, to search for your book on Amazon through various keywords. It will take some traffic to your product page and sales to help stand out among the other 1000 adult coloring books published in the last 30 days, and the 3700 (and rapidly growing) other adult coloring books.
- Study other successful adult coloring books. You want to see a few bestsellers to try to understand why they sell. Look at a few that don’t sell to try to learn the difference. Check out books that are selling that either list CreateSpace or a publisher you’ve never heard of, as they gained traction without the support of a giant publisher. Check out books that were recently published that somehow managed to get early sales.
- In your research, look at cover design ideas (layout, color schemes, font styles), product descriptions, front matter, thickness and darkness of the lines used in the designs, categories the books are listed in, even author biographies. Customers are checking out other books, so you should know what customers will see.
- What’s your angle? What makes your book unique? Which features will readers appreciate most? Use this to help choose your second category (see below for the main category suggestion) and to choose one or two of your keywords. It will help differentiate your book from others (starting with the title and cover image). It will give you ways to get discovered, e.g. when people search for “cats,” or “aliens,” or “fairies,” or whatever it is that makes your book unique. Remember to play your angle in your marketing (beginning with your description, and in your personal interactions, too).
- Make copies of sample pages. These are valuable marketing assets. (Be sure to put the book title and author name somewhere on the page, but unobtrusively.) Distribute these to senior centers and all kinds of local organizations where people may appreciate this stress relief activity. Put a free PDF of one or two pages on your author website or blog.
- Learn other marketing techniques and interact with your target audience. For example, you can organize coloring events for adults.
- Look for local support in small bookstores and other stores that aren’t primarily bookstores (bring some evidence that adult coloring books are really hot right now).
- If you self-publish through CreateSpace, don’t sweat the BISAC category too much. Pick what you think is best there. But just after you click Approve Proof, contact CreateSpace support and request the two categories that you’d like your book listed in at Amazon. One should be Books > Crafts, Hobbies & Home > Crafts & Hobbies > Coloring Books for Grown-Ups.
- If you self-publish through CreateSpace, you can only choose keywords and keyphrases of up to 25 characters. Tip: Don’t put a space after each comma, or that will waste a character. If you want one keyphrase to be coloring books for grownups, you’ll have to remove the “s” from grownups to make it work. If you want to add coloring books for teenagers, you must choose between coloring books for teens and coloring books teenagers. (I’m not suggesting it’s worth expanding into the teen market. I’m just giving an example of making the best use of the 25-character limit.) Note that any words already in your title or subtitle don’t need their own separate keywords.
FREE COLORING PAGE
Here is a free coloring page courtesy of author Jenny Pearson.
Click the following link to open a free PDF file featuring a cool cat drawn by Jenny Pearson.
Thank you, Jenny, for letting me include a few of your images with my coloring book post.
Feel free to check out Jenny Pearson’s author page.
Write happy, be happy. 🙂
Chris McMullen
Copyright © 2015
Chris McMullen, Author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers
- Volume 1 on formatting and publishing
- Volume 2 on marketability and marketing
- 4-in-1 Boxed set includes both volumes and more
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Excellent advice, as always. I’m thinking of a coloring book as a companion to my children’s books, as I agree with you; it’s getting pretty hard to sell a stand-alone coloring book.
That is a fantastic idea, Nicholas.
Thanks! It’s all got to do with the “established base” thing 🙂
That seems like a good way to do it. You should have initial support for your book. If you try it, I hope it works out well for you. 🙂
Thanks! Let’s hope so 🙂
Interesting stuff. I have some free paper dolls at my site intended as electronic swag.
I just checked them out. Those are pretty cool. 🙂
Wow, Chris, you’re fast. It was mostly a discussion point, but thanks.
I was curious. 🙂
I love to colour with kids. I always tell people it’s a stress reliever. I had no idea there were colouring books for adults too. I might have to practice.
The other day at a restaurant, the whole table was coloring with my daughter. It does make for a fun family activity. 🙂
Reblogged this on Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog.
Thank you for sharing, Chris. 🙂
Welcome Chris – Great information 😀
I received a colouring book & pencils last Xmas – and it’s great. They’re all over the shops here in the UK. I think they’ll be very popular gifts Xmas 2015.
The elves better get busy then. 😉
Thank you for this informative post, Chris. Very helpful. 🙂
You’re welcome. I’m glad it was helpful. 🙂
Wonderful post. I have used adult coloring books for years. Coloring is very relaxing.
Writers can use some relaxation. 🙂
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Glad to have found this article. My wife is an artist and she released her self-published coloring book, Nostos, here in the Philippines last July 31(you can check out here work on her Facebook page- https://www.facebook.com/paolasantiagoclarito?fref=ts&ref=br_tf. It’s been doing quite well even though we’ve been marketing it mostly online. I’ve been trying to get it out in the international market but it has been a challenging and frustrating experience pitching it to publishers.
Thank you for sharing your experience with coloring books. Good luck with your wife’s book. 🙂
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I’m in the process of putting some of the 133 pictures (in 5 books) into the public eye. Let’s hope it takes off
Good luck. 🙂
I do some crazy art that I was thinking about making some blank pages for a coloring book. Do you think you could check it out and tell me what you think? Search beautiful minds create by karl r mchale and let me know what’s up?
I’m probably not the best person to judge art. What you really want are people who draw in coloring books regularly to share their opinions (maybe someone who reads this comment will check them out and let you know).
It’s pretty easy to put together a coloring book and test the market, though. The main thing you need to learn is how to avoid losing DPI in your software (including the conversion to PDF). Another issue is that if you have intricate designs, you want to ensure that your fine lines (if you have any) come out in print. But for that you can just order a proof (or you can make a test book first with less effort, just throwing a minimum number of pages together to reach 24) and examine the result there.
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Great article! I have just self-published my first book, Kitty’s Cat: Colouring Book for Adults via Amazon’s CreateSpace.
I found it to be a fantastically quick and reasonably pain-free process. I was a bit worried about the quality of the finished product, bearing in mind that they seem mainly to deal with the written word, however I was pleased with the product, and have offered at a reasonable price, as not at high-end of market.
I can recommend CreateSpace, and they have plenty of support and forums should you come unstuck.
Kitty Blake
http://myBook.to/kittyscatcolouringbook
http://kittyscatcolouringbook.com
Love your colouring book Kitty!! Thanks for the review of CreateSpace. I’m looking into that and Lulu. So I found this page because I am trying to understand how amazon’s Look Inside works – are we able to pick and choose which pages (art) gets shown. What was your experience with this? Thank you 🙂 Ellen
The Look Inside is generated automatically. However, once it shows on Amazon, you can request to have the percentage of pages shown increased or decreased. You can’t pick specific pages. It shows in order from page 1 to whatever percentage is set.