Creating An Adult Coloring Book To Publish On Amazon KDP

Today, I begin a new sub chapter of my low – content book publishing journey. Since I began this quest back in October of 2019, I have uploaded lined journals, log books, note taking journals, and recipe journals. I have 121 low content books in my KDP book shelf, and I am so excited to add these coloring books.

Adult coloring books are a hot genre. I have been wanting to get into creating them now for quite some time. Even though the competition looks kind of fierce, and there are a lot of really nice ones out there that have obviously been made by very talented artists, I have done some research and have found a niche that looks penetrable. I am hoping to break into it by focusing on a certain type of coloring book with a certain theme I can build upon and add more volumes of the same.

Here is an example of a best selling adult coloring book on Amazon. As of this writing, this coloring book has a BSR (best seller rank) of 389! And most of the coloring books I have seen in my research on Amazon have BSR’s in the hundred thousands or lower, which tells me they are selling well and they are selling consistent.

Just look at the detail on that lion. It’s absolutely beautiful. If you take a look at the “Look Inside” feature on Amazon, you can see some of the inside coloring pages, and they are just as detailed and awesome as the cover art.

Click on the image to view on Amazon.

I have been wanting to get into the adult coloring game for awhile now, but because I am not a professional graphic designer or an artist, I felt intimidated, and I had to do a bit of research on how these coloring books are made. While I still don’t have a complete understanding of how all the designs are made, I figured out how to use free images and place themed, color-able text on top of those images using Photoshop.

For example, I found the below image at Pixabay and used it as a coloring page background. Sometimes, you can find really cool backgrounds to use for free, they seem to come and go on these free image sites. Alternatively, you can invest in a PLR coloring pages pack like this that you can use over and over again to write words on top of or use as-is with different niches.

I brought it into Photoshop, sized my document at 8.5 x 11 (that is what size my coloring books will be), placed some text on top, set the color to white, and put a black stroke around the letters, and voila! I have a beautiful coloring page.

So, that’s one way of doing it. Of course, this is probably the most elementary way, but, I see alot of “themed word” coloring books on Amazon that are selling well. I think the key is, like with any of these books, or any business endeavor in general, niching down. Carving a small piece out of a bigger piece. For example, if my niche was “coloring books for women”, I could niche down even further by targeting “coloring books for women with anxiety” or “coloring books for working women” or “coloring books for stay at home moms”. You get the point.

If you don’t know how to use Photoshop, or didn’t want to deal with the hassle of learning a new program where you can successfully edit these pages, there are super easy to learn online programs you can use to edit your images, some are free, some are paid.

Canva is what I used when I first started creating low content books. I used the free version, but if I hadn’t moved to Photoshop, I would have eventually paid for Canva Pro, because you have so much more flexibility with what you can do with your images, and also there are a ton more images available to you as a paid user. Canva Pro is a subscription based service, I believe at the time of this writing it is $9.95 per month.

If you really don’t want to bother creating anything yourself, but do want to break into the adult coloring genre, there are already done for you PLR coloring package options with all kinds of niches to choose from that you can use commercially to produce your own print on demand coloring books. PLR stands for Private Label Rights, which are rights that give you the option to use a product just about any way you want. Of course, you always need to read the fine print with any license, but usually the term “PLR” is associated with alot of freedom with what you can do with a product after you purchase it.

For example, this Zen Cat Coloring Page Pack is a great done for you option if you want to break into the wildly popular animal coloring book niche. You could niche down even further than that, and just focus on one kind of cat, like an Artesian breed. (People LOVE their pets!) Really, you can find passionate lovers of just about any pet out there!

For more PLR coloring resources, both free and paid, check out this post.

So, while the adult coloring book niche may seem like a challenge to break into at first, I am confident with all the resources and information available online, whether you are an artsy type person or not, you have just as much a chance to be successful as anyone else!

Good luck!

Let us know in the comments below if you have any helpful tips on creating adult coloring books!