I’ve written previously about how to sell your own colouring pages but now I want to discuss how to self-publish an adult colouring book on Amazon! The main reason being that I’ve now published a few on the platform and I still can’t find a guide anywhere that has all the information for beginners. When I was publishing my first book, I had to get information from all over the place and it took me ages. Although this is going to be a long post, it should be all you need to get you on your way! Self-publishing a colouring book on Amazon might seem like a headache at first but one you know all the small details, you can publish one quite quickly. The actual drawing of your designs is what takes the longest.
The colouring book I’m going to refer to as an example in this guide is my new Animal Faces: Mindful Colouring Book For Adults. It was the first colouring book that I really took seriously after publishing a couple of ‘proof of concept’ colouring books to Amazon that I used to gain experience with the whole process.
In this guide, I’ll go over;
- designing your illustrations
- how to translate your illustrations to digital format
- how to design a book wrap cover
- how to create the interior pages
- how to fill out the product page details
- how to self-publish a colouring book on amazon
I believe this guide is everything you need to self publish a colouring book. If you want to and more importantly, if you’re in a position to, you can buy me a coffee using the link below as a thank you!
To self-publish a colouring book on Amazon, you first have to open a free KDP account (formerly Createspace) You should use the same Amazon account that you use to buy things from Amazon so that later on you can easily order ‘author copies’ of you own colouring books. KDP is a free service that allows you to upload eBooks and paperbacks. There’s a tonne of features inside your free account but all we need are a couple of them. Self-publishing a colouring book on Amazon is quite easy and once you have done one, your future releases will be even easier.
When you self-publish a colouring book on Amazon, you’re essentially signing up for a print-on-demand service. That means that every time your customer buys one of your colouring books, Amazon prints them and ships them for you.
1. Designing your colouring book illustrations
The first thing you’re going to need when self-publishing a colouring book on Amazon is illustrations. Of course, if your an artist yourself or you simply enjoy drawing, I’d recommend doing this yourself. That’s because if you search for colouring books on Amazon, you’ll soon realise that there is a trend where people download royalty-free colouring sheets and slap them together into a colouring book to make a quick buck. The problem with these type of books is, A: we end up with lots of duplicated images in these books and B: the books are such low quality and poorly made that the images themselves aren’t even formatted correctly. The result is a lazy, pixilated illustration that every other Tom Dick and Harry is using.
So, you need to decide why you’re trying to self-publish a colouring book on Amazon before you actually start doing it. If it’s because you want to make a quick buck from ten minutes of lazy work, don’t bother. Customers won’t buy your books because they’ll be able to tell you’ve been lazy and hashed something together.
Personally, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to make money self-publishing colouring books on Amazon but the first reason I wanted to do it was so that I could prove to myself that I could do it and be proud of the fact I had created a physical product that others could enjoy. The thought of other people getting joy out of colouring my artwork was something that was and still is exciting.
There’s no doubt about it, designing your illustrations is the bit that takes the longest. You’re going to need to decide on a theme for your self-published colouring book. This is important because a book with random illustrations in it will only frustrate your customers. The book that I’m using in this example is my Animal Faces colouring book and you can see that I of course went with the theme of designing animal faces with intricate patterns on them.
The idea was simple enough: draw animal faces that I thought would be fun to colour and then add some patterns to them.
I tried to put myself in my potential customer’s shoes with this colouring book and designed illustrations that I thought they would find fun and what I personally find interesting-looking when I browse colouring books on Amazon. If you’re not already inspired about a certain theme, have a look on Amazon yourself to get some inspiration.
How many pages should a colouring book have?
This is a question that I mulled over a lot. You want to have enough designs in your book to justify the price you want a customer to pay. My first colouring book had over 30 designs in it but for this colouring book I aimed for 40. For some reason, 40 designs just felt right to me. Many colouring books you see on Amazon will have 50-100 designs but I wanted to keep my illustrations more manageable and with 40 designs I was able to keep the quality of them over quantity just for the sake of it.
It’s worth pointing out that you can’t self-publish a colouring book (or any book) with less than 25 pages on Amazon KDP. You wouldn’t want to make a book with 25 pages anyway because it’s just not a good deal for the customer.
2. How to translate your illustrations to digital format
Naturally, you’re going to need to start drawing all of your designs on separate pieces of paper. Once you have all of your designs finished, you’ll need to think about how you’re going convert them into a digital format.
Raw method:
Most people will want to draw their images and then scan them into their computer. This is fine but it’s worth pointing out that if you do this, you might want to first go over your pencil lines with a thick black marker so your lines are nice and smooth (or as smooth as they can be.)
This is probably the easiest way to get your designs onto your computer. Because you drew them on A4 paper, they should be big enough so you won’t have to do much resizing later on. The issue with this method is you may not get the smooth professional-looking lines that you would if you ‘digitise’ your designs like in the next method. They could look pixelated when printed.
Clean method:
I call this method the ‘clean method’ because this method allows you to get very smooth lines, the type you’d find in professional colouring books. It’s mostly free if you have any type of half-decent tablet too. You don’t need a drawing tablet, for example, I have a Samsung Galaxy Tab 6. This is the method I recommend. If you don’t have a tablet, you can still do this method with your scanned drawings. I’ll explain why I like to use my tablet in a moment.
What you need to do:
- Download Sketchbook Pro (free app)
- Download Inkscape on your PC/laptop (free software)
Once you have the Sketchbook Pro app, you can then take a photo of your drawing and then use the pen tool to go over (trace) your pencil lines. This will give you a good smooth base to work on later. Once you’ve done this for all of your illustrations, you can then turn to Inkscape to vectorise your images. Export all your traced illustrations to your computer from your tablet.
Download Inkscape for free
Why this is important: Your drawings will be raster images which will most likely pixelate if you need to resize them later (which you probably will). With Inkscape, you can convert your line art into vector images – the type of lines that will retain their edges when resized later. This process gives your line art a sharp and professional look.
Don’t worry if the interface looks confusing when you open it up. You only need to use a couple of features.
All you have to do is open Inkscape once it’s installed. Go to File>Import and then find your image in your files. Double-click it to open it in Inkscape. All you need to do now is select your images and go to Path>Trace Bitmap. A window will pop up and then all you need to do is click on ‘update’, wait for your image to appear in the preview box and then click ‘OK‘. Now, exit that box pop up and you’ll have a vector layer on top of your original raster image. Delete your raster image underneath so only the vector image is left and then export your image along the right side of the interface.
If you’re not sure which one is which, when you click on the vector image it’ll be named as ‘path’. You’ll also be able to zoom in on the illustration and the ‘path’ version will have super crisp lines no matter how far you zoom in. Once you’ve done this for every one of your illustrations, export them all as PNGs and you should end up with a folder of 40-50 vector images on your computer. All your images will have transparent backgrounds and that’s exactly what we want here. Now you’re ready to turn your focus to your book cover.
3. How to design a book cover wrap
What you’ll need;
- KDP book template
- Canva.com
Designing your KDP book cover wrap is where things start to get fun. When you design a Kindle book, you only need to think about the front cover, however, when it comes to self-publishing a colouring book on Amazon with KDP, you have to think about the front, back cover and the spine. That means you’re going to be designing the front, back and spine all in one which is why we call it a ‘wrap’. Luckily Amazon makes it quite easy for you and it’s a free process as long as you don’t outsource it to someone. That’s why my cover ‘wrap’ looks like a long rectangle. You can’t see the spine because my spine (due to my page count) was too narrow to have any content on it so it is printed black.
Before you do anything, you need to decide what size you want your colouring book to be. I like the 8.5×11 inch books because they’re nice and big and display my designs properly. Go here to download a template. You’ll need to select your trim size and then enter your page count. This is important because Amazon will calculate how big your spine will be, based on your page count.
So, how do you know how many pages you’ll need? For every page with a design on it, you need double the pages. So, if you have 40 designs, you then need at least 80 pages. This is because for every page with a design, you need a blank page underneath. Unfortunately, KDP paper is quite thin and if you don’t allow for a blank page behind each colouring page, the colouring will show through so this exercise minimises bleed-through. It’s annoying that you can’t select a different paper quality but at the same time, the KDP print on demand service was originally made for novels.
For my Animal Faces book, I went with 84 pages because I had an introduction page (with a blank page behind it) and a colour tester page with a blank page behind that too. So, add that to my 40 designs and my 40 blank pages = 84 pages.
When you’ve downloaded your file you’ll need to ‘unzip’ the folder and inside you’ll have a PDF and PNG version of your cover template. We’ll be focusing on the PNG cover template when we create our design.
Head over to Canva.com
Canva.com is a free image editing software that is all online so you won’t need to download it like Inkscape. All you need to do is sign up for a free account and you’re good to go.
Now the next step is important. You need to go to ‘Create new design‘ and select ‘Custom size‘ as shown below. You then need to enter the size of your template in inches. This isn’t as simple as just adding 8.5 + 11 (like you would with a kindle cover) because we’re creating a wrap so you have to take into consideration the margins and the front and back next to eachother. You’ll need to enter the height and width of your design to match your template.
To find out what the width and height of your canvas, you first need to take a look at your dimensions on the template you downloaded from Amazon. Open up the PNG and look at the figures on it like the below;
If we use the example above, the width of your canvas should be 8.5 (front cover) + 8.5 (back cover) +0.125 +0.125 (for the margin at either end) + 0.2 for the spine. This amounts to 17.45.
To calculate the height of your blank canvas, you need to add the height which is of course 11 inches and .25 (for the margin) to get your total so this will come out at 11.25 inches. Once you’ve done this you can then create your blank canvas on Canva and then upload your PNG template. You can then drag and expand your template to the edges of your blank canvas until it snaps to fit. I’ve shown this as below;
When you have your template in position, you can then lock it in place and turn the transparency down so that you can see what you’re editing within the guidelines. The red lines show the area where the book will be trimmed off so it’s important you keep your designs within these lines. You can actually have images that go all the way to the edge but they’ll be trimmed off where the red areas are. However, if you have any text that goes into the red areas, your design will be rejected when it comes to uploading it to Amazon KDP.
There are plenty of tutorials on YouTube about using Canva but you can add text and images (also upload your own) and add effects. As you can see, I kept my design quite basic with a black background, bold text, a few examples on the back and one of my designs coloured in on the front. It’s worth taking some time designing the front cover because most people will buy your book based on the cover. Look around on Amazon for some inspiration if you need to. The good thing about Canva is, that you don’t need to be a design whizz to make something really cool. When you’re happy with your design, delete the template later and save your cover wrap as a PDF. When it comes to uploading your cover wrap and your interior pages, Amazon only accepts PDF files.
4. How to create the interior pages
To create the interior pages, you’ll also want to use Canva as it’s fairly easy and once you’ve been playing around with it for a while it won’t be long before you know your way around it like a pro. To begin laying out your pages, you need to create another new custom size canvas by entering the page dimension so for this example it would be 8.5 inches in width and 11 inches in height. Once you have a blank canvas, you can begin to add a border onto it. I like to add borders (like in the image below) because it stops customers from colouring to the edge of the page which can often be annoying for them and it just keeps everything cleaner. To find the borders, search for ‘borders’ on the left side of the interface and stretch it out, change its colour to black and change it’s width if you need to. Play around with it until you’re happy with how it looks.
If you haven’t yet already, upload all of your designs to Canva. It might take a few minutes.
As mentioned, you need to add a blank page after every design page. However, Amazon doesn’t let you publish books with totally blank pages so make sure you add some kind of text to the blank page but then turn the transparency down on the text so it’s barely showing. This helps with the text not showing through the paper. So, keep adding new pages to your design and add a blank page with a little bit of text after every design page until you’ve added all of your designs.
When you’re done, go over each page carefully to make sure that none of your designs are sticking out beyond the borders. You can resize them and crop them to get them to fit inside the borders how you like.
Something else to think about is the copyright page and anything else you would like to include. I like to also add a ‘colour tester’ page as well as a copyright page. So, again, my book ended up having 84 pages. Canva lets you rearrange your pages so if you forget to put in a copyright page you can easily do it later.
Download both your cover wrap and your interior pages as PDF files.
When you’re happy with your cover and your interior pages, you can then go ahead and log into you KDP account. All you need to do is click on ‘Paperback’ to begin entering the details for your new book. This is loacted at the top of the page;
5. How to fill out the product page details
The next step will be to enter all of your details for your new book. It’s worth taking some time here so you’re happy with how your book is displayed on Amazon. The first page will be your Paperback Details where you’ll need to enter the title and if you like, subtitle of your self-published colouring book. From there you can enter the author details and if you have any contributors. Next you can also enter your product description and it’s worth using the word count wisely. You want to have a decent description that outlines what the customer will get in their book. When you self-publish a colouring book on Amazon KDP, you also need to enter seven keywords that relate to your book and then select two categories for Amazon to list it into.
The second page you need to fill out is the Paperback Content. This is where you can upload your PDF ‘manuscript’ and book cover wrap. Once you’ve done this, you can then look at the book preview which will show you a preview of how your colouring book looks. If there are any errors, you can see them highlighted in red. This may take a little trial and error before you get it spot on but if you’ve stayed inside the margins throughout the process of checking against your template, you should be good to go.
The third and final age is Paperback Rights & Pricing where you can add in your price that you want to sell your book for. You can see what kind of margin you will make in each region and once your happy with it, hit publish!
Once you have self-published your colouring book on Amazon, it will take about 3 days to be reviewed by the Amazon team. If there’s any issues with it, you’ll get an email telling you what you need to change otherwise you’ll get an email telling you that it’s live. It’s also worth pointing out that your description and your back cover can also take up to 7 days to show on the product page.
It’s also worth me noting that you have the option to buy ‘author copies’ which will allow you to buy your colouring book at cost price so essentially it’ll be the price it is to print it. I like to do this before I hit publish so i can make sure I like the way my colouring book looks before it’s available to real customers.
6. How to self-publish a colouring book on Amazon
If you’ve never self-published a colouring book on Amazon then the process may seem a little daunting. The good news is, this method is virtually free so there’s not an upfront investment you need to think about unless you want to buy some high-grade image editing software. However, thus far I’ve been able to do everything with Canva because it’s so versatile.
I you enjoyed this guide and want to see what a self-published colouring book on Amazon looks like, please consider buying my colouring book here.
Hi, Iām sorry if this is a very stupid question, but when you say leave a blank page between each design, do you mean so that the designs are printed on just one side of the paper or that so that there is a whole sheet of paper between each? So is it page 1- design, page 2 ā blank, page 3 ā design, page 4 ā blank (pages numbered like a regular book, referring to āsidesā not physical pages)?
Hi Brida, yes you’re right, but it’s not a stupid question as it can be confusing. You’re correct in your explanation: first page of your manuscript should be blank, second can have a design. Then repeat throughout the book. There is no whole sheet between, it will simply make your design one sided so you don’t print your next design on the other side. This is important because the paper isn’t great and you might see the other design through it if you make it double-sided. So, if you have 50 designs, your book will be 100 pages. Blank pages count in terms of page count. This is the rule of thumb. When using Canva for example, just leave a blank page between each design. Remember, Amazon doesnt like blank pages though so make sure you leave a little text at the bottom of each ‘blank page’ so your manuscript doesn’t get rejected. It’s trial and error at first āŗļø
Is a blank page necessary? or does that
depend on the kind of coloring book you are making.
Hi Anna,
It’s usually necessary as the standard paper quality is quite thin so ink may go through the pages.
Thanks
This was EXTREMELY helpful!!! Thank you so much for a written walk-through that’s easy to follow and jump back to.
Thanks for this very helpful guide! Iām going to buy a copy of your book to test out bleed-through.
One question – I couldnāt figure out if doing KDP means the book will always be also published as a Kindle copy. Obviously a Kindle colouring book isnāt much good to anybody. Are you able to choose whether to publish paperback copy only? Or will it publish it as a Kindle book too?
Thanks again – and your illustrations are lovely.
Thank you for the guide. I am excited to publish my first coloring book. I bought a copy of your animal faces coloring book to support you and to also see the quality of the published book. Thank you again!
Hi Andrea, that’s so kind of you, thank you so much!
I know paper weight is an issue with coloring books. Can we specify heavy paper?
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Hello! Thank you so much for creating this guide. It has been extremely helpful. However, I’m having a difficult time getting the template into Canva. Its saying the png cant be bigger than 25mb, and mine converts to approxiately 51mb. I’m just curious as to how you were able to get yours into Canva as you said your book was 84 pages and mine is 59. So I’m assuming your file was bigger than mine.
Hi Keira no problem! Ahh you may need to open the PNG in something like Paint, save it as a JPEG (which will make it smaller) and then save as a new file. Then you should be able to import the JPEG version into Canva š
Thank you Sean! I’ll try that. And I accidently reposted my question.
Hello! Thank you so much for creating this guide. It has been extremely helpful. However, I’m having a difficult time getting the template into Canva. Its saying the png cant be bigger than 25mb, and mine converts to approxiately 51mb. I’m just curious as to how you were able to get yours into Canva as you said your book was 84 pages and mine is 59. So I’m assuming your file was bigger than mine.
Does KDP only offer one kind of paper or can you choose a heavier paper? I looked on their site, but I couldn’t find any information about it (it could be there — I just couldn’t find it!).
Great step by step, I can’t wait to get started! I had one questions about the shipping cost. Since it is a print book and not an e-book I assume amazon prints and ships the book. With that said can it still be Prime 2-say shipping? and who pays for shipping?
Hello, why is the image converted to a vector but saved as PNG ? the vector image when saved as PNG will become a raster image. Am I wrong? vector image output format is pdf, svg but didn’t see PNG in some online tools.
Hi there, exporting as a PNG seems to keep its shape once converted to a vector.
I love this article! I have been making flower mandalas on my iPad in Procreate. I wanted to learn about making a coloring book on Amazon and found your VERY informative article. I also have Canva! I am so happy I found your article.
Hi, I really found this useful. I am the worst artist on earth, after my pug, and will hire someone on Fiverr to do my illustrations. What format should I ask them to deliver the finished files in so I can then arrange everything in Canva?
Hi! Thank you so much for this great post! I have one question, I have a lot of drawings ready on Procreate, is this a good program to use and then vectorize? I tried using the Sketchbook app but I don’t like drawing on it …what do you think about procreate?
Hi there, yes, Procreate is even better than Sketchbook. Perfect for this.
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Hi thank you so much for this educating article…
I have just published my coloring book and I didn’t add a blank page to it. Does that mean that my book will be rejected.
Secondly my coloring book passed all the publishing stages but I noticed that the write ups on book cover didn’t show up complete before I approved it. Does it also mean it will be rejected.
Iām having trouble with my coloring book. I have poured over the guidelines and fixed tons of things and still get a failed manuscript upload.
I am now trying fixing the blank page issue but I have a queabout orientation.
It say it all has to be orintaded the same way. Al my pages say portrait orientation but some of the pages all the content picture and caption is sideways to handle a horizontal picture. I have seen this layout in Dover coloring books.
Is this a problem?
Hi Maryanna, you may need to make sure the wording is portrait unfortunately. I would also check those books with sideways text are self published or not as it sounds like they might not be. I have not run into this issue myself.
Hi, Sean. Thank you for posting this informative and very helpful article. Do you have any advice regarding copyright? Thanks.
Thank you so much for this amazing guide! I just submitted my first coloring book for review and couldn’t have done it without you! š God bless.
What a great guide- the best I’ve found- thank you for taking the time to write this.
During my setup there’s a “Bleed” option and because some of my images went to the edges of the page, I selected “Bleed” instead of “No Bleed” and it says PDF Only- what does that mean? Does that mean people cannot buy a printed copy and only PDF downloads would be available?
Hi Sean, your tutorial was extremely helpful. I have a proof copy of my first book right in front of me. I have a question, for the ‘Ink and Paper Type’ in the ‘Paperback Contents’ did you select ‘Premium color interior with white paper’? I selected ‘Black & White Interior with white paper’ and my book’s images do not come out nearly as sharp as yours (which I bought a copy of). I am hoping that is the reason for the discrepancy. I vectorized all my images, and on the manuscript’s PDF it looks great. Even the title page on my book is worse than the one in yours and I created that digitally at the proper size, no resizing or conversions at all.
Also, if you plan to edit this article, I got my book with a matte cover. However, because I am using an image for a matte cover it gives the cover a strange texture. So, if you didn’t test it before, Glossy cover is definitely the way to go.
Thank you for writing this article, and I hope to hear back from you!