How To Self

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;

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.

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 just to take their money.

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 customers 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.

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.

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 coud 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:

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.

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.

What you’ll need;

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 pint 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.

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 you 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, 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.

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.

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;

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.

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.