Practical tips for starting my coloring book business

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Hi Corvin,

I hope you and your family are doing very well.

Congratulations on the progress of your self-publishing project. It's truly inspiring to see how you've brought it all together.

As for me, I'm starting a new project 100% focused on coloring books, where I can fully leverage my strengths:

I have over 15 years of experience in design.

I work with a full-time illustrator, and my partner is a graphic designer and editorial layout specialist.

While I can also create non-fiction books and novels, this category will be my initial priority.

I have a long-term vision (10 years), and I'm aiming to build royalty-generating assets.

I've left my eCommerce consultancy behind to fully commit to self-publishing. I want to build something profitable, but also sustainable and aligned with my purpose.

I think your tools are excellent, although they're currently outside my budget. I'm very interested in acquiring them as a lifetime deal when that becomes possible.

I would truly appreciate any practical advice you could share on how to start strong in this coloring book category and avoid common mistakes. I'm fully committed to the process and to learning for the long haul.

Thank you for your time. I wish you good health and much success!

Warm regards

Master key3
1 Answers

Hi there,
I am excited for your journey. Cleo and I also started KDP by quitting our full time job and going all in and luckily that worked out well for us and I hope it does for you too.

Coloring books are competitive with AI and so many people doing it, so I would do a combination of very small niches and then some of the big ones. And each book can cross promote each other in the back pages to show users what else you have. You can out your best ones on the back of your cover design too.

I could 100% build a brand and a community so you can easily get repeat customers and also ask them what kind of pages / books they would want next.

I would also sell digital coloring pages on Etsy and other pages and from there promote your printed books on Amazon.

I would also see what other brand items you can sell in a addition to some upsells etc.

Maybe if you create a character for your coloring pages you can sell that on mugs, shirts etc that potential super fans might want to buy too.

With books I would for sure try and run ads at minimum during launch to give them a boost.

And then with coloring books, I would create a tiktok account showing you hand drawing each page etc and gain an audience from there. I think with so much AI people will appreciate and value seeing authentic coloring pages being created and want to support that.

You could on the same account or another account also have one page where you or someone else colors in the coloring pages for video content too.

And of course if you post on Tiktok post on all other platforms that have short form content.

Videos and ads will be key for gaining traction.
And finding the right keywords for your title/subtitle and 7 backend keywords will be super important!!

Hope that helps and best of luck :)

Corvin Van Stone611