How to Create and Sell Coloring Books

About this video

(Summary from the Arabic caption track.) Dale unboxes a package from colouring-book creator Ann Mona, whom he credits with building a large, loyal community around colouring books without ever showing her face on camera. She sent five colouring books representing her range, including Mood Lifters, a bug-view colouring book, and a grayscale book, plus a painting as a gift and information about a one-hour training on her website for people wanting to self-publish colouring books. Colouring a page from her book Mushroom Mania, Ann explains how she creates books: some are hand-drawn, others are made in Adobe Illustrator using line techniques, including word-only and mandala books, while her grayscale books start as charcoal, pastel or pencil drawings converted to black-and-white images where the shading is already done. She promotes through a free Facebook live colouring tutorial every Monday at 10 a.m., focused on teaching technique rather than a sales pitch. Instead of giving away free pages, she created a participatory colouring book for the weekly sessions: viewers can buy the book or watch free and apply the technique to any page. She says loyalty grew from those free sessions, consistency, and personally phoning people who buy or even download a free page from her website to thank them and check the download worked, noting about 90% do not answer but the roughly 10% who do are surprised. Her best advice is not to publish one book and expect a bestseller, given the competition, but to persist and do it for yourself. Her worst-advice story is an unsolicited public attack about six months in calling her covers terrible; she says she learned to look for what she could learn rather than take criticism personally.

Key takeaways

• Ann creates colouring books by hand drawing and with Adobe Illustrator, including word-only, mandala and grayscale books converted from charcoal, pastel or pencil art.
• Her promotion is a free Facebook live colouring tutorial every Monday at 10 a.m. that teaches technique rather than pushing sales.
• She replaced free-page giveaways with a participatory colouring book used in the weekly sessions, which viewers can buy or follow along from any page.
• Loyalty is built through consistency and personally phoning website buyers and free-page downloaders to thank them and check their download worked.
• Her core advice is to keep publishing and persist rather than expecting a single colouring book on Amazon or Etsy to become a bestseller.

Episode details: published July 9, 2020 · 12:52 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dale L. Roberts’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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