Artwork for a new coloring book.

Publishing Children’s Coloring Books

There are so many fantastic reasons to publish a children’s coloring book. If you’ve written and already published a children’s book, adding a matching coloring book to your sales list can help draw in extra income from young fans of your other publication. Coloring books in general, even without a previous publication attached, can be a great source of extra income. You can also include a link directly to a PDF version of the coloring book from your website or blog as a giveaway to promote your book, website or program. But, there are a few key tips to keep in mind when publishing a children’s coloring book.

You can either create an ink drawing and scan or photograph it at high resolution or create a digital version using a vector program like Adobe Illustrator to create clean sharp lines. You can also use a bitmapped program like Photoshop, but make sure your lines are sharp and clean and not feathered or else your images will look blurry.

Custom coloring book pages created in Adobe Illustrator in high resolution vector format for clean easy to color pages

Find A Good Illustrator

You can create the artwork yourself and hire a professional artist to clean it up and get it ready for publishing or you can find an illustrator who is familiar with creating coloring book illustrations and has a repertoire of satisfied customers to create the whole book from descriptions. Not all artists are familiar with coloring book styles, and even the best illustrators cannot necessarily create appealing coloring book art. Find someone familiar with the techniques needed to achieve the best quality coloring book pages.

Relay Your Imagine Ideas Clearly

When working with your illustrator be sure to give detailed descriptions of the images you want. The pictures in this book are truly the center of attention and it’s important that you give clear and concise details to get the work you imagine. Include a detailed description in your instructions including attire, time of day/year, ethnicities, what actions are being portrayed and why.

Pick A Theme

Themed coloring books are much likelier to sell than any other kind. Holiday books specifically are very popular because they make great, affordable gift ideas. Other themes include animals, activities, meditative shapes and hobbies that can be personalized to different children. For instance, if a child loves baseball, their parents are likely to buy them a baseball coloring book as a gift. Another popular theme for coloring books is making a ‘special coloring book’ that goes along with a previously published children’s book. This is a great marketing tool for the children’s book and can draw in extra income efficiently.

Publish A Collection If Possible

If you do choose to publish a children’s book, publishing a collection of them is more likely to draw in sales. A collection of different sports-themed books or coloring books focusing on different areas of the world are more likely to be bought as a set. You’re likely to build sales more rapidly when you have more than one coloring book available in a specific collection.

Know Your Market

Choose your market right from the start. Some coloring book genres are going to appeal more to animal lovers, or girls, or boys, or sports addicts. Whatever the case, pick your topic and then know your market. You want images that are going to appeal to your targetted kids. If you have children who can ‘review’ images, you’re even more likely to pick the very best illustrations and guaranteed to create a book that fellow kids will also love.

Know Your Target Age Range

Different coloring books are going to appeal to different age ranges. Parents want something that is appropriate for their child’s coloring skills and interests. An ABC coloring book for toddlers should have larger and more easily-colored images that don’t require special motor skills. On the other hand, a unicorn book for older girls should offer pictures suited for an older skill set. Knowing your target age range will help ensure your pictures are on point with what both kids and parents expect when they open up the cover.

Publishing a children’s coloring book can be very rewarding and fun. It is an artistic venture that can definitely pay back in earned income later on. Just be aware of a few key tips when you go into the publishing process and your coloring book venture will be a success.

Important final details

There are some things that will make your coloring book stand apart. You will want to create your artwork in CMYK not RGB. CMYK is the color process that printers use. Furthermore, for the deepest printers black, you will want to set your CMYK to  60C 40M 40Y and 100K. Another detail that can make your work stand out, is varying the stroke width for elements of your design. What I mean by that is, instead of having a stroke that is the same width throughout your design, you can taper parts of the line to accent the artwork and give it depth.

Black and white Children's coloring book art here Barkley is in a variety of scenes this is a picture of all of the pages.

If I am illustrating your book in vector (I typically do) it is super easy to take the finished colored illustrations, delete the colors and make a few minor tweaks to create a razor-sharp black and white line art coloring book from your existing artwork.