In this video,
I'm going to show you how to create a particular type of coloring book
to publish on Amazon, via the KDP platform,
that's both easy and cheap to create and is very popular
and therefore profitable.
So if you're in the market to get into self publishing and create your own book
to publish on Amazon, then follow along as I show you how. Now,
if you've not been to this channel before then welcome my name's Paul Marles.
And I do videos on how to make it, keep it and grow it.
And that's your money I'm talking about. And if you do like videos like that,
then please do give it a thumbs up,
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notification of when I produce more videos like this.
So what type of coloring book are we looking at.
Today? Well, it's the short phrase.
Quotes, motivational quotes, affirmations. There's many different types,
but it's those types of coloring book we're looking at. As I mentioned earlier,
they're very popular indeed. In fact,
if we go over to Amazon and have a look at some examples, we can see here,
I put in affirmation coloring books into the search bar and there are plenty
available. Says here, there are 1000 search results,
which if you've seen any of my videos on niche research before you'll know that
that's not too competitive. So if we scroll down and have a look,
we've got this one here with a best sellers, rank of 832,
which is very low. And if we put this into a book sales calculator,
we can see that it's selling between 2,500 and
5,000 a month,
which at a selling price of $6.99,
gives it a profit of about $1.90,
which equates to a monthly income of $4,750 to
$9,500 a month.
Which if we look at the top end equates to about
$316 a day of pure profit.
Now I know these figures do trigger some people.
They say, oh, you know, it's a scam. It's impossible to make this sort of money.
And you know, I'm giving everybody false hopes, but I've said before,
these books are created by people like you and me.
And so if they can do it, so can you. And if we scroll down, you know,
there's lots of examples of these types of books with low best-sellers ranks.
Here's one, 2,113 there's loads,
14,140. Here's Another one, 7,000.
These are all selling well. Now,
if we just take a quick look inside this particular book,
we can see here that the pages,
the interior are quite basic.
We've basically got this quote here on a patterned background.
And that's what I like about these particular type of books.
You don't need great artistic skills because you don't need to be drawing or
creating images or outsourcing images at sort of
great expense to create these sorts of interiors.
And the method I'll show you is relatively simple and is very effective.
Now let's just have a look at some different types of books on Amazon.
So here I put in the search term quotes coloring book, and again,
we've got lots of examples if we scroll down.
Another good search term or type are Psalm coloring books.
Now these are quotes or short phrases from the Bible.
And when I saw this, I started to think, well,
could you do similar coloring books with quotes from other religious
texts. There's an idea for you. And another popular one are,
and I do apologize if this offends anyone, but swear word coloring books.
But I have to show you these because these are insanely popular and profitable.
Here's one with an extremely low bestsellers rank of 181.
That means it's the 181st best-selling book on amazon.com in
the US, as a whole. So that's pretty good,
but all these have got very low best sellers ranks. Now,
when I was thinking of different sub niches within this or different types of
books,
I thought about things like maybe quotes saying short phrases related to
professions or sports or hobbies.
Just ideas for you to do your own research and Amazon to see if there is a
market for those type of books. If there wasn't,
and you can create these easily,
you may want to think about just experimenting and try with those different
sorts of niches. But those were the basic ones I found affirmations, you know,
funny quotes, motivational quotes,
Psalms quotes from religious texts and swear.
Words. So.
I'm going to show you this in three steps, which is getting the quotes,
finding your fonts,
and then putting it all together to create a nice cohesive coloring book.
So in terms of getting quotes,
you could go over to Google and just putting funny quotes, look at images,
and you've got all these here. Now, as I put in here, funny quotes,
but you could put in motivational quotes, et cetera.
One of my favorite sites is Pinterest. Again,
this time I put in motivational quote and we've got all these options that are
available and I find Pinterest one of the best sources for things like quotes.
One of the other sources, you could go to a site like red bubble,
where people create merch, create t-shirts, et cetera. And again,
all I've done here is put in quote and you've got all these ideas for different,
quite types of quotes that are currently popular and trending
on Redbubble. You can also search for trending and bestselling,
like these here. Again, they're just examples. Now,
a common and good question I often get asked is what's the issue with trademark
and copyright around using these quotes and phrases that you find on the
internet? Well, in general,
and I say in general quotes, can't be copyrighted.
That is short phrases and quotes can't be copyrighted. However,
there is a caveat to that in a moment. However, they can be trademarked.
So what I suggest you do first of all, is if you find something you want to use,
is go over to the uspto.gov
website and search.
Just put in here that the quote or phrase that you're searching for here,
I've pushed, put, just do it. Now. Don't want to search all terms.
I just want to search the exact phrase and I'll submit query.
And I will be almost certain that this is trademarked by Nike.
And if we go down here, we can see here, we've got, just do it.
You just click on the live and it will tell you. There we go.
It's trademarked by Nike. So you don't want to be using that.
You can go over to the equivalent site in the UK,
and that is.gov.uk/search-for-trademark, and do the same sort of search.
And you can do a Google search for trademark searches in any other
countries, markets that you're thinking of publishing in. Now,
I said there was a caveat to the issue with regards copyright
and short phrases.
Now I've done my reading and I'm going to give you a link to this document here,
which explains about copyright.
If the particular phrase conjures up a particular image,
or maybe a product,
an example given is the phrase ET phone home.
Now I'm not checked that for trademark, but if it wasn't trademarked,
you may go, okay, that's fine I can use it.
because you can't in general copyright a phrase. However,
they say if it conjures up a specific image of something
in particular, then that could well be copyrighted and ET phone home,
conjures up the image or the film, ET whcih waspublished,
which was created many years ago in the eighties.
So in that respect, that particular phrase would be copyrighted.
So it is a bit of a gray area.
Now what I suggest doing is if you do have a phrase and you feel you really must
use it, but you're not sure, then my suggestion is consult a copyright lawyer.
So now we've picked our quotes or you've picked some quotes.
We want some good fonts. Now in general,
a lot of these coloring books use script or handwriting type fonts.
Now what you can do is go to Google and just search for free fonts.
And you've got these websites here. Now, what you need to make sure,
is when you pick a font is that you have commercial use.
Now some fonts may find are in the public domain, such as this one here,
but you'll find that others are free only for commercial use,
like this one here.
And in which case you would have to buy the commercial license.
NoI if you're using things like Adobe illustrator you'll find that the fonts
there you can use. And I think that's the same for fonts.
You find on Microsoft Word. You can use those commercially.
If you're worried about commercial licenses and you want to pick a font that's
not on Adobe or Microsoft, then a good,
and this is a resource I use is Creative Fabrica because then, you know,
you've got the commercial license to use these and I just searched for script
font and we've got pages and pages of options. Now,
Creative Fabrica will also be useful for the patterned background that we're
going to be using later.
But you can find similar sites that provide these different graphics and fonts.
Things like designbundles is another website I've used, but Creative Fabrica.
I do have an account with these which I've had for nearly a year
and are great for fonts, graphics. And then also KDP interiors.
I'll leave the link to it down below. Now,
if you really wanted to splash out and get something bespoke,
you could go over to fiverr.com. And I put in here a phrase coloring book,
and there are people that will create your interiors for you with quotes on
various backgrounds. And here's one I saw,
which I quite like the look of this is sort of a doodle style coloring book with
a quote in the middle. And they say,
they'll create a basic page for six Australian dollars and 74 cents
beause I'm in Australia. However, if you wanted this for commercial use,
because you can see this is not ticked there,
it would cost 20 Australian dollars, which is about, I think,
around about 15 us dollars. So if you're doing a 60 page coloring book,
you'd need about 30 images because often you have a blank page because of bleed
of coloring pens going through the page. So 30 at that price,
you're looking at around about 450 us dollars which would obviously
save you a lot of time doing it yourself.
And it's the same with a lot of these creations of books,
any type of book you can take, pay for shortcuts.
And so you pay the money, but it will save you time,
but there are free options available. It just takes your time.
And what I'm going to show you now is a free option. Now,
the software to use to create these interiors needs to be vector
editing software. I'm going to be using Affinity Designer today.
Other software is Adobe Illustrator.
Free versions are Inkscape and Gravit Designer.
Now Gravit Designer only has basic functions in the free version.
If you wanted extra functions, you'd have to pay for the pro version.
What I'm going to show you today, you can easily do in the,
in the free basic version.
So let's open Affinity Designer,
and that's just a basic quote I'm going to be using today.
Create a life you love.
Now this is just in a basic arial font. So first of all,
I'm going to put a bounding box around all these words,
and we're going to change the font to brushscript.
Now they're not really aligned in the center. So again,
another bounding box around all the words,
click on this box at the top or wherever it is on whatever software you're using
and just click align horizontally.
Now we want people to be able to color in these letters. So again,
another bounding box around all the letters. Now,
up here in the top right-hand corner.
We have options for stroke and we have options for fill color. Again,
you'll have similar on whatever software you use.
So we want our fill color to be white. Move this slider over.
Now you'll see our words disappear and we want our stroke to be black.
So I'm just going to click, move our slider along to black.
Now you can see we've got our outlined words.
Now you can adjust the size of the stroke. You can make it really thick.
That's no good. Or really thin too. It almost disappears.
I'm just going to set this at three for the moment,
because I think that will work well.
Now what we need next is a background.
So I'm just going to go back to Creative Fabrica.
I put in floral patterns and we've got these here,
which are actually designed for coloring book pages.
So if I click on this option and just click on download. Now,
you'll notice we've got full print on demand usage allowed,
so we can use these in books. So I've downloaded that.
Go back to Affinity Designer and from wherever it's downloaded,
you just drag that onto the page.
And we're going to move that into position and just holding down command or
control is going to drag that so it covers the page.
Now that's crippling our letters.
So on the right-hand side where we have our layers box,
we're just going to drag that to the bottom.
So now we have our words over our patterns background.
It looks okay, but it does look a bit messy. So we're going to create an effect,
which I think you'll like. So for the moment, I'm just going to switch off.
Just going to click this ticket just to switch off our colored background.
Now I'm going to highlight all our words again,
or put a bounding box around it.
And I'm going to click on command C or control C to copy and then
command V or control V to paste.
And then I want to group all the layers together in this particular layer.
So I'm going to click on command G or control G to group.
And I'm going to get just untick all the layers of our letters like,
so, and this leaves our group here.
Now what we'll want to do is click on our color box.
We want our fill this time to be black. So I'll click on the black.
Now we go over to the stroke tab and we're going to increase our
stroke size and you can see it gets larger and larger and
eventually all joins together. Like so.
I'm just going to reduce that ever so slightly. Like so.
Next thing is command C or control C to copy. And again,
command V control V to paste.
Now make sure you've got the top layer highlighted.
So that's the bottom layer and we've got the top layer highlighted.
We're going to make the stroke color white so move our
slider across. Now,
what we need to do is to drag those two layers that we've grouped together to
just above our pattern background layer like so.
And then what we can do is turn back on the layers that contain our
words.
And then we can switch back on our background image and you
can see here now it's already looking a bit better.
So what we need to do next is just click on the layer that highlights our
black contoured background.
And you can see there'll be bounding box around it.
So what you do is put your mouse over there, click and just drag.
Now you can see what happens. You can move this any way you want,
but if you position it just down and to the right,
you can drag this into position.
I'll do that just a bit more like so to create a nice 3D
effect, which I think you'll agree, looks pretty good. Now,
what I should've mentioned earlier is the size of the page.
Now you can see that the pattern goes right to the edge of the page.
So this page is going to have bleed. Now,
one of the most common sizes for coloring books is 8.5 by 11 inches.
So we want to create a page size with bleed.
So that would actually be 8.625 inches by 11.25
inches. So what do we do with this now? Well,
we want to create the interior of our book.
Now you can do this in programs like InDesign or Adobe Indesign and Affinity
Publisher.
I've actually done all mine in Keynote and some also in PowerPoint because
I find this really easy and has always worked for me. No problem.
So as I'm on a Mac,
I'm going to go to Keynote and we've got our blank page here. Now,
again, this is 8.625 inches by 11.25 inches.
With Keynote you have to convert that to points on Powerpoint you can just
create the page size from those dimensions itself.
Now we've got our first page here, which is blank.
Now I'm just going to copy that page and just paste.
I'm going to create just four pages.
Now you can keep going if you want to create all the pages for your coloring
book. In this case, you know, it could be 60 pages.
So we could go all the way down to 60. So we can go back up to the first page.
Now what we do is go back to Affinity Designer,
put a bounding box around all our document,
and then just copy, go back over to Keynote and just paste. Now,
for some reason, I cannot work this out.
It's leaving a tiny little white board at the top. So if you find this happens,
it's no problem using the arrow keys or just drag.
You can move that up to the top and then just increase the size like so.
And then we've got our first page. Now the second page,
which is a page behind this one I normally leave blank.
Some people do do these black, so I make them all black.
I don't like that because often when it gets printed out, it doesn't look right.
And you can often sometimes see very fine little lines down there.
And I don't think it looks very professional, but that is an option.
If you choose to do it, I just leave it blank and white.
So the next page you create the image on would be page three.
So you can go through the same process as I've done,
use a different pattern use a obviously a different quote.
But you can create that nice effect that we can see here,
which if we go back to our earlier example of the coloring book,
looks very similar to this.
This looks more like a hand drawn pattern background. Again,
you can find those type of backgrounds on something like Creative Fabrica or
designbundles.net.
And the other thing is I use the same font here for people to color him.
You could use a different font for some of the words,
like in this example here,
they've used a script type font with a what's called a sans serif
font, and they've used two different sizes.
She could mix up the different fonts and different sizes all within the same
image.
I would suggest probably not using more than two fonts unless you really are
an expert in using these types of fonts. It's not an area of my expertise.
There are our books published on Amazon. If you want to learn more about that.
So once you've filled in all these alternate pages with your
images,
you then save that as a PDF and then that will be ready to directly
upload to the KDP platform. Now,
if this does spark your interest and you want to learn more about how to create
other, different types of coloring book interiors,
then watch this video next where I show you how. I hope you enjoyed the video,
make sure you, you do hit the subscribe button.
Thank you very much for your time. It's very much appreciated.
And until next time, goodbye.