Five years ago, in 2015, when Kindle Direct Publishing was still called Createspace, I self-published my first coloring book: “YamPuff’s Stuff“. I had no idea what I was doing, but my coloring pages were popular online and I had received requests from fans to make a coloring book. So I drew 24 original coloring pages and compiled them together. And my first little blue book was born. I’ve written before about the process that goes into making my coloring books, but not really about the long journey I took to get here. It was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, and it was all done in the dark. Would it work? Would it be worth it? I had no idea.
I was pretty devastated when I received the proof copies and found that nothing was as I had expected. The color on the cover had weird corrupted fuzziness and image distortion. The lines of the coloring pages were low-res and not crisp and smooth as they should be. But I would not be stopped. I joined a Facebook group of coloring book artists, figured out the correct format to export my cover for a perfect finish, and learned how to turn my linearts into vectors for those crisp lines I wanted. I ordered another set of proofs. And this time, they were perfect. I was elated!
Sales, however, weren’t great. I hadn’t done much to promote the book besides making one or two posts about it on my DeviantArt page. I hadn’t shared a single promo image of what kind of coloring pages were on the inside of my book. I wanted to keep things “mysterious”. The back cover has no information on it, because a description of what’s on the inside of a coloring book wasn’t cool enough – I wanted it to be “artsy”. As further proof I had no idea what I was about, I didn’t even have a coloring book flipthrough video for this book on my YouTube channel until much later, and no promotional flat lay photos. Basically, I had created this coloring book and threw it out into the void. Looking back, it’s not surprising it didn’t do well. On the other hand, the book WAS selling something like 10 or so copies every month.
And so, when the creative bug bit me again, I decided to give it another go. Carousel Dreams was all about learning from past mistakes and evolving, moving forward. For some reason I still decided to go with the “artsy” blank back cover, but I brought everything else up a level. I promoted the book while making it, sharing images and works-in-progress shots on my Instagram and DeviantArt pages, getting ideas and testing concepts with my fan and followers. I got in contact with coloring book reviewers who reviewed my new book, made videos about in on their coloring channels, and colored in some of the pictures themselves. I put everything that I had learned into it, and that made all the difference.
Since my humble beginnings as a self-publishing coloring book artist five years ago, I have sold over 15,000 copies of my various coloring books. No where near a New York Times bestseller or anything, but an accomplishment I am hugely proud of! And I could never have done it without the support of my fans and help from loads of coloring book artists and self-publishers online. There is a community behind each and every self-publisher!
The crazy thing about selling things online – as I’ve noticed over the years in my Zazzle store – is that you literally never know what is going to work! I poured my heart, soul and mind into Sugary Dreams, which I was positive was going to be my breakaway hit – yet is one of my slowest-selling titles. On the other hand, my reworked re-release of YamPuff’s Stuff – featuring the original coloring pages from my first coloring book, plus redrawn favorites from my DeviantArt account with a total of 46 coloring pages – remains my best-selling coloring book to this day! I basically cobbled it together just for the sake of doing it because I felt the original YamPuff’s Stuff just wasn’t up to scratch anymore. And my best-seller of all time? My Color Charts book. That’s right. The book filled with blank charts for people to record their color collections in has outsold every single coloring book I have ever made.
Way back when I was working on my “Dreams” coloring book concepts – Carousel, Sugary and Flowery Dreams (including a scrapped Galaxy Dreams concept I might bring back some day) I always thought of one day making a Deluxe Dreams collection, one book with all of the Dreams coloring pages collected within. With the release of Flowery Dreams in 2020, during lockdown, I realized I had not only published a trio of Dreams collections but I ALSO had enough time sitting around at home all day to work on a Deluxe Collection book at long last! And so I finished setting up my Ingram Spark account and began yet another coloring book journey. The Dreams Collection.
My Dreams Collection truly is the culmination of everything I’ve achieved wrapped up in one very special book. What I’ve realized making it, and publishing it through a new platform outside of KDP, is that self-publishing is a journey you just never stop learning from. I’d have thought by now that I’d know everything there is to publishing your own coloring book, yet new challenges popped up all along the way. It’s a book that literally could not exist without the journey, and whether or not it proves to be a best-seller, will always hold a very special place in my heart.
