How To Make a Coloring book For KDP Using Canva

Creating coloring books to sell on Amazon is one of the easiest side hustles and today I’m going to show you how to make a coloring book for KDP using Canva.

This tutorial will be extremely beginner-friendly, as I’ll walk you through the whole process of creating formatting, and uploading your book to KDP.

I’ll also show you how to pick a profitable Niche that makes you money on the platform.

So if you’re ready for this tutorial, make sure to read this guide all the way up to the end.

What is a Coloring Book?

A coloring book is a book filled with sketches and artwork meant to be colored.

There are so many types of coloring books you can create for KDP you know in the theme, Niche, gender, or demographic.

This opens you up to a whole new world of possibilities for making passive income with this Side Hustle.

To show you how profitable this side hustle is, here’s a UNICORN COLORING BOOK that has gotten 20,900 reviews from just one book at a price point of $4.99.

Since Only 38% of buyers on Amazon actually leave reviews, we can confidently say that this seller has made sales double the amount of reviews they’re getting.

This seller has made six-figure (Over $100,000 in profit) from selling this single coloring book which can be replicated using Canva in minutes.

Overview of how to make a coloring book for KDP 

The entire process of making a coloring book is very simple.

Below are other resources you will be needing to get started.

• A Free Canva Account for creating your book files
• A Creative Fabrica account for sourcing high-quality Graphics, fonts, and design resources
• Amazon Book Cover Calculator for creating the dimensions for your book cover.

There are 5 steps involved in making a coloring book to sell on Amazon KDP and they include:

• Brainstorming
• Resource Sourcing
• Book Interior Design
• Book Cover Creation
• Book Upload and publishing

How to Make a coloring book for KDP

Step 1: Brainstorming 

In this step, you’re going to be brainstorming the theme, niche, and audience demographic for your coloring book.

The goal of this step is to find a proven Market with high demand and low competition.

One thing you want to steer clear of with this side hustle is guess creating coloring books you think might sell.

You want to make sure there’s a market for your coloring book before you go on to create it.

This way you can guarantee sales and profit for your time and effort.

There are so many thought processes that go into choosing the perfect match for a coloring book.

You will have to choose the

• Theme for the book
• age of age and gender category
• Number of pages and much more.

That aside, finding a niche for your coloring book is extremely easy, and here’s how to find profitable coloring book niches for completely free.

Remember the benchmark for a profitable niche is that it has a healthy competition that you can realistically outrank and a good demand or search volume.

There are so many ways to find profitable niches and there are 2 types of niches you can focus on with low-content books.

1. Evergreen Niches (In demand all year round e.g a Unicorn coloring book)
2. Seasonal Niches (In demand, only doing a time of the year every year. e.g Halloween activity book)

Before you even start your niche research process, make a list of possible umbrella niches and book types.

This way we can work our way down to discovering hidden sub-niches.

Some of the best evergreen niches include:

• Pets e.g Dogs
• Hobbies e.g Skating
• Career eg teaching
• Nature e.g Flowers
• Humor e.g Memes
• Mystical creatures

Some of the best seasonal niches include:

• Christmas
• Halloween
• Thanksgiving
• Easter

Some of the best low-content book ideas include:

• Journals
• Planners
• Coloring book
• Activity book
• Notebook
• Composition book
• Storybook

So let’s say you choose to create a UNICORN coloring book, you will need to evaluate this keyword to see if it meets our criteria or niche down even more to find unsaturated niches.

To find potential keyword ideas in demand, I use AMAZON’s SEARCH BAR SUGGESTIONS.

If you type in a keyword and Amazon suggests other keywords, that’s a clear indication it’s a good keyword with good demand.

You can even use CHATGPT to get even more sub-niches or keywords and once again, see if Amazon suggests the keyword.

I typed these keywords into AMAZON’s search bar and it suggested it. Hence this niche has demand on Amazon.

Write out these keyword suggestions and start analyzing the competition on Amazon for each of them.

For this, you will be using Amazon’s search results.

Stay away from keywords with more than 1000 results. I find it easier to outrank the competition for a keyword with less than 1000 search results.

So once again, I type in my keywords onto Amazon, and right away I found a winning niche with only 318 results, THAT’S INSANE.

Once you’re sure you stand a chance of making passive income with your chosen niche, move on to the next step.

Step 2: Source your book graphics

Once you have your coloring book idea, the next step is to source the graphics for your book.

No one said you had to design your coloring book elements and Graphics from scratch to make money selling coloring books.

In fact, you could be a complete beginner at Graphics design and still make this work.

The good thing about creating coloring books is that you don’t have to be an expert writer to get started.

In fact, most coloring books barely have any text on them.

This means you can create this kind of book without stressing over the words to go in them.

To supplement this ease, you need to make sure the graphics and entire theme of your book are high quality so customers can see their money’s worth and leave a good review on your book.

That said, there are so many ways you can source graphics for your coloring books.

Some of the design resources you will be needing to make this work include Fonts, clipart, SVG, and book cover templates.

Once you have all of these design resources, all that’s left is to combine them in a file on Canva and download it as a PDF.

If you’re serious about starting this coloring book side hustle then you’ll love me for this.

For example, I found this font bundle worth $537 for sale on Creative Fabrica for just $1.

Moreso, you get creative and commercial use licenses to these bundles which allows you to use them over and over again in other design projects.

These bundles are a steal because you will basically be investing in them once and reaping the rewards.

The greatest part is you don’t even have to pay the real price to get these bundles for yourself.

Creative Fabrica is known for its generous deals and even if you have almost no money in hand, here are 2 ways you can grab these bundles for almost free.

First, you can sign up for a free account on Creative Fabrica and download your first 10 products for free.

or even better with just $1, you can get unlimited creative and commercial use access to over 7 million aesthetic graphics and design resources available on Creative Fabrica.

Who said the best things in life aren’t FREE?

Step 3: Creating Your Designs

In this step, we’re going to be creating the PDF file about the coloring book which will then be uploaded to Amazon KDP.

Trust me this is very easy.

You just need a free Canva account to make this work.

Here’s how:

• Choose a dimension for your book and create a new file on Canva.

• Create multiple pages on Canva and upload your graphics/SVGs to each page. The more SVGs you have, the more coloring pages you’ll be able to create.

• Add in-text quotes on specific pages you choose to make your coloring book much more fun.

(Feel free to gain inspiration from other coloring pages’ interiors on Pinterest.)

• Once you have your PDF file ready to be uploaded, you need to first format it for a suitable print outcome.

• Don’t forget to add your title page and copyright page as this is the standard for most books that are printed through Amazon KDP.

• Finally, download your book as a PDF file.

Step 4: Create your book cover.

Wise words have told you not to judge a book by its cover.

I really wish that was the case for Amazon KDP.

Buyers on Amazon are real skeptics about purchasing books and will scrutinize your book quality in any way they can.

From the graphics on your preview page to the description of your book and most importantly your book cover.

Your book cover is the single most important marketing selling point of your book.

You need to make it so good that customers know it’s a good book from a glance.

Think of all the coloring books you’ve used as a kid, they all had catchy covers that made your parents buy.

You will need to put enough time and effort into creating the perfect book cover.

While it’s a good ethic to Outsource this aspect of your book creation process, you can totally get away with creating your book cover yourself.

The way I do this is by starting with templates from Canva or Creative Fabrica.

I outline exactly how I use Creative Fabrica and Canva to create attractive book covers here in this post on how to use Creative Fabrica for KDP.

Step 5: Publishing your Coloring book

This is by far the easiest step of the entire book creation process.

All you need to do is follow the steps provided by Amazon on your dashboard and your book will be published in no time

Obviously, you would first have to create your Amazon KDP account which shouldn’t be an issue.

To upload a new book on KDP, here’s a brief overview of the entire upload process

• First, you will need to input your basic book information including your title, tags, categories, and more. Make sure you add in the keywords we found during our research to make your book SEO-friendly.
• Next, you will need to upload your book file in PDF format and your book cover.
• Finally, you will be able to set your prices and publish your book.

You won’t need to worry about errors and inconsistencies with your coloring book as Amazon will be detecting that and signaling them to you.

Most of these errors can be corrected using your Canva account, so it’s nothing to worry about.

If you want to take this side hustle to the next step, I recommend ordering a copy of your coloring book and reviewing its quality firsthand.

You can also use the copy you ordered on Amazon for organic marketing on social media platforms like Tik-Tok, Instagram, and YouTube.

Trust me, while Amazon is a good source of free and passive traffic, it takes a lot of time to get your first sales and show by marketing your book you should keep it the push it needs to become a best seller on Amazon.

FAQs on How To Make a Coloring Book For KDP