Selling Your Own Drawings for others to color can be a wonderful and profitable product to sell, and we explain how to do it in this article. Coloring books for adults.
Not everybody can sketch black and white pictures that others like to color in. If you're able to, congratulations, you have a talent that could earn you a lot of buddies and perhaps even some cash. There are a few ways you can make money doing this:
1. Create and sell your own unique colouring books for adults or children or,
2. Sell your sketches to others, either privately or in the form of PLR (Private Label Rights)
Watch our video below for the most important points discussed in this article:
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Create Your Own Coloring Books
Decide what age range to target (eg 4 – 6 years, 7 – 9 years, adult, etc) and what theme to use, eg fairies, pixies, woodland creatures, trucks, construction machines, unicorns, military, space, mandalas, etc. Not all books contain flowers or objects. Many are text-based, with words to color in, including some with “naughty” words and others with motivational or inspirational sayings or Scriptural quotes. Create your pictures at high resolution, otherwise, they will be fuzzy or pixelated when they print out. This means you must either create straight on the computer at high resolution or scan your physical drawings at high resolution (300 dpi minimum). Younger children need large uncluttered pictures. Older children need more detailed pictures and backgrounds, while adults and children over the age of 10 years often enjoy coloring complex pictures with lots of detail. Probably 20 different drawings are enough for a children's coloring book.
Create your book as a PDF document. You can prepare it in a program like Microsoft Word or Powerpoint, with one drawing per page, and export it as a PDF. You can now create it as a book on Amazon KDP. Joining their program is free. You will be able to purchase sample copies to check your book is printing as you expected and the books will be printed ONLY when someone orders them, so you won't have huge amounts of money to pay out nor big piles of books to store. You will need to promote your book.
If you want, you can, of course, get a number of your books printed by a local printer and you then store them while selling locally or online. You will be responsible for marketing and selling them.
Selling Just The Drawings
Selling your Sketches privately or as PLR is another option. If you don't want to create and sell books either on Amazon or from private publishing, you could sell your drawings to others who can't draw but who like to create books. You will need to sell the purchaser non-exclusive copyright too (for PLR) or the outright copyright if you are selling to one private purchaser. That means you need to price your drawings at a level that earns you an income from one sale or a few sales.
These drawings also need to be at a high resolution (300 dpi minimum) and all lines included must be “closed”, that is, do not use “arty” strokes or shading to complete an outline.
The outlines for these pictures must be complete, with no holes or gaps because they will be sold as digital drawings that purchasers will want to modify before selling as books on KDP (all work for sale on Amazon KDP must be unique, you cannot take a bunch of PLR drawings and offer them unchanged for sale as a book).
Very often, a purchaser will want to add patterns to a drawing to make it more suitable for an older child or adult or they may wish to color it in to use as a cover for the book. This can all be done easily in a graphics program but if lines are not complete, then patterns and colors can flood into other areas and you will get complaints from purchasers. These pictures are usually sold as JPGs or PNGs, sometimes as SVGs or even all three, not usually as PDFs.
When selling as Private Label Rights (PLR), the sales funnels usually comprise the main offer (usually 20 – 30 different drawings at high resolution on one theme) plus one or more one time offers (OTOs), which are opportunities to sell more items and thus earn more money.
The OTOs are usually backgrounds – the same number of separate backgrounds as main pictures (eg mountains, buildings, fairy houses, etc, something relevant to the main theme) plus a colored version of the pictures, or maybe a dot to dot version of the pictures.
Personal Use Only Sales
If you do not want to sell the copyright to your pictures, even on a non-exclusive basis, you can sell your drawings for personal use only on sites like Etsy, where parents, for instance, can download a picture for their kids to color in or for themselves, for a bit of relaxation.
Selling Drawings
If you can draw, you can use your talent to provide a lot of pleasure to others and perhaps earn a bit of money for yourself.
Madge enjoys creating coloring books for adults and children to enjoy, whether to improve their fine muscle skills or for relaxation and fun or for therapy.
