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While drawing my 100 images based on Dragon magazine covers, I really enjoyed coloring the images. I wondered about making a coloring book out of the images.
There are numerous videos on how to make and sell coloring books on KDP. Often they suggested that passive income with coloring books was easy. They talked about finding a niche and how to market the coloring book. Many suggested using clipart or AI to create images. Needless to say that wasn't my goal.
If you were planning to make a coloring book, you should figure out the page size before making the images. Obviously I didn't do that. My images were a square aspect ratio. That severly limited options on KDP. I settled on 8.5x8.5 format. That format limited the distribution options but I'd rather not rework on the artwork.
By only doing one image per two pages, a blank page appeared behind the image. You might have noticed you could see the next page image through the current page. If you placed an image on the opposite side of the page, this would be worse. Ideally higher quality paper which doesn't have this issue would be used. I choose the black and white interior with white paper. Not sure if the cream paper would be better. Color pages had a premium paper which might be better but that costs more.
Recommendations suggested keeping the book to 100 pages or less. With only one page per side, that limited you to 50 images. I wanted a title page and a page that listed the artists who created the original cover. I settled on 40 images for the coloring book.
For images, I could have just used the first 40 images but my artwork increased in quality over time and some images just are not interesting to color. I didn't intend to make a second coloring book so I picked images I thought were the best quality and most interesting to color.
For a cover, I started with my version of the cover from Dragon #122 by Denis Beauvais. I removed half the color from the image and added a title. On the back I put some of the color images along with a little text.
Overall I think it turned out all right. I doubt I will make more coloring books but who knows.