Before I get into this article, I’d like to clarify that when I say you can make $40,000 a month from coloring books or $10,000 a month from log books or something like that, I’m making sure I got these numbers from somewhere. .
I don’t just pull these numbers out of the blue and say “hey, upload 1000 logbooks and you’ll make $10k per month!”.
You are reading: How to make money with coloring books
no, I like to take my numbers from real life case studies and that’s what this post is about. a real brand, making real money. and it’s something any of us can do too.
If you’re into low content publishing, already publish your own coloring books, or are just a fan of “coloring” (and that’s the technical term), then you may have already heard of Jade Summer.
if not, jade summer is one of the leading coloring book brands available on amazon and in just a few short years has created an absolutely gigantic brand within the coloring book niche. for adults.
I have been researching this brand for the past few months and finding out how they have become so successful.
In business, you’ll often hear “don’t reinvent the wheel” or “find what works and do the same.”
when you hear they don’t mean go and copy someone’s product or design or something like that. they mean copying their strategies. Copy the way they execute marketing. copy the way they have built a brand.
so when I see someone who is very successful, I want to know how they did it and if it’s something I can do too.
let’s take a quick look at the jade summer products available on amazon.
jade summer uploaded her first coloring book in 2016 and now she has 160 coloring books available.
They do discontinue books sometimes that are perhaps some of their older ones that don’t generate as much sales as the newer ones and they are always releasing new books too, so they aren’t focussed on just having a large amount of books in their inventory. They like quality.
Before I continue, I want to show you how I arrived at the $40,000 per month figure that Jade Summer could possibly be earning, and then I’ll go over how they’ve done it.
every book on amazon receives a best seller ranking, which can change throughout the day, week, and month based on the sales they receive, so my numbers are based on the bsr i looked at, at the time when I was doing my research. but it will give us a good idea of your potential income.
I looked at his books by popularity and checked the top 100 books.
I then used an amazon sales calculator to get a prediction of the sales they could generate based on those bsr.
We have total sales of 21,505 books sold per month. if we look at using a $2 royalty that’s $43,000 per month.
First of all, they’re doing a lot more than this and I’ll tell you why. I just can’t tell you exactly how much more they’re making.
one: I only looked at his first 100 books, so there are at least 60 other books with sales that I haven’t included in this figure.
Two: The sales provided by the Amazon Sales Calculator are conservative, so the sales they generate are likely to be higher than the calculator predicts.
three: they don’t only sell paperback books, they also sell digital books, which we’ll see later. the sales of its digital editions are not taken into account.
See Also: 10 Best Books On Writing A Memoir (That&39s Worth Reading)
four – They sell books with a variety of different page counts. some books have 100 pages, some books have 200 pages. books with fewer pages are usually priced lower than larger books. using amazon’s royalty calculator you’re probably making $2-3.50 in royalties on your books depending on page count and selling price, but I don’t have my calculations based on $2 royalties just to be conservative .
if you are earning higher royalties on some of your books, then your income will be higher than what I have calculated.
I’d love to I’d love to know your actual sales revenue (because I’m such a nosy!) but still, $40,000 a month is absolutely incredible and I think each and every one of us would do it. I love being in that position.
how did they do this? let’s take a look.
when you look at jade summer’s amazon page, they have filled in their author information.
I also say “they” because jade summer is a brand, a pseudonym. it is very unlikely that it is a real person.
They’ve included their website address, so we can go there and see what’s going on there.
It’s a very simple website that looks like WordPress site with a very basic theme – probably a free theme. And their website is strictly to promote their books. There’s no generic landing page, there’s no popups or popovers or any annoying distractions to take away from the actual coloring books for sale.
I mentioned earlier that they are doing sales of both digital and paperback editions. if we click on one of their products, what they do is they have this link to go buy the pocket version on amazon.
Which as a side note is an affiliate link, so they are also making affiliate income for sending their own customers to amazon to buy their books!
then just below they have a link in case you want to buy the digital version. click that link and it tells you that you can buy the digital edition of lulu. lulu is an on-demand book printing service, much like amazon kdp, but it can print hardcovers, spiral bound books, and more specialized types of books and covers.
Honestly, I’m not sure why they’re selling their digital editions through lulu when they could sell them through their own website and make a much bigger profit, but maybe they wanted access to lulu’s customer base.
wondering if they would even sell many digital versions? well i recently saw a post on your facebook group where someone was asking about the quality of the paper the paperback is printed on and guess what? many people commented on that post saying that they prefer to buy the digital version because they can then print it on any gsm paper they want.
I regularly see posts in your private group about people buying the digital versions and printing the pages themselves.
On their website, they have some links in the footer and there is also a copyright attached to this publisher, fritzen publishing. So, I took a look there.
this website has nothing but a link to jade summer. I originally assumed they only had the jade summer mark, but there is also a link to the fritzen post on amazon that leads to an author named alexander kennedy.
In the author bio it says owned by fritzen publishing. that’s interesting, it’s a totally different niche of books, but it seems that they are not focused on this brand since there are no recent books uploaded here.
there is a fritzen post facebook page, but it is not active and they have no followers here. there is also a link to eric fritzen, fritzen post manager on linkedin, but no activity here either.
i searched facebook for people connected to fritzen publishing, but their facebook profiles are private or not active there, so they are not publicly speaking about their business on their facebook profiles.
They have a jade summer page on facebook, which has almost 34,000 followers. here they have a “coloring page of the day” where they post pictures of the coloring pages completed by their customers.
I mean, what better marketing for your product than their customers showing off your product.
See Also: Ellie Kline – Book Series In Order
They also post when a new book is published on amazon or lulu.
They also have a private facebook group that has over 12,000 members. in the group, your customers become even more involved in the brand.
Post alternate book covers and ask group members to choose which one they like best. this helps them get their brand and books on point and know in advance which cover will sell best.
They give their group members advance notice when a book is going to be published.
Your group members can make their own posts to showcase your coloring pages, plus you can ask questions about coloring, like what kind of markers to use, or show photos of receiving your jade summer order in the mail.
Seriously, you can’t do better marketing than this. not only is it free, you create this community around your brand where your customers get so involved that they feel part of the brand.
Then they become dedicated and loyal customers, buying pretty much everything you launch. and they are more than happy to run over to amazon to leave 5 star reviews.
now, they don’t just promote their brand through facebook.
On their website, they have a link to a free coloring book. This book is available to purchase on Amazon for $9.99, but if you provide your email address on their website, they will send you a digital version for free.
Interestingly, when I looked at their facebook page while researching last month, they were posting an ad. This ad isn’t currently running, so I can’t show it to you.
It was an ad directing people to that page to download a free coloring book.
so the main secret to your success is building your email list and I would love to know how big your email list is.
When I joined your email list, the first email was the free download of the coloring book.
your email sequence told me about your facebook page and group. and since joining the newsletter about a month ago, I’ve been getting at least 2 emails a week from them.
i get an email promoting a new coloring book or an email asking for an amazon review. and I’ll show you how they express it.
they don’t focus on what book you’ve bought or even whether you’ve bought one or not.
Not only does it ask for reviews, but it even tells you about another coloring book they have that you may not have known they had before you got that email. and you could go take a look and buy it.
These emails combined with their private facebook group is how they get so many great reviews and comments in such a short amount of time.
advise your group members that there will be a new release, so you’re building that anticipation. As soon as it launches, your customers buy directly from Amazon, giving them a low BSR right out of the box.
then, as soon as your customers start receiving your new books, they come back to amazon and leave reviews.
and what does amazon do when a book generates so many reviews so quickly and so well? it will continue to push it up the best seller rankings and put it in front of more amazon customers and that’s how they cement those great bsr’s.
As you can see, these are strategies anyone can implement and can be done in any niche, not just the coloring book niche.
See Also: How to use the audiobook player in OverDrive for iOS (iPhone/iPad/iPod touch)