Printable Coloring Book Self Published in 2 Days

by Steve Barancik
(Tucson, AZ)

Fodder for a coloring book?

Publishing a Printable Coloring Book

It so happens that I'm a publisher.

Ask Google AdSense! They call someone with a website a publisher. And like a publisher, I need product.

My successful children's books site attracts 50,000 visitors a month as of this writing. (December, 2009.) They're all looking for something.

Sometimes they find it. Sometimes they don't. The more often I can give them what they're looking for, the more they like me and the better I do.

And a lot of them are looking for printable coloring books.

I'm no artist

I thought that put me at a pretty significant disadvantage when it came to supplying my visitors with coloring materials! But then I stumbled across Gutenberg.org.

The site is a repository for public domain content, work for which copyright has expired. I've gathered a lot of traffic to my site using their versions of Aesop's Fables. (I've even used the site for high class clip art.)

But now I needed a public domain picture book. How about Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit?

You see, image copyrights expire just like text does. And a number of editions of Ms. Potter's work were old enough that I could use them freely.

What I wanted to do was take original text and pictures and turn the pictures into line drawings. For instance...


Free photo editing software made it easy to do. I selected a public domain edition of Peter Rabbit that had drawings with strong black lines. I put the document together in Microsoft Word and then exported it to Open Office's Write, because Write has built in PDF-creating functionality.

Voila! A Peter Rabbit e-coloring book.

Nothing left to do but upload it to my site and create the proper links to funnel existing traffic to it.


I priced my printable coloring book at $2.00 US because I know that people looking for coloring online aren't exactly looking to spend a bunch. I set up my payment with PayPal and end up netting $1.64 per purchase.

All for what was essentially a day and a half's work. If they do as well as I expect, I might create more and sell them as a package as well as individually.

Want to see the pitch page? Here you go:

Printable Coloring Book: The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

What I practice is really a different kind of self publishing. Rather than start with the product and try to find an audience, I pretty much start with the audience and try to find the product!

Maybe that means I'm more capitalist than artist, but I can live with it.

Oh, and here's another way I've repackaged Peter Rabbit, this time for writers.