I Made Coloring Books for My Grandkids, Then Published Them on Amazon

Between August 20 and September 16 I published five coloring books on Amazon.

I am not an illustrator. I have never taken an art class. Publishing them cost me nothing.

I want to tell you how that happened, because the way it started is not the way these stories usually get told.

It did not start as a business idea

It started with my grandkids.

I wanted to make them something. Not buy them something. Make it.

So I made one. And when it was finished, it looked like a real book. Because it was one.

That is the part nobody tells you. The distance between "a thing I made for my grandchild" and "a book for sale on Amazon" is much shorter than it sounds. It is a PDF and a price.

I think that gap feels enormous because we all grew up with publishing meaning something else. It meant a company said yes. It meant somebody in an office decided your thing was worth printing. That version of publishing still exists and it is still hard to get into. It is just no longer the only version.

What publishing actually involves

Here is the whole shape of it.

You make the pages. You save them as a PDF. You upload the file to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing, which is free to use. You add a cover, write a description, set a price.

Then you are finished, and Amazon does the rest.

When somebody orders your book, Amazon prints that one copy and mails it. You do not hold stock. You do not go to the post office. You do not handle returns. There is no box of unsold books in your spare room, because the books do not exist until somebody buys one.

I think most of us picture publishing as a set of doors that somebody else has to open for you. It is not that anymore. It is a form.

The form asks you for more than you expect, so it is worth knowing what is coming. Amazon wants a title and subtitle, an author name, a description, up to seven keywords, two categories, the age range if it is a children's book, your interior PDF, your cover, and a price. That is the list. None of it is difficult. All of it is easier to write down in advance than to invent while you are staring at the screen.

What it costs to publish one

Nothing upfront. That is not a simplification, it is the actual answer.

You do not pay to open a KDP account. You do not pay to upload a file. You do not pay to list the book. Amazon will also give you a free ISBN for a paperback, which is the number that identifies the book in the trade, and that costs nothing either.

There is one condition on the free ISBN worth understanding before you take it. A free KDP ISBN can only be used for a book published through KDP, and it registers the book under an "Independently published" imprint. If you later want to sell the same book through another printer or distributor, you need your own ISBN, bought separately. For a first coloring book that you are making because you wanted to make it, the free one is fine.

What you do pay is the printing cost, and you pay it out of each sale rather than out of your pocket. Amazon deducts it before it pays you. So the cost exists, but it never arrives as a bill.

The printing cost is not a mystery number. Amazon publishes the formula:

Fixed cost + (page count x per page cost) = printing cost

For the United States store, as of September 2026, black ink on white or cream paper works out like this. A book of 24 to 110 pages has a fixed cost of $2.30 and no per page charge at all. From 110 to 828 pages it becomes a $1.00 fixed cost plus $0.012 per page.

Colour interiors cost considerably more. Premium colour from 24 to 40 pages is a flat $3.60, and from 42 pages up it is $1.00 plus $0.065 a page. Standard colour, available from 72 pages, is $1.00 plus $0.0255 a page.

For a coloring book this matters more than it first appears, because a coloring book is line art. Line art is black ink. A 40 page coloring book with black interior pages sits in that first band and costs $2.30 to print, the same as a 100 page one. The colour is on the cover, and the cover is included.

Check the current figures before you price anything. Amazon changes them, and the numbers above are what they were when I wrote this.

How the money is actually worked out

Amazon pays you a percentage of your list price, minus the printing cost. The formula is published and it is short:

(Royalty rate x list price) - printing costs = royalty

The royalty rate is the part most people get wrong, and it changed. On Amazon.com there are now two rates rather than one. A paperback listed at $9.99 or above earns 60 percent. A paperback listed below $9.99 earns 50 percent.

That threshold is the single most useful number in this whole article, because it sits exactly where a first-time publisher's instinct puts them. When you are nervous about whether anyone will buy your book, the urge is to price it low. Pricing it at $8.99 to be safe does not just lose you a dollar of list price. It moves the whole book down to the lower rate.

Run the arithmetic on a 40 page black ink paperback, printing cost $2.30.

At $9.99 the sum is 0.60 x 9.99, which is $5.99, minus $2.30. That leaves $3.69.

At $8.99 the sum is 0.50 x 8.99, which is $4.50, minus $2.30. That leaves $2.20.

A dollar off the price takes about a dollar fifty off what reaches you. The cheaper book has to sell noticeably more copies to end up in the same place.

There is also a floor. Amazon will not let you price a book so low that the royalty cannot cover the printing, so every title has a minimum list price calculated from its own printing cost and rate. You will meet that number if you try to go under it.

I want to be plain about what this section is and is not. It is arithmetic, not a forecast. It tells you what one sale is worth. It tells you nothing about how many sales there will be, and anyone who tells you that number is guessing.

The three things that stop people

"I cannot draw."

Neither can I. AI tools make the pages now. You describe what you want and you get something you can print. The illustration work that used to cost anywhere from five hundred to two thousand dollars is the exact part that changed.

This is the objection I hear most and it is the one that has genuinely stopped being true. Not softened. Stopped. The skill that used to be the barrier is now the part you delegate, and what is left is the part you were always able to do: deciding what the book should be.

"It must cost money to publish a book."

It costs nothing to upload one. Amazon prints on demand and takes its cut from each sale, so there is nothing to pay upfront and nothing to carry. I did not pay a fee to put any of those five books up.

"I would not know where to start."

Start with one person. Not a market. Not a niche. One person you would like to hand a book to.

I started with children whose names I know. It turns out that "what would a four-year-old actually sit still and color" is a better brief than anything I would have invented by researching a category from the outside.

There is a fourth thing that stops people and it does not get said out loud, so I will say it. A lot of us think a book with our name on it is for other people. More qualified people. People who were doing this at thirty. That belief is doing more damage than any of the practical objections, and it is the only one on the list that no tool can fix for you.

Choosing the size and setting the pages up

Pick the size first, because everything else is built to fit it.

Amazon's standard paperback sizes start at 5 x 8 inches and 6 x 9 inches, which is the default. Those are novel shapes. A coloring book usually wants to be bigger, and KDP allows a custom size as well: for paperbacks the width can be anything from 4 up to 8.5 inches and the height from 6 up to 11.69 inches. That is how the familiar large coloring book shape is done.

A paperback needs at least 24 pages. Black ink books can run up to 828. You will not be near either limit, but the 24 page minimum is worth knowing before you plan a 16 page book for a toddler and find you cannot publish it.

For paper, black ink books can be printed on cream, white, or groundwood. Cream is warmer and reads well for text. For coloring pages, white is the usual choice, because it is what crayon and pencil look right on.

For the cover there are two finishes, glossy and matte. Amazon describes glossy as shiny, making black covers darker and artwork more striking. Matte has minimal sheen and a subtle, polished look. Children's books lean glossy. Adult coloring books more often go matte. Neither is a wrong answer and neither costs extra.

The listing is part of the book

The pages are what somebody colors. The listing is what makes them find it in the first place, and it is the part first-time publishers rush.

There are four fields that do the work.

The title and subtitle are where most of your searchability lives. Look at how mine are built: "Tiny Town Helpers" on its own tells a shopper nothing. "Tiny Town Helpers: A Community Helpers Coloring Adventure for Ages 4-6" tells them the subject, the format and the child it suits, in one line. The subtitle is not decoration. It is the sentence that answers the question the shopper actually typed.

The description is the place to say who the book is for and what is inside it. Not how wonderful it is. A grandparent standing in front of your listing wants to know whether a particular child will sit down with it. Tell them how many pages, what is on them, and what age it suits.

You get seven keywords. These are not single words, they are phrases, and the useful ones are the phrases a real person would type. "Coloring book" is not one of them. "Coloring book for 4 year old boys" is.

You get two categories. Choose the most specific ones you can find rather than the biggest. A book that is visible near the top of a small category is doing better than a book nobody scrolls far enough to see in a large one.

None of this takes long. It just needs doing while you still have the energy, rather than at eleven at night when the file has finally uploaded and you want to be finished.

What I have up there now

Five books. Four for children, roughly ages four to eight. One for adults.

• Confident You: Fall Edition, a fall coloring book for adults, $9.99
• Amazing Girls who Build and Create, a STEM art and maker coloring adventure, $11.99
• Amazing Animal Careers, $11.99
• Tiny Town Helpers, a community helpers coloring adventure for ages four to six, $10.99
• A Cute Robot Coloring Adventure, for ages four to eight, with counting, shapes, kindness and teamwork, $9.99

All paperback. All under my own name.

Look at those prices against the threshold in the section above. The two at $9.99 are sitting exactly on the line. That was not luck, it was the one piece of arithmetic I did before I published.

The first went up on August 20. The fifth went up on September 16. Four weeks, five books, around everything else I do.

I am not telling you that to impress you. I am telling you because the speed surprised me too, and the reason for it is dull: the second book is far faster than the first. You are not learning the whole thing again. You are just making another book.

The part that actually takes thought

The making is the easy bit now. What takes thought is who the book is for, and what you charge.

A coloring book for "kids" is competing with everything. A coloring book about the people who work in a town, made for a four-year-old who has just started noticing garbage trucks and mail carriers, is a different proposition.

Specific is not a smaller market. Specific is a findable one. Somebody typing "coloring book" into Amazon is browsing. Somebody typing "community helpers coloring book age 4" has already decided what they want and is looking for the one that matches. The second person is easier to reach and much easier to satisfy, and there are more of them than the word "niche" makes it sound.

The same thinking applies to the adult book. "Adult coloring book" is an ocean. A fall coloring book built around confidence is a shelf.

And the price you set changes what you keep on every copy sold. That is a real decision with a right answer, and it is worth understanding for ten minutes before you publish rather than working it out afterward.

How long it takes to go live

Expect about three business days, and up to 72 hours for the book to appear on Amazon.com once it is approved.

Other Amazon marketplaces can take up to five days. And there is one exception that catches coloring book publishers specifically: Amazon treats low content books, the category that covers journals, notebooks and similar, differently, and those can take up to ten business days to appear.

So if your book is not live the next morning, nothing has gone wrong. Nobody is reading it and deciding whether you are good enough. It is a queue.

One honest thing about the timeline

Nobody should read "five books in four weeks" and think that is the normal pace, or the required one.

I had already been building online for a while. I knew the tools. The first book was slow and awkward and I got things wrong. The four after it were quick because the first one taught me the route.

If your first book takes you a month on its own, you are not behind. You are doing the part that makes the rest fast.

What I would tell myself before the first one

Decide the size before you make a single page.

I say this because the one thing that genuinely wastes your time is producing artwork and then discovering it does not sit properly in the shape you chose. Everything else is recoverable. You can rewrite a description after publishing. You can change a price after publishing. You can replace a cover. Interior pages built to the wrong dimensions are the one thing you end up doing twice.

The second thing: finish the first one badly rather than not at all. A finished book that you can see the flaws in teaches you more in an afternoon than a month of reading about it. Mine did.

Questions people ask me about this

Do I need to be able to draw?

No. The pages can be generated with AI tools now and you direct them by describing what you want. What you do need is taste, in the ordinary sense of being able to look at a page and know whether a four-year-old would enjoy it.

Does it cost anything to publish?

No. There is no fee to open a KDP account, upload a file, or list a book, and a paperback ISBN from Amazon is free. The printing cost is taken out of each sale rather than paid upfront.

How much do I keep from each sale?

You keep the royalty rate times the list price, minus the printing cost. On Amazon.com the rate is 60 percent at $9.99 and above, and 50 percent below that. The printing cost for a black ink paperback of 24 to 110 pages was $2.30 in September 2026. Check the current numbers before you set a price, because Amazon does change them.

What size should a coloring book be?

Bigger than a novel. KDP's standard sizes start at 5 x 8 and 6 x 9 inches, and you can set a custom size with a width up to 8.5 inches and a height up to 11.69 inches, which is how the usual large coloring book shape is made. Decide this before you make the pages.

How many pages does it need?

At least 24. That is Amazon's minimum for a paperback, and it catches people planning a short book for very young children.

How long before it is actually on Amazon?

Around three business days, and up to 72 hours to appear on Amazon.com after approval. Low content books can take up to ten business days, and a coloring book may be treated as one.

Can I publish under my own name?

Yes. All five of mine are under mine. There is no requirement to invent a pen name, and if you are also writing or building anything else online, having one name across all of it works in your favour.

Is it too late to start this?

No. I started at an age where a lot of people have decided their building years are behind them, and the only thing that turned out to matter was that I had a reason to make the first one. You are not too old. You are not too late.

If you want the steps

I wrote up what I learned into a short guide, because I spent two afternoons working it out and there is no reason for anyone else to spend the same two afternoons.

It covers finding a niche that is not already flooded, the free AI tools for generating pages, the pricing decision, and fifty prompts to start from. Twenty-five for adult books, twenty-five for children's.

It is $2. I wanted the price to be the last reason you said no.

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