One form of content that people consistently buy in multiple age groups is coloring books. While they used to be mostly geared towards children, many teens and adults in recent years have been buying and using coloring books that are targeted towards kids or adults in order to relax and do something more mindless.

Making a coloring book previously required you to either be artistically inclined or work with someone who could draw. These days, however, that’s not the case. Anyone who knows how to prompt AI image generators correctly and compile the results into a proper format can publish numerous coloring books or pages on many different platforms.

You can generate coloring book pages using AI much faster than anyone could possibly hope to draw them, and for most art styles, the difference will be unnoticeable. If you wanted to take things a step further, you could even use another AI to generate different ideas for the coloring books.

Most platforms don’t mind if you sell things like coloring books even if they’re entirely AI generated, as long as it’s mentioned somewhere in your listing that you used AI to make it. The most major platforms like Etsy and Amazon follow these rules, meaning you’ll still be able to make full profit as long as you mention your use of AI in your description.

Using AI to Make Coloring Book Pages

There are many different AI images generators that you can pick from, such as Grok, Midjourney, DALL-E, and more. For the purposes of demonstration, we will use Midjourney, but know that any platform will work just fine, although the prompts used may need to be changed if you use something else.

The most important things you need to specify for a coloring book page is the art style as well as making sure that it’s purely black and white line art. If it’s already colored in, it won’t really work too well as a coloring book. You also don’t want it to be grayscale, because people might find that more annoying to color in.

If it’s line art, it will have clear and concise lines that people can follow. You should keep the theme and general art style consistent throughout the coloring book. Of course AI will vary the art style slightly, but as long as it all looks cartoonish rather than one or two random realistic looking pages, it should be fine.

The first thing you need to know before prompting AI is what kind of coloring book you want to make and what kind of target audience you want. For the examples, we’ll do zoo animals for kids, a very generic and common topic.

In the example shown above, you can see that with a very simple prompt, you can generate some workable images. This particular one was the best out of the bunch, but Midjourney provides four different images each time it’s prompted, which can come in handy in its own right.

If you put in a more general prompt, such as just asking for animals, it will produce a greater variety of images which can help you fill out more pages in your coloring book, which in turn is more appealing and helps you fetch a higher price.

Here, you can see that the top two share a fairly similar style, so these two images would work perfectly as a two-page spread in a coloring book. If you don’t mind mixing up styles, the one on the bottom left would work well, too.

You wouldn’t want to use images like the one on the bottom right, because the entire background is blacked out. You want to be sure to give the people buying your coloring books as much room for creativity as possible, and not being able to color in the background would be a downside for many.

Touch Up Images to Fix AI Mistakes

Touching up any images that AI generates isn’t necessary, but it may separate you from the crowd and make your coloring books far more appealing. AI can often times mess up small details, and with some minor work in a program like Photoshop, you can fix these mistakes to avoid any negative reviews.

Take this image below, for example. It did a fairly good job of making some cartoonish fish in a coral reef, but there are a few issues. One of the bubbles looks like an eye, there are a few floating pieces of coral, and the stripes on one of the fish look a bit strange.

With just a few minor adjustments and a couple of minutes in Photoshop, we can fix these somewhat distracting problems. This makes it seem a lot less AI generated, and will result in a generally more positive experience for your buyers.

Although rare, AI can also sometimes unintentionally generate something that could be seen as offensive or inappropriate. It might not be outright, it might be something like branches in the background arranged just in the wrong way or any small detail that was misplaced.

In such cases, it would be best to touch it up manually in order to avoid any controversy or negative reviews. The last thing you would want while building up a side business is a ton of negative exposure because AI made an easily fixable mistake.

Coloring book images should be particularly easy to touch up since they’re usually very simple lines and are also black and white. If you were working with a lot of different shades and colors, then it might be more difficult to fix.

If you’re particularly strapped for time, and you think it may be too time consuming to edit each page, you could just ensure that there’s nothing glaringly wrong with your images and send it out as is.

Making slight modifications and touch-ups is a great way to ensure that you have plenty of positive reviews, but small mistakes in something like a kid’s coloring book will largely go unnoticed.

Sell Online Across Various Platforms

One of the best ways to ensure that you’re maximizing your profit potential is by selling your coloring books across multiple different platforms as well as in different formats. If you do it right, you’ll see much more business than you would by just staying on one single platform.

For example, many people default to something like Etsy for their books. You can sell them printed or as printable files, and Etsy does allow AI generated content as long as it’s specified that it is such.

If you only stuck to Etsy, though, you would be limiting yourself greatly. If you sell on Etsy and Amazon, and a few other websites, you’re effectively casting a much larger net. No matter which website people default to, they will be able to find your book.

Another thing you should consider is using the same coloring book and reformat it to fit a few other niches. For example, let’s say you had a coloring book for different underwater animals. Instead of only selling it as a coloring book, you can add some things to sell it separately for different people.

You could go through and make each page a paint-by-number format, giving you a second product with minimal effort. You can also add in things like blank word spaces to make it a vocabulary book or writing practice tool for kids.

These will appeal to slightly different niches, even though the images are the same. Teachers, for example, might not just be looking for coloring books, but instead would like something that teaches students how to write words like “coral” or “fish” while also allowing them to color them in.

By using the same images for multiple different kinds of books and selling across different platforms, you can go from one or two listings to 10 or more. They’ll all appeal to different groups of people, and in doing so will increase your profits with minimal effort on your part.

Make sure that each platform you use is okay with uploading AI generated content. Most platforms allow it as long as you specify it in the description, but you need to be sure. If you upload it somewhere that doesn’t allow it, you can suffer some serious consequences.

Ongoing Coloring Book Trends

In order to have the best chance at succeeding with this business, you need to stay up to date on common trends in coloring books. While many of them are constants, especially for younger kids, there are certain trends that appeal to adults or older children.

Making coloring books for young kids is likely the easiest option, though it also has the most competition. Kid’s coloring books often feature very consistent themes, such as animals or sometimes different holidays like Christmas or Halloween.

Adult coloring books have a much broader spectrum of themes, since most adults have much more differing tastes between one another. This also allows you to enter a market with less competition, although you will need to find things that make you stand out.

Often times, adult coloring books are marketed as stress relievers, and can include things like inspiring phrases to help people relax and feel more confident while they take a respite from their stressful lives.

Many adult coloring books also feature less cartoonish art styles, but not all of them. Some adults still prefer to color in cutesy pictures, although more complex ones with more details that they can fill in are popular, too.

Intricate patterns are a common trend in adult coloring books, as well. Whether they’re overlaid on top of things like animals or just the patterns on their own, these provide plenty of little details that people can spend a lot of time coloring in. Mandala patterns are especially popular.

One trend in adult coloring books that was formerly popular but appears to be dying off is the “swearing” coloring books. These usually included swear words in the designs in order to be somewhat humorous and to seem more “adult,” but they seem to be falling out of fashion in favor of more stress relieving, positive-focused books.

If you want to put an interesting twist on it to appeal to more people, you can add in more features beyond just the coloring book pages. For example, some people turn them into journals, where the consumers will do one coloring page per day and write in their thoughts like a typical journal. This can be heavily marketed towards stress relief and mindfulness.

Throwing in things like inspirational quotes can also help you market it towards a similar audience. If adults are buying these books in order to relieve stress, it would stand to reason that they could use some words of inspiration in order to help them regain a bit of confidence.

The coloring book and pages industry is a great gateway into making money online. With AI by your side, you can whip up endless bundles of books people can order – and digital downloads they can print.