This Coloring Book Makes $1,000 a Month on Etsy (Amazon KDP Alternative)

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]So, what does it take to make a $1,000 a month over on Etsy from selling coloring books? Normally, I look at Amazon KDP, but here is a real opportunity for self-publishers to make real money over on Etsy.

[00:00:17]First of all, we need to look at how much demand there is over on Etsy for things like coloring books. And because it's a bit more of a bespoke personalized marketplace, it works a little bit differently from Amazon KDP.

[00:00:29]So, first of all, when you come on over to Etsy, if you search for something like coloring books, you can see the types of searches people are looking for. So, using the little Everbe plugin here that we always use on Etsy, you can see that coloring book kids has an estimated 745 monthly searches. So, that's probably the most popular area for coloring books over on Etsy. So, if we click on that, we can see what the search results look like. You see in the top right hand corner that it's a competitive area because there's over a thousand items with ads. And you can see here all of the different types of search results.

[00:01:06]So straight away here from the top line of search results, you can see that these kind of bundle items work really well on Etsy. And that's because unlike Amazon where generally you're selling a physical product or a product that gets delivered to a Kindle, you can share PDFs, you can share download links, those kind of things over on Etsy. And so you can offer a lot more for your money. So these are all going to be kind of more digital downloadable PDF files.

[00:01:33]You can see here that they're very, very good value for money. So this top one here is a,000 plus pages and it's selling for 9.25. You've got a Disney one here with 13,000 coloring pages for £16. And I really like the look of this one, which is 4,000 plus cute and cozy coloring page bundle, which has 100 coloring books in it. So, if we click on that, we can have a little look at how well this book is doing. And as I mentioned, spoiler, it's making over $1,000 per month. So, just looking at the thumbnail here, it's got 100 coloring books and it's got over 4,000 pages. So, if you're looking to sell digital coloring books over on Etsy, you're not going to get away with just a single coloring book unless you're pricing it very low or it's in a really interesting area. You need to offer volume or you need to offer some level of customization. So, that is mainly where Etsy differs from Amazon KDP for coloring books. And so you can see this, it's got 100 coloring books. They've got book covers for every single one. And then what you'd imagine is each coloring book has around 40 pages in it, which then gets to around that 4,000 plus pages. They've got some examples here.

[00:02:48]So they've got a nice video that just showcases some of the book covers. You can tell that this is playing on the kind of cute and cozy Coco Yo style. And we'll look at the inside soon, but I can estimate just by looking at this that they were probably made using AI. Still, even though I think this is AI generated, it's very good quality for AI coloring pages. And also, if you're spending say £350, $4.50, however much it is for 4,000 coloring pages, maybe you don't mind so much if a few of them are slightly lower quality. And so, you've got examples here of what the insides look like. They've even colored some in probably using AI. And you can see here if I zoom in that they're slightly different line widths and style. So here at the bottom you've got really bold ones whereas here they're a little bit more intricate. So that is a clear indicator to me that they use some sort of AI program to make these coloring pages. But still you get a lot of content in here. And it tells you here what happens when you buy it. So how to access your file? Sign into Etsy in your account. go to purchases and reviews and then download your files.

[00:04:00]So, I'm just going to take a quick look at the data behind this and then we'll take a look inside and see what the coloring pages actually look like. So, going back to the product, it's listed as 4,000 plus cute and cozy coloring page bundle, 100 digital coloring books, bold and easy coloring pages, digital download. So, in terms of the SEO, it's targeting cute and cozy coloring pages, probably coloring pages bundle, digital coloring books, and bold and easy coloring pages. So, when you're listing your coloring books over on Etsy, make sure you're considering what SEO you're trying to target because that's the main way that people are going to find your coloring books. And scrolling down, it's got reviews for this item and it's got this little summary here, summarized by AI. So, everything's using AI these days, but it says here that it's great quality, great product, easy and quick download, great selection, and this has got an average of 4.9 out of five stars based on 28 reviews. So, you can see it's a very good product. And, you know, if someone sees that there's a few blemishes or something, they'll just probably skip on to the next one, seeing as there's 4,000 coloring pages to color in. Having a look at the description, it's just going in on the fact that there's 4,000 adorable, stressfree, fun coloring pages. They are all in 8.5 by 8.5 in, so they're square in terms of the resolution. 300 dpi, so if you want to sell coloring books, you always need to make sure they're high quality, which is 300 dpi. And that generally means that when you're uploading your PDFs as a file over on Etsy, you probably won't be able to upload them all if you're selling more than maybe 100 or 200 coloring pages because the file size will be too big. So, what you tend to need to do is then upload them to a Google Drive or something like that. And then in your PDF, you have a link to that Google Drive. So, we'll see if that's what's happened here. And then at the bottom, they just say that these files are for personal use only. So, you can't download these and make a coloring book for yourself and sell it over on Amazon, for example. And they said here, due to the digital nature of this product, all sales are final. So, no returns basically, which I think is fair enough, especially at just £370 while this is on offer. So, the great thing now is that we can analyze this listing using Everbeby and we can find out a load of data. So, the average price on this is 5.88. So, it's currently at 739 on a 50% off sale, but it's been listed at 5.88. And over the past month, it's had 170 sales, made a,000 in revenue, had £339 sales, and it's only been out for 2 months. So, for people out there thinking that there is no potential over on Etsy for coloring books and those kind of things, there is. You just need to put in the work and the effort to build this kind of bigger bundle. It's had 26 reviews, over 12,000 views, 429 favorites at a conversion rate of 2.74%.

[00:07:07]So, when you first launch your product like this, you might need to run some Etsy ads to try and drive those views.

[00:07:15]And if your conversion rate is around 2 and a half%, don't worry. That seems to be pretty standard over on Etsy. Coming down to the trends graph, you can see here over the last month it's had £170 sales and had £1,000 in revenue. If we go to alltime, you can see that in February it had £470 probably when it was first launching and it started to rank for certain search terms, but in March it did a lot better.

[00:07:42]And then you'd imagine in April it's probably doing better still. Going down to the keyword tags that it's targeting.

[00:07:49]If we search by search volume, we can see that the tags that it's used are coloring book, cozy coloring, coloring downloads, printable coloring, coloring drawings, cute coloring book, adult coloring page, coloring for adults, adult coloring book, Kawaii coloring book, coloring page, and coloring designs. So, that's why I love using Everbe. You can actually look at what these successful listings are using in terms of their keyword tags. And if you want to try out EverBe for yourself, there's a link to a free trial in the description below. But going back to this product, what we can also do is see how much money it's making per sale. So let's say this one's selling for full price and it's got a 50% discount. It costs zero to make and it costs zero to ship. So here you can see that it's making a revenue of $369 per sale, but there's fees of around 85.

[00:08:49]So this is for the US rather than the UK. But even if this was the UK, it would still be making £2.84 per sale. And if you're selling hundreds of these per month, this just shows the possibility over on Etsy still for things like current books. And the great thing about this is you don't have to do anything. You don't have to ship anything. It's all instant. It's all just sending a link, a PDF file, whatever it may be to the customer as soon as they click purchase. And so, you don't have to do anything. So, the hard work over on Etsy is upfront. It's making the product, making it really good quality, making those thumbnails, maybe making a video for the listing so it stands out. And then once you've uploaded it, your job's done. You can then run Etsy ads or drive people to the listing if you want to. But then it's either going to get sales ongoing like this one has or you can move on to the next one and maybe try something a little bit different. But all you need really is just one of these to take off and it can drive £1,000 $1,000 per month for years. So I'm going to buy this product and we're going to have a little look inside the book and see what makes it so special. So once I've added it to my basket and purchased it, all we do is we get this option to download. So, here we've got an image which just says, "Happy creating." And it also encourages people to leave a review, which is a very good idea. And then we've got this PDF file with a link to all of the downloads. And this is what I thought would be the case because they've given us 100 coloring books. There's no way we could have uploaded these to Etsy unless they were really, really low quality, which is not what you want. So, here in this Google Drive link, you've got all of the different coloring pages, all of the different coloring books. And if we download a few of them, we can just take a little look through. So, just looking here at the first one, it's really nice quality. There's not too many inconsistencies.

[00:10:40]And yeah, it's quite a nice good quality coloring page. As we scroll through, we can see all of the different ones. And what I would imagine is as we go on, maybe in some of the other ones, you'll start seeing some AI inconsistencies.

[00:10:56]But to the average consumer, are they going to know that this is generated with AI? Probably not, because it's pretty good quality. So, let's look at a few of these different coloring pages.

[00:11:07]So, we've got some simple art ones.

[00:11:10]We've got some really cute pocket spaces ones, which I really like. So, these are kind of like hidden worlds within everyday items. But when you do zoom in here, you can see a few sort of little inconsistencies.

[00:11:23]You got these adorable little bold and easy catmum ones. So, the AI tool that they've used to generate these is a pretty good AI tool, but there are a few areas where maybe the lines don't join up, etc. You've got some affirmation quotes. These ones aren't quite as good as the other ones. You've got areas where it doesn't really make sense. And that's what I find when I generate these type of images in AI. you do find that the kind of patterns might make some random squiggly lines for example, but I guess it's just good to offer these as part of the package. And then we've got some other images here as well. So this is just showing you a few examples of what's included. And the main thing that they're going for here maybe isn't necessarily quality. It's more that they're going for quantity. So that's kind of I guess what you need to decide over on Etsy. Are you going for bulk?

[00:12:17]And if you do go for bulk, you need to go really big. So this has a hundred different coloring books in there which is going to take quite a long time to create or you need to go absolute high premium quality which is going to be handdrawn illustrated and maybe just something a little bit unique so it stands out over on Etsy. Ideally even maybe a personalized option. So let's say we can create Craig's coloring book for example. That might convert a little bit better than just a generic coloring book. But as a listing, you know, this does show what is possible and the kind of lengths that you would have to go to to make a,000 pounds, £1,000 a month over on Etsy from selling coloring books. Now, I'm not going to rush out there and create this listing because if I wanted to create this, this would take me a ton of time, and I'm not willing to just generate AI coloring books in a matter of clicks. I like to make sure that all of my content is high quality, it's been hand retouched, etc. So, if I was going to create something like this over on Etsy, what I would probably do is just focus on creating these coloring books over on Amazon KDP, create them one at a time and then maybe when I say I've created 25 of them is then bundle them up, put them as a bundle listing like this over on Etsy and just treat it as a little bit of a potential extra income opportunity because let's say you've made 25 coloring books and you're selling them all print on demand over on Amazon KDP.

[00:13:43]Why not bundle them up and turn them into a package like this over on Etsy?

[00:13:48]The only risk is that someone might download them and try and sell them on for themselves, but you do have that in the terms and if you spot that over on Amazon KDP, you can report them to Amazon and get their account blocked, etc. So, yeah, it's a really cool idea.

[00:14:04]It's not something that I'm going to do anytime soon, but maybe when my Lily Rose pen name has 20, 25 books to it, I'll give it a go over on Etsy. So, yeah, that's it for this video. How have you got on over on Etsy? What have you seen that's selling well over there? Let us know in the comments down below.

[00:14:24]Also, if you've not tried Everbe for yourself yet, I've just been given this amazing buy one growth plan and get one for free, which means you pay for a month and you get a month free. So, that's a great way to introduce you to Everbe and see if it's for you. So, yeah, if you like the keyword research options, if you like trying to analyze what other products are doing, make sure you check out Everbe, there's a link down in the description below. That's it for this one. See you in the next video.