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Case Study Creating a Belly Dancer Adult Coloring Book
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Case Study – Creating and Adult Belly Dancer Coloring Book
Copyright © 2016 by Richard G Lowe, Jr.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means – electronic, mechanical,
photographic (photocopying), recording, or otherwise – without prior
permission in writing from the author.
Although every precaution has been taken to verify the accuracy of the in-
formation contained herein, the author and publisher assume no responsi-
bility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for damages that
may result from the use of information contained within.
Trademarked names appear throughout this book. Rather than use a trade-
mark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, names are used
in an editorial fashion, with no intention of infringement of the respective
owner’s trademark.
For more information see: www.thewritingking.com
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DISCLAIMER
The information presented in this Product is intended to be for your
educational and entertainment purposes only.
We are not presenting you with a business opportunity.
We are not presenting you with a distributorship.
We are not making any claims as to income you may earn.
We are not presenting you with an opportunity to get rich.
Before embarking on any endeavor, please use caution and seek the advice
your own personal professional advisors, such as your attorney and your
accountant. Where income figures are mentioned (if any), those income
figures are anecdotal information passed on to us concerning the results
achieved by the individual sharing the information. We have performed no
independent verification of the statements made by those individuals. Please
do not assume that you will make those same income figures.
Please do not construe any statement in this website/product as a claim or
representation of average earnings. There are NO average earnings.
Testimonials and statements of individuals are not to be construed as claims
or representations of average earnings. We cannot, do not, and will not make
any claims as to earnings, average, or otherwise. Success in any endeavor
is based on many factors individual to you. We do not know your educational
background, your skills, your prior experience, or the time you can and will
devote to the endeavor.
Please perform your own due diligence before embarking on any course of
action. Follow the advice of your personal qualified advisors. There are risks
in any endeavor that are not suitable for everyone. If you use capital, only
"risk" capital should be used. There is no guarantee that you will earn any
money using any of the ideas presented in our in materials. Examples in our
materials are not to be interpreted as a promise or guarantee of earnings.
Many factors will be important in determining your actual results and no
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guarantees are made that you will achieve results similar to ours or anybody
else’s. No guarantee is made that you will achieve any result at all from the
ideas in our material. You agree that we will not share in your success, nor
will we be responsible for your failure or for your actions in any endeavor you
may undertake.
Please understand that past performance cannot be an indication of possible
future results. Materials in our product and our website may contain
information that includes or is based upon forward-looking statements within
the meaning of the securities litigation reform act of 1995. Forward-looking
statements give our expectations or forecasts of future events. You can
identify these statements by the fact that they do not relate strictly to
historical or current facts. They use words such as “anticipate,” “estimate,”
“expect,” “project,” “intend,” “plan,” “believe,” and other words and terms of
similar meaning in connection with a description of potential earnings or
financial performance.
Any and all forward looking statements in our materials are intended to
express our opinion of earnings potential. They are opinions only and should
not be relied upon as fact.
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THE IDEA
When looking for ways to make money, many of us are concerned about the
large payoff - we’re always looking for the million dollar deal or how we can
bring in $10,000 in the next thirty days.
Unfortunately, this can result in ignoring smaller niche markets which can
actually be quite lucrative. Sure, these markets are not going to individually
generate income in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. However,
properly done, they can give you a healthy return on investment.
That means spending $100 and a few hours of time may result in $1,000 of
profit. That’s a pretty good return on investment, obviously much better than
the stock market or other traditional methods.
Niche markets are often invisible or difficult to spot because they generally
are not very obvious, at least not until you look at them.
In my case, I’ve been photographing renaissance festivals and belly dancers
for about a decade. During that time, I took over a million pictures, did almost
2,000 photo shoots of various performances, plus over a hundred private
shoots of individuals or groups of dancers and festival performers.
I was doing this as a hobby, and in most cases didn’t charge for my services.
I was happy to be part of a group of fantastic people who were are creative,
artistic and giving. During this time, I became quite famous in Southern
California as one of the most prolific and talented, if I do say so myself,
photographers for these two groups of artists and performers.
Fast-forward a few years, and I was brainstorming about what product I
should create next. I’m also a writer and author, and I’m always looking for
subjects or areas where I could write and publish a book or product. That’s
how I make my living: find a market that has a need, and fill that need with a
book or product that makes me some income.
I read an article on the new craze of adult coloring books. Coloring books are
exploding in popularity among adults. They are very popular because they
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are fun, they bring out the creative side of people, and, believe it or not, help
people get together in fun groups.
One of the reasons why coloring books are taking off is adults are using them
as a way to get together in what are called coloring book parties. This is
where several adults get together in a room, take several coloring pages,
and color them together. It’s a fun way for people to enjoy each other’s
company and create something beautiful at the same time.
I didn’t think much about it at the time, filing it under possible projects for the
future. A lot of products fall into my inbox every day of the week with ideas
for potentially lucrative niche markets including creating Sudoku puzzle
books, interview books, and any number of other things. Usually I ignore
these, because there’s only so much time in the day. Besides, it’s important
to pick a niche that actually will produce income, otherwise you’re just
wasting your time and efforts.
One day a friend of mine released her own adult coloring book. She’s an
artist, a very good one, and since I believe in supporting friends, I purchased
one of these books from Amazon.
As soon as I opened it, and held it in my hands, the idea came to me. Why
couldn’t I create a coloring book like this? I’ve taken hundreds of thousands
of pictures of dancers and hundreds of thousands more of masquerade balls,
fair participants, and any number of other things. Surely I could use
Photoshop or some other tool to create outlines from those photos to be used
as coloring pages.
But what kind of coloring book would I create? And who would buy it? I had
no experience in that area.
As I slipped through the pages of her beautiful coloring book, the idea came
to me. Why not create my own from the photos that I’ve taken of belly
dancers and other performers? Would these dancers be interested in
purchasing copies of such a book and throwing their own coloring book
parties using drawings from my images?
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And there you have it, that’s where the idea came from. The rest of this book
is a case study of how I turned that idea into a viable, profit-making product
attractive to that niche market.
Some of the concepts presented herein will be very specific to creating
coloring books, but you should be able to use the ideas and techniques
described to come up with your own products, coloring books or otherwise,
which you can sell to your own niche markets.
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THE RESEARCH
Before expending any energy into creating a product, it is of primary
importance to determine if there is a market of buyers who are interested
enough to make purchases. Not only does there need to be a market, but
the market needs to be large enough to justify the expense of creating and
marketing the product.
That’s where my journey began:
What is the product?
Are there people who will purchase this product?
How big is the market?
How do I market to these people?
WHAT IS THE PRODUCT?
An adult coloring book consists of a number of line drawings, anywhere from
20 to 50 of them, bound together in a book. Generally, these are loosely tied
together by a theme of some kind to make it interesting for particular group
of people.
Because these coloring books are aimed at adults, they need to be more
complex than those meant for children. Don’t make the mistake of thinking
that an adult coloring book means adult themes; quite the contrary is true.
An adult coloring book contains drawings that are interesting to adults.
I started by taking a look at the coloring books available Amazon and
spending a couple of hours researching what the adult coloring book market
looked like.
At the time, one of the better selling coloring books had to do with animal
designs. These drawings consisted of an animal with complicated patterns
inside such as a dolphin with flower petals or a butterfly with geometric
shapes.
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Another one, also better selling, had drawings of beautiful women with
interesting and complex backgrounds. I could see right away that these two
books would be very interesting coloring projects.
Significantly, each of the coloring books mentioned had over nine hundred
reviews, and the vast majority of them were four or five stars. These books
were selling very well indeed.
On the other hand, there were no coloring books at all in the belly dance
area, which didn’t surprise me at all, and only a few that included dancers of
any kind.
ARE THERE PEOPLE WHO WILL PURCHASE THIS PRODUCT?
The second part of my research was discussing the project with a few
dancers to determine if they had any interest in this kind of coloring book.
After talking with twenty different performers, it was pretty obvious that they
were very interested in purchasing this product. In fact, they were quite
excited about the prospect and some of them even indicated they buy two
copies, one to keep and one to color.
HOW BIG IS THE MARKET?
This kind of product is very narrowly focused on the specific target audience
of belly dancers. In fact, since I was using photos of dancers in the California
and Western United States area, the market was geographically limited also.
One of the facts that came out in my discussions with the dancers was the
primary reason why they were interested in the product was because it would
include drawings of their teachers, peers, and friends in the dance
community.
The belly dance community in the Western United States is quite small,
consisting of perhaps around a thousand individuals. The market is actually
slightly larger than it appears because the dancers friends and family might
also be interested in purchasing coloring books themselves.
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My conclusion was that I could expect to sell between fifty and three hundred
copies of these coloring books in the first month of publication, with a small
but steady number of sales afterwards.
HOW DO I MARKET TO THESE PEOPLE?
The answer to this question actually turned out to be pretty simple since I
have about twelve hundred dancers friended on Facebook. Thus, my
marketing efforts would be primarily through Facebook and related social
media.
This made the project much simpler as it was no need to put together an
email list, purchase advertising, or perform the other, more usual tasks
required to get the word out about the product and to try and convince people
to purchase it.
That is actually one of the primary advantages of a small niche market – the
marketing efforts tend to be much more limited in scope than with larger
markets.
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CREATING THE PRODUCT
Now that I determined that there was a market for belly dancer coloring
books, albeit a small one, I decided to move ahead with creating the product.
Obviously, the most important part of a coloring book is the drawings them-
selves. The need to keep the entire effort inexpensive introduced several
challenges during the creation of the book. Additionally, since I’m also a con-
sultant and my time is both limited and valuable, I couldn’t spend a lot of time
creating drawings.
Second, a good, eye-catching cover is vital in order to get sales. However,
since my marketing efforts were to be aimed at friends and dancers who
already had an interest in the product, the cover was not as important as it
would normally be.
PERMISSIONS
I selected photographs of about forty different dancers for total of forty-eight
images. A few dancers had more than one drawing in the book.
Before sending the photographs to the artist, it was necessary to obtain per-
mission from each dancer. Since I wanted to keep this casual, I simply mes-
saged each dancer to ask them if it was okay to use photographs of them.
All of the dancers were very excited about the prospect and gave me per-
mission right away. No compensation was to be given for the use of their
images; however, each dancer would be identified along with their website,
if they had one, so they would receive some promotional value from the col-
oring book.
THE ARTWORK
My first concept was to create the drawings based upon my own photos us-
ing Photoshop. I had the idea that there must be a filter or some tool available
that would create a sketch from a photo.
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There are filters that will do this job, but the effort it takes a lot of time and
requires quite a bit of manual fixup to the images. Additionally, the drawings
the produced tended to have a fuzzy look to them or, depending upon the
filter and tool, be closer to grayscale drawings then coloring pages.
It didn’t take me long to realize that these tools would not be sufficient for the
coloring book that I had in mind.
On top of that, it was taking me between two and three hours to produce
each drawing, and with a planned total of forty drawings, there was no way
that was going to cut it.
I decided that I needed to find an artist, but artist can be expensive, espe-
cially if higher quality is desired.
I use a site called Fiverr to help me with quite a few tasks that I need for
writing and publishing my books. There are thousands or more people who
have created gigs (services) to perform very focused tasks for a small price.
I’d used people on Fiverr to create book covers, proofread my books, and
create various marketing aids.
A quick search brought up an artist who claimed that he could create
sketches from photos. His portfolio looked good, at the low to mid end of
acceptability, and his price was very good: a dollar per photo.
I wound up getting all forty-five photos converted into sketches, and as soon
as I got them, it was obvious that it wasn’t going to work out. They were
similar to what I had produced myself: grayscale renderings, and on top of
that the images were fuzzy and had a muddy look about them.
I wasn’t about to give up, so I searched through Fiverr again and found an-
other artist, who claimed she would do the sketches for couple of dollars
each. I was skeptical, but figured five dollars for three sketches was a good
test.
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She returned the images a few days later and they were absolutely perfect
for what I needed. In fact, she produced results that were the high-end of
quality that I wanted.
This was because instead of using Photoshop or similar tool to make the
sketch, she actually made them by tracing the photo by hand. Because of
that, annoying background details such as crowds, tables, lamps and other
things could be easily removed from the final product – she just wouldn’t
trace them in the first place. Additionally, she could add backgrounds to
make the coloring pages more interesting.
I negotiated with her and wound up sending her fifty photos to be converted
drawings. It took her about three weeks and all but two of them were perfect
for the final product.
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THE COVER
I wanted a high-quality cover for the coloring book. In fact, I believe in pro-
ducing high-quality products regardless of their price or intended audience.
However, considering that the market for this coloring book would primarily
be reached through social media, it was not as important as normal for the
cover to serve as a way to market the book.
In most cases, people purchase
a book based upon its cover, its
title and its description. They
may also judge it based upon
previous works by the author.
This means that a good, eye-
catching, well-designed cover
can mean the difference be-
tween a book that sells poorly or
one that does well.
My covers are all done by a par-
ticular cover artist on Fiverr at a
very reasonable rate. She pro-
duces extremely high quality co-
vers, understands graphics de-
sign, and knows how to create a
book cover that markets well.
Best of all, she includes revi-
sions in her services, since she
understands that covers may need to be modified over time.
She produced a good cover which communicated well, and after a few revi-
sions, it finally met with my satisfaction.
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PUBLISHING THE BOOK
Once I had all of the drawings back from the artist and the cover created, the
next task was to actually publish a coloring book. I’ve published about a
dozen paperbacks before on Createspace, which is owned by Amazon, so
understand the process pretty well.
The largest format for a paperback on Createspace is 8 ½ by 11 inches. This
is actually slightly smaller than I would’ve preferred, 9 x 12 would have been
better, but that’s the best that Createspace provides.
I created the document in Microsoft Word and set the margins to ½” on the
top, bottom, right and left to allow the maximum space for the drawings.
Createspace requires that any images be at 300DPI (dots per inch), which
is a fairly high resolution. With forty-eight images this created a Word docu-
ment that creates a large document, in this case about 15mb.
I began with my standard template, which includes a header page, copyright
notice, table of contents, and some back material promoting my books and
services.
After that, it was just a matter of inserting each drawing into the word docu-
ment. Since I didn’t want the images to be printed front and back, I included
a blank page between each one. This ensured that each drawing would be
on the facing page of the coloring book.
You need the following things before you begin publishing on create space:
The book – Createspace does support the direct upload of word doc-
uments. However, I have found that uploading a PDF version pro-
duces better results, so before I uploaded the book to Createspace, I
used the save as PDF function of Word to create a PDF format copy.
A cover – all books require covers, and a paperback requires both a
front and back cover. For most books, I would’ve spent the time to
create a nice back cover with a synopsis of the book, a few drawings,
anything else necessary for marketing purposes. However, because
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of the narrowness of this niche market, I decided to expedite the mat-
ter and left the back cover blank.
If I had intended that this book be distributed to libraries or
bookstores, I would take the time to create a better back cover. In
fact, down the road I’ll probably do so, but I wanted to get this project
done quickly.
An ISBN number – Createspace offers several options for providing
your book with an ISBN number, which uniquely identifies it for
bookstores and libraries. You can use one that is assigned by Cre-
atespace, and there are several options available, or you can provide
your own. I already own a block of one hundred ISBN numbers, so I
just used one of those.
One of the cool things about using Createspace to publish your book is
that they have a guide that walks you through all of the steps needed to
get it done. You enter all of the information about your book, including the
author, title, subtitle and so forth, and upload the book and your cover.
At that point, Createspace will perform some validation that your book
meets its requirements for publishing. For example, all images must be
300DPI and must fit within the margins. Anything that violates the stand-
ards will be flagged as an error. In some cases you can ignore these, and
in others you need to fix them before moving on.
I have found that the PDF format for documents produces less errors than
the word format.
Once you’ve worked out all of the errors, and most likely re-uploaded the
document multiple times, you’re ready to submit it to Createspace. Once
you do that, it will be reviewed and either rejected, in which case you fix
the error and resubmit, or accepted.
At this point you have one last chance to examine the document before
submitting it for publication. You can order a proof copy through the mail
or you can look at it online.
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Look it over and make sure it’s right, and then submit the document.
Within a day or two, will magically appear on Amazon for sale.
You’re not done yet, as you need to define the description, categories,
keywords, and price of your book.
The wizard on Createspace makes this all very straightforward.
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MARKETING THE BOOK
I asked the artist to send me drawings as she completed them, partially be-
cause I wanted to double check what she was doing, and partially because
I wanted to use those images to help market the book.
I created several small advertisements, similar to the above, and posted one
or two per day on Facebook. I asked a few friends the dance community to
repost those on their Facebook walls and in various dancing groups.
This help build buzz for the book so that on the day of release several people
were ready to purchase a volume for themselves.
That was the extent of my marketing for this particular series of coloring
books. Due to the narrowness of this niche, I didn’t feel the necessity for
trying to market it to a wider audience.
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CONCLUSIONS
Part of the reason why I created the coloring book was to prove that it is
possible to create a high quality, relatively inexpensive product for a very
limited niche market.
I set the price at $20.00, which is about normal for a specialty coloring book.
This gave me a profit of $10.00 per book.
The total cost for creating the coloring book was a little over $100, and the
total royalty that I received from Amazon was $1,000 within the first three
weeks of publication. It continues to sell a few books a week, and will prob-
ably continue to sell forever.
Except for the final part of putting the book together, I worked on the project
in between other tasks due to its nature. Thus, I spent ten minutes here and
fifteen minutes there doing miscellaneous tasks. This is time I probably oth-
erwise would’ve been spent watching television or playing games or some-
thing like that.
The final editing of the book took about eight hours.
The coloring book sold well enough that I decided to create a series of four,
which are in progress as I write this case study. These are obviously coming
together more quickly, since I have the process defined.
I created a series because I’m curious to see if the niche market is still viable
with more than one product.
This was a very specialty product, with a very narrow niche. Yet by controlling
the costs, and spending the time to research the market up front, I was able
to make a pretty good return on investment. Additionally, my friends in the
dance community enjoyed coloring the book that I created and were happy
to be involved in the project. It was well worth the time and effort.
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ABOUT RICHARD LOWE JR
fter spending over 33 years in
the computer and information
technology industry, Richard de-
cided to take an early retirement to pur-
sue his dreams of becoming a profes-
sional writer and published author.
Richard is a leader in the computer in-
dustry, serving as Vice President of
Consulting at Software Techniques and
Beck Computer Systems before settling
down as Director of Computer Opera-
tions at Trader Joe’s. During his twenty-year tenure at that esteemed com-
pany, he focused on computer security and preparing for the possibility of
disaster.
In addition to creating hundreds of articles for the web and blogs, Richard
actively works as a professional ghostwriter. In that role, he has completed
books on a wide variety of subjects including memoirs, business volumes,
and novels. Because of his in-depth background in software management
and computer security, Richard has ghostwritten a number of major books in
those areas. KnowBe4, a major computer security company, recently con-
tracted with Richard to update the 2010 version of their book Cyberheist to
2016.
A
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ABOUT RICHARD LOWE JR
Additionally, Richard has published books of his own. His first two volumes,
Safe Computing is Like Safe Sex and Real World Survival Tips and Survival
Guide, respectively touch on the subjects of computer security and how to
survive emergencies and disasters. Richard has also written and published
a series of short eBooks on the aspects of freelance writing, including blog-
ging and ghostwriting. Other published books include How to Plan a Party
and How to Surround Yourself with Beautiful Women without Being a Sleaze-
ball. To see all of the books he has available, visit:
http://www.coolauthor.com
An avid adventurer, Richard has been a photographer for much of his life,
with a focus on nature, scenic, performance and event photography. He has
done everything from hiking in dozens of national parks throughout the coun-
try, to photographing various unique festivals and events, such as the Laby-
rinth of Jareth Masquerade Ball and the World Mermaid Awards Convention.
He is well known in the Renaissance Festival and Belly Dance communities,
having photographed over 1,200 dance events and 400 festivals. For several
years, he photographed the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, Cal-
ifornia.
Richard is currently working on a large number of short Kindle eBooks on a
wide variety of subjects. Beginning in 2016, the first of a ten-volume series
of Science Fiction novels will be published.
One of Richard’s passions is to use the power of words to educate people
on human rights. He believes the world will be a better place when human
beings are treated with the full respect and dignity they are due.
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ABOUT RICHARD LOWE JR
Is your career important to you? Find out how to move your career in any direction you desire, improve your long-term livelihood, and be prepared for any eventuality. Visit the page below to sign up to receive valuable tips via email, and to get a free checklist for keeping your career on track and going strong. http://list.thewritingking.com/
I’ve written and published many books on a variety of subjects. They are all
listed on the following page.
https://www.thewritingking.com/books/
On that site, I also publish articles about business, writing, and other
subjects. You can visit by clicking the following link:
https://www.thewritingking.com
To find out more about me or my photography, you can visit these sites:
Personal website: https://www.richardlowe.com
Photography: http://www.richardlowejr.com
LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardlowejr
If you have any comments about this book, feel free to email me at rich@the-
writingking.com