Stepping Stones—Publishing our First Coloring Book
In our family, we established a culture of celebrating wins whether big or small. We may go out to a restaurant to celebrate a deal won, or visit the park and enjoy some free time as we rejoice in what the Lord has done. My favorite celebrations involve sushi buffets, but we’re not here to talk about sushi.
Last Summer, we embarked on creating a mobile game for toddlers that displays educational mini games based around the story of Noah’s Ark. We noticed an absence of games centered around our beliefs (particularly for toddlers) and decided that we could do something about it with our skill set after much prayer.
6 Months later and we have our first published coloring book and the game almost ready for review to then be released. For us, this is a big win that will keep us moving forward in creating more resources for Christian Parents.
A Prophetic Word
Years prior, a friend at a school Gaby and I attended prophetically spoke about Gaby’s involvement in assisting me in a video game company. This was spoken during a time where I was still learning to redeem my time as I had such an addiction to games much of my life, so I thought nothing of it. When the LLC was formed and we began work on the game design, we thought it’d be a great idea to couple the game with an accompanying coloring book for further exposure—essentially cross selling:
- Find our game on the App Store? The Parents Section has information on physical products that would serve your kids well.
- Find our Coloring Book through Amazon or a different source? Scan the QR code or see the additional page with the screenshot of our mobile game for you to download and let your kid play.
One aspect of our game involves coloring a set of inked drawings (because our daughter absolutely loves to color and draw). Being able to repurpose those pages toward our coloring book made sense, and this led to learning all about Kindle Direct Publishing.
Self-Publishing through Kindle
We knew we wanted to self publish as we could certainly not handle fulfillment at our current state. KDP made it easy, though I did have to learn Adobe InDesign for structuring the coloring book and handling all the bleed and margin settings! The review process was straightforward, and I’m grateful to have done book covers for peers years ago as I had to commit to the same process for this coloring book’s front and back cover.
I used Procreate on my iPad Pro from 2019 to draw the 40 coloring pages that would end up being in the coloring book, along with developing the front and back cover (although I had to continue working on them on Photoshop in my laptop as the iPad did not have enough processing power to handle additional layers in the document).
I love how the Lord uses moments of our lives that we think are mundane but in fact are stepping stones to where we’re headed. Even now with the publishing of the coloring book, the game awaits some bug fixing before entering into the review phase on both Google Play and App Store, but once live, we will get to perform marketing steps for our own products that we’ve aided clients with (in terms of increasing their revenue and pushing their products to their target audience).
Things like SEO, PR, Social Media, PPC, Email Marketing, Website Development—everything we’ve helped others with (and still help with) under Arising Co (our Agency)—gets to be utilized, and that makes me grateful for the years of marketing work done. Looking back, I'm grateful for all the small steps we've taken to get to where we are now, and look very much forward to the many more steps coming for seasons to come.
Reflection
Can you think of moments in your life where God used what you learned or practiced in a prior season as stepping stones for when their knowledge applied would be required? Perhaps you’re going through a season now where it feels mundane, but maybe, just maybe, you’re learning skills and developing in character for what’s to come?
Write down some comments as I’d love to hear your story.
Get Your Noah's Ark Coloring Book Today
Our vision is to see toddlers and kids know God and love Him from an early age, and we'll accomplish that by teaching kids the Bible and who God is through resources such as this book and our upcoming game that are full of creativity and fun.
If you know any parents with kids, be sure to share the link with them (or gift them one). If you know any Churches that need solid resources for their children's programs, let them know. We're getting the word out, and we are grateful for your help.
To learn more of our upcoming game release, you can join the waitlist at www.heavenbornstudios.com where we'll provide updates via email.
You can check out our coloring book for toddlers on Amazon here based on your marketplace:
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