Indie Colour Scene: Increase in self-published sales driven by colouring books
Sales of self-published titles have risen up to this point in 2025, according to data from Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM), although it is difficult to identify all self-published titles in the TCM, with a large number of imprints and authors making up this corner of the retail landscape.
For this analysis, we’ve taken all titles marked under the ‘Other Publisher Groups’ in the TCM and identified the biggest 50 authors from both 2024 and 2025 who are self-published – we’ve then combined these authors with any title that has an imprint that identifies itself as independently published, in addition to those from IngramSpark and CreateSpace.
This may mean that some titles have been missed, but with over 20,000 unique ISBNs in both sets of data, the vast majority of sales have been captured.
‘Colouring’ titles delivered an additional 176,018 sales year-on-year, more than covering the increase that self-published titles have seen this year – they also account for 98.3% of the value increase too.
The total number of titles identified as having registered sales in the first six weeks of 2025 is 22,906 – just over 1,000 fewer than in the same period in 2024. Despite this, volume sales have risen 56.5% to 468,238, bringing in £4.1m – a rise of 39.7% vs 2024.
For context, the volume in the rest of the TCM excluding these titles has risen just 0.6%, with value rising 1.1% in the same timeframe – so what has led to the rise in sales for self-published books?
At the top of the charts for 2025 are the colouring books from artistic collective Coco Wyo – although not a single author, we have included them – and other similar groups – in this analysis. Sales of the Coco Wyo books have brought in £815,074 in the month and a half of 2025 – in the same period last year they do not appear in the data at all.
Continues…
Read More
The cute and comfy colouring books – sold primarily through Amazon links on TikTok and Instagram – including titles such as Girl Moments, Cozy Friends and Little Corner – account for 71.3% of the total. In fact, titles containing “colouring” or “coloring” in their descriptions have delivered an additional 176,018 sales year-on-year, more than covering the increase that self-published titles have seen this year – they also account for 98.3% of the value increase too.
With colouring books taking up 20 of the top 50 slots, it is safe to say that the colouring craze is back – but what of the other big names in the self-published arena?
Freida McFadden has been dominating the paperback charts for most of the past 12 months, but her self-published short story – The Housemaid’s Wedding, intended to bridge the gap between books two and three of The Housemaid series – is performing well too.
McFadden appears in position eight on the self-published ranking, with sales of 4,556 copies, a figure that in 2024 would have put her at the top of the chart but is beaten out by seven different colouring titles in 2025.
HD Carlton’s Haunting Adeline was 2024’s bestselling self-published title and helped deliver sales of £104,731 in the first six weeks of the year, making Carlton one of only two authors — alongside LJ Ross — to hit six figures.
2025 has seen Carlton lose 25.9% of her sales year-on-year, and she falls from second place on the author chart to fourth, losing out to both the Coco Wyo collective and fellow colouring sensation Vivi Tinta.
There are big losses for some other big 2024 authors as Alex Hormozi’s $100m… series of books lose £27,187 – a drop of 64.2% – while JD Kirk’s sales drop £12,301, though this is in part due to the author moving to publisher Canelo for his latest DCI Logan thriller.
It is not all bad news, though – there are some big winners, with Leigh Rivers growing sales of her erotic thrillers from £902 to £31,111 to become the sixth-biggest author on the list, while Patronella Ravenshear’s The Human Being Diet catapults her into fifth place with sales of £57,502.
