The adult colouring book boom, and after
A few breakout titles, a bookshop table and a sharing culture built a category in about three years. Then the shelves filled with sameness. What survived moved to screens.
For roughly three years in the middle of the 2010s, adult colouring books were on the front table of every bookshop in the English-speaking world, and then they were not. It was a real publishing phenomenon with a clear rise and a clear cooling, and the reasons for both are unusually legible.
A caution before the history: this is a category where invented statistics circulate freely. Any specific figure you read about copies sold or market size should be treated sceptically unless it is sourced, and the honest way to describe what happened is by its shape rather than by numbers.
What drove the rise
A small number of breakout illustrated titles
The category did not build gradually. A handful of intricately illustrated books, aimed explicitly at adults rather than children, sold far beyond anyone’s expectations, and everything else followed them. This is the normal pattern for a publishing surge: a few titles demonstrate that a market exists, and the industry then discovers it had been there all along.
The artwork in those breakout titles mattered. It was dense, decorative, pen-and-ink work with a lot of small areas — the sort of thing that takes real time to complete and looks impressive when it is done. Crucially, it did not look like a children’s book. That was the whole positioning: an adult could be seen with it.
Bookshop table placement
Colouring books are physically well suited to being sold from a table. They are visual, the cover communicates the entire proposition instantly, and the price point is low enough to be an impulse purchase. Once the category was established, it occupied front-of-store space in a way that fed itself: people bought them because they were there, and they were there because people bought them.
A sharing culture that rewarded finished pages
This is the most underrated driver. The mid-2010s were the peak of image-first social platforms, and a finished colouring page is nearly ideal content for one: it is flat, colourful, rectangular, photographs well under any lighting, and demonstrates effort. It also invites a specific kind of response, because the underlying artwork is identical between people and only the colour choices differ, so comparison is built in.
A hobby with a natural shareable artefact spreads faster than one without. Colouring produced a picture of itself as a by-product.
Cheap production
From a publisher’s side, a colouring book is inexpensive to make. It is single-colour interior printing, no photography, no colour separation, modest paper, and an artist can be commissioned for a fixed fee. The margin structure encouraged volume, and volume is what arrived.
Why it cooled
A book is consumed once
This is the structural problem and no amount of good publishing solves it. When you have coloured a page, that page is done. When you have done every page, the book is finished as an object — it cannot be reset. So the category had to sell a new book for every unit of activity, which means it depended entirely on continuous new purchasing rather than on continued use.
Compare that with almost any other hobby: a set of knitting needles, a guitar, a chess set. The tool persists and the activity repeats. A colouring book is closer to a crossword magazine, and crossword magazines do not sustain front-table placement.
Market flooding
Because production was cheap and the demonstrated demand was large, the shelves filled very fast, and a substantial share of what arrived was poor. Line work that was too coarse to be satisfying, or so fine it was unusable. Paper thin enough that a felt pen bled through to the page behind. Books that were obviously assembled from stock ornament rather than drawn.
The effect of a flooded category is not only that bad books sell badly. It is that the average shopper’s expectation drops, and the front table stops being a signal of quality. That damages the good titles too.
Sameness of subject matter
Within about two years the visual vocabulary had narrowed to a recognisable set: mandalas, botanical patterns, animals composed of ornament, secret gardens, enchanted forests. Any individual example might be well drawn, but collectively the shelf looked like one book reprinted with different covers. There was nowhere obvious for the category to go, because the constraints of the format — flat regions, no colour, dense pattern — are quite narrow.
What actually survived
The category did not die. Physical colouring books are still published and still bought; they simply returned to being an ordinary steady niche rather than a phenomenon. That is the normal end state of a surge and it is not a failure.
The more interesting thing is that the format moved to screens, where three of the four problems above stop existing.
Bleed-through is not a concept
The single most common practical complaint about colouring books was paper quality: a marker soaks through and ruins the reverse of the page, so you either colour on one side only or restrict yourself to pencils. On a screen there is no reverse side and no ink.
A page is not consumed
A digital picture can be reset and coloured again, and more importantly, it does not have to be. The absence of consumption changes the economics completely: the same library keeps being usable, so nothing depends on you buying a new book every few weeks to continue.
Storage disappears
Finished colouring books are awkward objects. They are too large to shelve comfortably, too worked-on to throw away, and not quite good enough to frame. Many people accumulated a stack and then stopped buying because of the stack. That problem does not exist on a phone.
The tiny regions become reachable
The densest illustrated pages of the boom contained areas too small for a pencil tip, which is why so many of them were left partly done. On a screen a magnifier solves it: press and hold and the area under your thumb is shown enlarged with a crosshair marking exactly what will be filled. A region that is physically impossible with a pencil is merely small on a screen.
What was genuinely lost in the move
It would be dishonest to present this as pure improvement. A book gives you a physical object, the specific pleasure of a pencil on paper, and a page you can tear out and give to someone. Paper does not run out of battery, does not notify you, and does not contain anything else you could be doing instead — that last one is not a small advantage, and it is the one screens cannot answer.
The other loss is authorship. In a colouring book the palette is entirely yours; you decide what colour the leaves are. Colour-by-number apps take that decision away in exchange for removing the paralysis of a blank palette. Which of those you prefer is a matter of temperament, and neither answer is the sophisticated one.
What the episode is actually evidence of
The lasting lesson of the boom is not that adults like colouring, which anyone could have guessed. It is that a large number of people want a structured, low-stakes activity for their hands that produces something to look at, and that they will adopt one instantly if it is put in front of them without embarrassment attached.
The books solved the embarrassment problem — that was the innovation, more than the artwork. Screens solved the consumption problem. The underlying demand has been steady the whole time, and it was steady long before 2013, in the form of a paint-by-number kit on a suburban kitchen table.
Frequently asked questions
When was the adult colouring book boom?
Roughly 2013 to 2016, with the peak of front-of-store visibility in the middle of that span. Specific sales figures circulate widely and are often unsourced, so the shape of the trend is more reliable than any number attached to it.
Why did adult colouring books stop selling?
Three reasons compounded: a book is consumed once, so the category depended on continuous new purchases; cheap production flooded the shelves with poor titles; and the subject matter converged on a narrow set of themes, so the shelf stopped offering variety.
Are adult colouring books still published?
Yes. The category returned to being an ordinary steady niche rather than a phenomenon, which is the normal end state of a publishing surge rather than a collapse.
What do apps solve that paper books did not?
Bleed-through, one-shot pages, storage of finished books, and regions too small for a pencil tip. What they do not solve is the physical object at the end, the feel of pencil on paper, and the fact that paper contains no other distractions.
Try it on a real canvas
Numbrush is colour by number for adults: mandalas, rose windows and geometric pattern work, twelve colours a picture, a magnifier for the tight spots, and a wrong tap that costs you nothing. Free, offline, no ads and no account.