De-Stress coloring book — my Amazon KDP journey
Mandala book creation story
Peaceful New Year’s Days inspired me to create a mandala coloring book which I decided to publish on Amazon. The idea was planted by a business coach to which email list I subscribed. What he did not say is that there are a couple of legal things to watch out for if you create images with AI.
Lately, I got inspired by Bing Chat which has integrated ChatGPT 4 with DALL E 3 image creation for free and played with image creation for my personal use as Christmas and New Year greetings to friends like this one as peace is something we take for granted and is so much related to freedom of expression and humanity progression.
My first creations were winter bunnies for kids coloring book and all in my house said that now they are sure that I am getting nuts for creating them. Winter bunnies were the main subject for days. Then I decided to make images of other animals in winter domestic and wild ones and I got over 200 pictures of them which I reduced to 120 and published them as Winter Delight — a kid's coloring book.
As inspiration stayed and my hunger for creation and publishing was still there I went for my true passion — mandalas. So for many hours I created again over 100 mandalas for a coloring book and published the De-Stress — coloring book featuring 120 mandalas.
Wake up call
As I got excited and shared this news with my friends, a chief of our Super Grouper band asked me did I checked what Bing says about using images for commercial use and he found out that: “Bing permits only non-commercial use of images created with DALL E 3 on their Chat service.” although it uses the same DALL E 3 which OpenAI uses and on Chat GPT is free for comercial use but as a payed option.
My friend proposed me to rather use Midjourney and by that time my initial excitment for mandala creation was gone but I decided to follow through and get my basic Midjourney subscription plan which gave me 3h 20min of fast image creation time for $10 monthly subscription and started mandala creation from scratch employing good old perseverance. Although, with comercial usage of images it is not all straight forward as explained in this article “Can you use Midjourney Commercially?” by Sagar Choudhury.
Finally, after many hours of creation and content design, writing and adjustment technical adjustment to meed Amazon KDP requirements for paperback print my thrid book was out and is available here:
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| De-Stress coloring book on Amazon: https://a.co/d/8MJih2E |
Finding a moment of peace with Mandala Meditation
It is so cool how mandalas can activate and harmonize our 6th (Ajna) Chakra and after such meditation, you can start perceiving mandalas with your inner eye.
If you decided to order your copy and you are done with coloring (or if you have some other mandalas you like) you can do a Mandala Meditation.
Sit comfortably in front of your mandala and breathe slowly and deeply, gazing upon your mandala so that the image gradually goes out of focus.
Then you can close your eyes and see your mandala unfolding on the screen of your mind.
Repeat this process for about 7 minutes as you meditate on the center of your mandala shape, allowing its geometry to bring your mind to a state of balance.
After Mandala Meditation you can relax in savasana — laying down position.
Namaste!
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| Image created with Midjourney |
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