Author: Maxime Gauthier-Kwan

What a whirlwind this week. Yesterday we had a colourable front-page cover on Metronews Ottawa as well as an article about us. Once again today we had more drawings, this time by people who had submitted pictures of the coloured cover.

English text below Mise à jour rapide. Nous ajouterons la section en français au site. C’est du travail additionnel, néanmoins nous sommes habitués à jongler entre le français et l’anglais. On a du pain sur la planche. Quick update, we are going to add French to our website. Sounds pretty daunting, however we are used…

We are very humbled to have been selected for April’s Awesome Ottawa award. The generous contribution is definitely helping us getting one step closer to the production of the book. If you haven’t heard of the Awesome Foundation, we’d encourage you to check out Awesome Ottawa. They distribute an award every month of $1000 for cool…

Our work colleagues graciously organized a stress-relief session of colouring during our lunch hour with classical music playing in the background. There was even some candles for the ambiance. Notably, we found out that there was a lot of different approaches and styles that could be used for the same drawings. Overall, it’s looking good…

We did our first *serious* promotional giveaway last weekend for Ottawa Geek Market and The Capital Gaming Expo. Hopefully we’ll have some happy colourers sharing their artwork soon! Our superhero cosplay excerpt was a perfect match for the event.

Well, that was pretty straightforward. We are ready to generate an ISBN whenever we want. The only catch is that the Library and Archives Canada wants a copy for “archival purposes”.  Although it seems to be implemented for every publisher, we can see right through their scheme: to colour the book!

We have submitted a request to have an ISBN. Our Canadian system so far has been very easy to figure out. We are fortunate to have access to free ISBN’s through Library and Archives Canada. Fun fact, every iteration or version of a book requires its own unique ISBN which is recognized world-wide.

We are quickly discovering that there is a will to sell our product in stores. Since we have limited time and energy to both build the product and focus on distribution, we will focus on local retailers as our primary distribution preference instead of our previous idea of doing a crowd-funding campaign. We are looking for…

We’ve started approaching stores for gaging their interests in colouring book for adults. Time to prep for  presenting our wow-factor. One place shared that the trend is really popular in Ottawa, but that there is also a crisis for good colouring pencils… Seems like Ottawa is craving colours.

We were humbled by the interest in our project at yesterday’s SoupOttawa . Although we didn’t win, it was great to see the community being really interested in contributing and bringing new ideas we hadn’t considered. (Not to mention getting a copy of a cool book). Time to adapt and continue moving forward! We will be…