How to make a puzzle book for Amazon KDP

1. What a puzzle book actually is

KDP calls these low-content books: paperbacks where the value is in the layout rather than in prose. Word search, sudoku, mazes, crosswords, dot-to-dot, coloring pages. They are popular with self-publishers because there is no manuscript to write, printing is cheap, and the audience — people who buy a puzzle book at an airport or for a grandparent — is large and steady rather than trend-driven.

A finished one has a fixed shape: a title page, a copyright page, the puzzles (one per page), a divider, the solutions (several to a page), and usually a few ruled pages at the back. KDP prints it on demand when someone orders; you upload two PDFs — the interior and the cover — and never touch a printer.

2. Choosing the puzzle type

Word search is the biggest category and the easiest to theme, which matters for step 3. Sudoku has a loyal, repeat-buying audience and no theme to think about, but the puzzles must be correct — a sudoku with two solutions makes your own answer key wrong, and reviewers say so. Mazes sell well for children and for "activity book" positioning.

Whichever you pick, published books are almost always graded: easy at the front, hardest at the back, with the level printed on each puzzle. A book of fifty identical-difficulty puzzles feels flat to solve.

3. Choosing a niche

"Word Search Book" competes with ten thousand others. "Texas Word Search", "Gardener's Word Search", "Large Print Word Search for Seniors" compete with a handful, and the buyer searching for them already wants exactly that. Pick the audience first — a hobby, a place, a season, a gift occasion — and let the puzzles follow.

For word search, the niche is the word list. Thirty to sixty on-topic words is enough for a fifty-puzzle book, provided each puzzle uses a different subset of them. A good generator does that for you and says so when the list is too short to avoid repeats; by hand, you are keeping the tally yourself.

4. Trim size

6 × 9 inches is the standard for puzzle books: cheapest to print, fits every shelf, and a 15×15 word search grid comes out at a comfortable size. 8.5 × 11 is for large print — bigger grids, bigger letters, the right choice for an older audience — but it is large trim in KDP's pricing, which costs about 40% more per page to print. Worth it when you can charge for it; expensive by accident otherwise.

Regular trim means no wider than 6.12" and no taller than 9". So 6 × 9 qualifies — exactly 9" is the limit, not over it.

5. How many puzzles

Most published puzzle books run 50 to 100 puzzles. KDP requires at least 24 pages and an even page count. With one puzzle per page plus front matter, a divider, solutions six to a page and four notes pages, the arithmetic is roughly:

Notice that up to 110 pages the printing cost is a flat $2.30 for black ink on regular trim. Up to that point a longer book costs nothing extra to print. Past it, every page adds about a penny — a 200-puzzle book is not twice the profit of a 100-puzzle one, it is twice the print cost at the same list price.

6. The interior: KDP's rules

This is where first attempts get bounced. The rules are simple but exact.

Page size

The PDF page must equal the trim size: 6 × 9 inches is 432 × 648 points, no more, no less. If you use bleed (only needed when images run off the page — a plain puzzle book does not), the page grows by 0.125" on the outside edges.

Margins

Outside, top and bottom: at least 0.25" (0.375" with bleed). The inside margin — the gutter, against the spine — grows with the page count, because a thick book swallows more of the page in the binding:

The gutter swaps sides: left on right-hand (odd) pages, right on left-hand (even) pages. Get this backwards and every puzzle sits too close to the binding. The margin calculator gives all four figures and the page size for any trim, page count and bleed setting.

Fonts

Every font must be embedded in the PDF. An un-embedded font is one of the most common rejections, and the error message does not make it obvious. Most design software embeds by default when exporting to PDF; Word does not always.

Page count

At least 24, at most 828, and even. An odd count is rejected.

7. Puzzle quality — what earns one-star reviews

Puzzle book reviews are brutal about a small set of specific faults, all of which are avoidable:

• A word appears twice in a word search, because crossing words accidentally spelled a second copy. The solver finds the "wrong" one and the answer key disagrees with them.
• One word hidden inside another — CAT inside CATALOG — in the same grid.
• Filler letters spelling something rude. It happens more than you would think, and it happens in books for children.
• A sudoku with more than one solution. The answer key is then simply wrong for anyone who found the other one.
• Repeated puzzles — the same word list, or the same grid, appearing twice in one book.
• An answer key too small to read. Solutions packed eight to a page in 5pt type are not an answer key.

If you generate puzzles with a tool, check that it guards against every one of these by construction rather than by luck. If you make them by hand, check every grid twice.

8. The cover and the spine

A paperback cover is one PDF containing the back, the spine and the front side by side, with 0.125" bleed on every outside edge. Its size depends on your page count, because the spine width is page count × paper thickness: 0.0025" per page on cream paper, 0.002252" on white. A 66-page book on cream has a 0.165" spine; a 124-page book, 0.31".

So the cover cannot be designed until the interior is finished and its page count is known. Change the interior, and the cover has to change too.

Two more rules: KDP only allows text on the spine from 79 pages up — below that the spine is too narrow, leave it blank — and a 2" × 1.2" area in the lower right of the back cover must be left clear for the barcode Amazon prints there.

9. Pricing and royalty

KDP pays 60% of the list price on paperbacks priced $9.99 or more (50% below that), minus the printing cost. So a 66-page 6 × 9 puzzle book at $9.99 earns (9.99 × 0.60) − 2.30 = $3.69 a copy. At $7.99 it earns (7.99 × 0.50) − 2.30 = $1.70, which is why almost every puzzle book is priced at $9.99 or just above it.

Large print at 8.5 × 11 costs more to print and sells for more — $12.99 to $14.99 is normal. The royalty calculator does this sum for any trim, page count and price, including the large-trim rates most calculators leave out.

10. Uploading

On kdp.amazon.com, create a paperback. Enter title, author and description; pick a category (puzzles sit under Humor & Entertainment → Puzzles & Games); upload the interior PDF, then the cover PDF. KDP's previewer will show you the book page by page and flag anything outside the margins. Order a printed proof before you publish — it costs the printing price plus postage, and it is the only way to see the real thing.

Keywords and a clear title matter more than anything else you do after the file is right. "Large Print Word Search for Seniors: 100 Easy Puzzles" tells Amazon's search and the buyer exactly what this is.

11. The mistakes that get books rejected, in one list

• Under 24 pages, or an odd page count
• Page size not equal to the trim size (or not grown for bleed when bleed is on)
• Fonts not embedded
• Gutter too narrow for the page count, or on the wrong side
• Cover the wrong width — usually a spine miscalculated, often by that 0.06"
• Text on the spine of a book under 79 pages
• Artwork under the barcode area

None of these is about the puzzles. All of them are about the file. That is the dull truth of KDP: the book is judged on its geometry before anyone looks at its contents.