How to make a puzzle book for Amazon KDP

1. What a puzzle book actually is

A puzzle book is a paperback 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.

Sellers call these low-content books, and the phrase is everywhere in KDP courses and forums. KDP's own definition is narrower: a low-content book is “generally repetitive, and designed to be filled in by the user” — notebooks, planners, journals, log books. KDP adds that this “does not typically include activity books, such as puzzle books or coloring books, which generally do not feature repetitive content on each page.” That distinction decides one checkbox when you publish, in step 10.

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 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 need no reading, so they suit children's and activity books.

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 largest page KDP prints at its regular rate (the rule is under the table below), 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 more: in black ink, $2.84 instead of $2.30 for a book up to 110 pages, and 1.7¢ a page instead of 1.2¢ past that. Worth it when you can charge for it; expensive by accident otherwise. Puzzle Press has a large print word search generator already set to this trim.

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

At 6 × 9, anything from 13 to 88 puzzles costs the same to print, with the answers six to a page. (A word search grid more than 20 letters across gets four or two answers a page instead, to keep the answer letters at KDP's 7pt minimum, and the top falls to 82 or 68.) 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.

Where that line falls, for a one-puzzle-per-page book. The table is easy to read and easy to be caught by, because you set the margins before you know the page count. At 6×9, 5.5×8.5, 7×10, 8×10 and 8.5×11 the solutions of a sudoku or maze book pack six to a page, so 122 puzzles is a 150-page book and 123 puzzles is a 152-page book — one more puzzle, and every page in the book needs a gutter an eighth of an inch wider. At 5×8 they pack four to a page and the line arrives sooner, at 115 puzzles. Word grids pack fewer to a page once they are big enough that six (or four) would take their letters under KDP's 7-point minimum, and the line comes sooner again: a word search from the generator's default list, whose grids reach 19 letters across, crosses it at 115 puzzles on 5.5×8.5 and at 96 on 5×8. The page count the generator shows already allows for this. In the other direction, 13 puzzles is the fewest that reaches KDP's 24-page minimum at any trim.

It is the round-number instinct that walks you over: “100 word searches” is about 126 pages and comfortably inside the first band, “120 puzzles” is 149, and making it a neat 125 puts you in the second. Being generous does not fix it either — 0.5" on a 40-page book is not safe, it is a narrower text block than you are entitled to, and in a puzzle book the text block is the grid. There is no gutter that is right at every page count, only the one that matches the book you actually made. Decide the puzzle count, get the page count, then set the margins — and check again if the count moves.

Fonts

Every font must be embedded in the PDF. An un-embedded font gets the file rejected, and the error message does not make it obvious. Check before you upload: in Adobe Acrobat Reader, File → Properties → Fonts lists every font, and each should say "Embedded" or "Embedded Subset".

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, and 0.00235" on KDP's newer groundwood paper (KDP's help pages don't give it, but their cover calculator uses it; the spine calculator shows how it was checked). A 66-page book on cream has a 0.165" spine; a 124-page book, 0.31". Change the paper and the spine changes with it.

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 80 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: less than half the royalty for a book two dollars cheaper. $9.99 is the lowest price on the 60% rate.

8.5 × 11 is a large trim, so it costs more to print: the 108-page book this tool makes from 50 large-print puzzles prints for $2.84, against $2.30 for the same page count at 6 × 9. The royalty calculator does this sum for any trim, page count and price, using KDP's large-trim rates.

Leave Expanded Distribution out of the sums. That checkbox offers a book to bookstores and libraries at a 40% royalty, but KDP's page on it lists puzzle books, word search, sudoku, crossword and maze among the content its distributors do not currently accept. A puzzle book earns on Amazon, so price it for Amazon.

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.

On the paperback details page KDP asks whether the book is low-content. By KDP's definition in step 1 a puzzle book usually is not, and ticking the box is not free. KDP's page on it says low-content books “are not eligible for creating a series, regardless of the ISBN option you select” — so no Volume 1, 2, 3 grouped on one Amazon page — and that without an ISBN “the sample and the back cover thumbnail are currently not supported”, which means no Look Inside for a buyer deciding whether the grids are big enough to read. A book of different puzzles on every page is the activity book KDP describes; publish it as one.

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.

Plan a series around KDP’s weekly limit. Since September 21, 2026 an account can create up to 2 new titles per format per week (paperback, hardcover and Kindle each count separately), and since October 5 it can submit up to 2 new titles per format per week for publication. Updates to a title you already submitted don’t count, and the week resets on Sunday at 12:00 AM UTC (KDP’s announcement). So a Halloween, a Thanksgiving and a Christmas word search book are three paperbacks, which takes two weeks to submit.

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 — for example a spine worked out with that extra 0.06"
• Text on the spine of a book under 80 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.