Word search book generator for Amazon KDP

What goes wrong in word search books

A small set of faults is easy to make and easy for a solver to spot:

• A word appears twice. Crossing words, or the random filler letters, accidentally spell a second copy — and the answer key only marks one.
• One word hides inside another. CAT inside CATALOG in the same grid is found twice.
• Filler letters spell something rude. In the 5,400 puzzles measured below, the generator threw away 6,038 fills for exactly this.
• The same list, twice. A short theme list reused across fifty puzzles produces near-identical grids.

Puzzle Press checks every grid after placing the words: each word must occur exactly once in all eight directions, nested words are removed from the list before placement (you are told which and why), filler letters are screened against a blocklist, and each puzzle draws a word list not used earlier in the book — if the theme is too small to supply enough different lists, you are warned before you download, not after. These are checks, not hopes; the same tests run on every book.

Themes, or your own words

90 built-in themes: Animals, Food & Cooking, Travel & Places, Garden & Nature, Under the Sea, Space, Christmas, Sports, Music, In the Kitchen, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Easter, Valentine's Day, Birthdays, Weddings, American States, On the Farm, Dinosaurs, Camping, Fishing, Cars & Driving, Weather, Jobs & Careers, School Days, New Baby, Coffee & Tea, Birdwatching, Flowers, Desserts, Games Night, At the Beach, Nursing, Teaching, Trucking, Bible & Scripture, California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, New Jersey, Virginia, Washington State, Arizona, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Indiana, Missouri, Maryland, Wisconsin, Colorado, Minnesota, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Kentucky, Oregon, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Utah, Nevada, Iowa, Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, New Mexico, Nebraska, Idaho, West Virginia, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Montana, Rhode Island, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, Wyoming, Quilting, Knitting, Golf, Wine. Every list is published in full at /word-lists, free to use anywhere. Or paste your own list — one per line or comma-separated — and name it; the name prints on every puzzle. Thirty to sixty on-topic words is enough for a fifty-puzzle book; each puzzle draws a different subset, and the tool warns you if the list is too short to avoid repeats or if a word is too long for the grid.

Grades

Grid size is automatic from the word list (measured below: 17×17 is the middle size at medium), or set it yourself. Large print switches to 8.5 × 11 with bigger letters and a grid sized for them, for readers who need bigger letters: see the large print generator.

Measured on 5,400 puzzles

To put numbers on the checks above, the generator was run on all 90 built-in themes on 21 October 2026: a 20-puzzle book for each theme at each grade, 15 words a puzzle, with the grid size left automatic. That is 5,400 puzzles, and every word of every list was placed in all of them.

Easy grids come out biggest because the automatic size allows about 3 cells for every letter at easy, 2.6 at medium and 2.2 at hard: with only two directions, a tight easy grid would leave words that don't fit. Hard also throws away the most fills: its filler letters are drawn from the puzzle's own words, so they spell a puzzle word a second time far more readily.

The blocklist is 37 rude or offensive strings, three of them only three letters long. Every one of the 90 easy and medium books, and 89 of the 90 hard books, had at least one fill thrown away for spelling one. So a book of 20 puzzles from random letters, with nobody checking, would be likely to carry one. Here each rejected fill is simply redone, and the PDF only ever gets grids that passed both checks.

What a book costs to print, and earns

Page count is title, copyright, one puzzle per page, a divider, solutions 6 to a page, and four notes pages, rounded to an even number. Printing is KDP's flat rate up to 110 pages, then $1.00 plus 1.2¢ a page. Royalty calculator for other prices and trims.

The rules every KDP interior has to meet

Page size equal to the trim, margins that grow with the page count, fonts embedded, 24 to 828 pages and an even count, a cover whose spine width is page count × paper thickness with nothing added. The tool lays every book out to these; if you would rather know them yourself, they are all in the guide, with the numbers.