Creating and publishing KDP puzzle books and activity books and in this case
word search puzzle books on Amazon can be very challenging.
Got to find the word lists. You've got to create the original interior.
You've got tocreate a cover and then put it all together.
Create the PDF files which you can then upload to the Amazon
KDP platform.
So in this video I'm gonna address those issues and show you a really fast way
of creating these types of books. So if that's something that interests you,
then follow along. Now if you've not been just channel before then welcome.
My name's Paul Marles and I do videos on how to make it keep it and grow it and
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So I'm gonna be showing you how to create a word search book. I like word search
books because one, as you can see here from the best seller's ranks,
they sell extremely well.
But there are also lots of different themes and sub niches within
the overall word search niche that you can create these books in.
And we're gonna look at one particular sub niche today and that is the Christmas
word search book. And as you can see already,
we're currently in October bestsellers ranks look pretty good.
These are already starting to make sales.
And when it comes to Christmas holiday period time,
the sales of these are gonna absolutely take off.
So this is just an example.
You can use what I'm gonna show you in any sub niche theme
that you like. And we're gonna be using the software Book Bolt today.
Why?
Because they've recently updated their software and they now have the Book Bolt
studio,
which makes it incredibly easy and fast to create a cover
and create an interior. And I'm gonna show you some tips and tricks on
how to find word lists. So if you don't use Book Bolt,
then you can use what I'm gonna show you on any of your puzzle making
platforms you like. Now, in terms of Book Bolt,
they do run a three day free trial.
So if you're not already a subscriber of Book Bolt,
you can try this out, what I'm gonna show you and see if it works for you.
Now I will leave a link down below to the Book Bolt platform.
It is an affiliate link.
I do receive a small commission which helps run this channel.
But if you don't wanna click on that link,
you can just go to the Google website and do the search yourself.
So when it comes to creating these books, these word search books,
the biggest issue is getting the list of words for these books. And I
found a couple of good resources. One is at dictionary.com.
You can see we've got these word lists and flashcards.
And you've got these very broad categories on the left hand side here.
So you could click on something like fun and you've got all these lists
of different word lists and you just click on show more and you can keep going
and going. And incidentally,
these actually provide good ideas also for Word
search Sub niches.
Another good site I found was this one here at enchantedlearning.com.
And they've got all these vocabulary word lists by theme and there are loads and
loads here.
And I actually clicked on Christmas and it's of around 200 words.
So this is a great starting point. So let's, first of all,
open up Book Bolt and this is what you find.
And you've got all these useful tools,
which I use in particular for niche research. And that's the the actual cloud
function. But you've also got these category research tools,
keyword research tools as well. So it's very useful.
It's not just a book creation software.
So if we click on Create,
we've got these options here and we want to click on Book Bolt
Studio. This will take us to the studio platform.
And what we want to do is click on project,
New project and then fill in some details here.
So we'll call this Xmas word search.
And the trim size is going to be 8.5 by 11 inches.
It's going to black and white interior with white paper. No bleed.
And we'll do a page count,
let's say 90 pages for this particular project, click on Create Project.
And you can see we've got our cover template here.
But what we're gonna do first of all is create the interior. So on this vertical
menu here,
we click on this little maze icon and it gives us all these options for
different types of interiors that we can create.
And what I do like about Book Bolt Studio is that they've got a lot of templates
here for different types of puzzles. So we're doing word search today,
but you could do a Sudoku book, a maze book, crossword book,
Nurikabe, word scramble.
And you could also combine these in one interior to create an overall
activity book for kids or adults.
And then there's all these other options as well to create different types of
low content books, logbooks, planners, et cetera.
So we click on word search and it shows us all our pages here.
Now you can create one page at a time or you could create all 90
pages at once. If you wanted to do all 90 pages, you just select all,
you deselect the cover. So you've got all these pages and you could create all
those pages at once. I'm only going to create five pages today,
just as an example to show you how to do this.
So I'm just gonna click the first five pages, click on next.
Now here we have the details for our interior. Now when it comes to margins,
you'll find that the margins will already be set and it will automatically
create the puzzles within the margins.
But what I do is I just set this to not put 0.125.
So I'm just going to paste that in. You can choose your font.
You've got all these different selections here.
We're just going to leave this at open sans.
Font size will remain the same font color,
I want this as black stroke width we'll leave at two.
Stroke as black. Maximum words per page.
I'm going to set this as 10 .Clue type columns.
Cell color will leave as is. Now do you want diagonal words and reverse words?
This will depend on what age you are pitching your book at,
but we're going to go yes and have reverse words yes also and solution
highlighter becasue this will create all the solutions to your puzzles as well
as I'll show you in a moment.
We'll leave that as ellipse and we'll click on this button here,
add solution after the puzzle pages.
And I usually leave this one blank here because I don't want book bolt,
add in random words or sentences. Then we'll click submit.
And it's told me there's not enough words in my CSV file because I
haven't uploaded a file. So first of all,
we need to create our CSV file. Now you can do this in Google Sheets,
do this in Excel if you want. So Google Sheets,
I've created this Christmas word search list.
And from this list that we looked at earlier,
I just added in groups of 10 words and left a space between
the groups. And I've also added in some of my own words as well.
So what we do is click on file, download and choose .csv.
So click on file and then just select the .csv file
that you've downloaded from the spreadsheet that you created of your word lists.
Then hit submit.
And you'll see here on the left that the pages are now populated
with our word search puzzle pages.
Now you'll notice here because we've just done five pages,
but after the fifth page it has uploaded the solutions to the
puzzles. Now,
I don't think that gives a particularly a good customer experience if
you have these whole pages of the book just occupied by the solutions. So this
is what I suggest doing. So click on a page, click on the solution,
and then control C to copy, and then go to the end of the book.
And you could start building up pages with the solutions on.
So if I just hit Control V to paste, then reduce the size of it.
So now you could have four solutions or probably looking at that,
you could probably have nine solutions per page.
Just delete the one that we copied, then go to the next solution, click on it,
control C to copy,
go down to the bottom or ev wherever you want to place your solutions.
Click on the page, control V to paste,
And again, reduce the size. So it's a similar size. Move that across.
And you can see how you can create a page of solutions here. And then again,
delete that one that you've just copied.
So that would be our interior that we've created. Also, just as a side note,
you can modify these pages in other way adjusting the
size and positioning. It will automatically put it in the middle for you.
You could also add images.
So if this was word search book for say maybe kids,
you could add images as well just to spice things up a little. So.
Now we come onto our cover. And as I said, we've already got our template here,
which is very useful.
We don't have to download a template from the KDP help section. So first of all,
we want to put in our background color.
So I'm just gonna click on the shapes icon and choose a square.
And I'm gonna move this to the top corner of our book.
And then holding down shift, just drag diagonally and across.
And that will fill the background for us.
And we're going to change the color of this to a green.
Then next I want to add some text. So just click on the text button,
click on heading, and again, move that to the middle.
And we're going to have our first word, which is going to be xmas.
Hit control C to copy control V to paste. Then I'm just gonna move that down,
double click on it and type in word search. And again,
just move that so it's in the middle so it's all aligned.
And we can adjust the size. But first of all, we're going to change the font.
So I'm gonna select ,holding down shift, select both.
And then on the dropdown menu we can select our font.
We can choose one from this list here and the list is huge.
Or we can upload our own fonts if we like.
I've uploaded some Christmas related fonts,
which I actually found on Creative Fabrica.
There are other sites where you can find fonts,
you can just Google free fonts or you can go to a site like
designbundles.net and Envato Elements.
I get most of my fonts and images from Creative Fabrica and I just did a
quick search for Christmas fonts.
And you can see you've got all these different selections here.
But I'm just gonna choose a free font and I'm gonna choose this one here called
Bangers. Click on Ok.
Now we can adjust the size of these again,
move them to around the center and position that on the book as we like.
And I'm going to change the color by clicking on this color box.
And we're going to choose this red.
And we're going to put a stroke around these letters just so it does
stand out. Just pop more on the cover. So I click this stroke color box here,
select white. And we're gonna change this to eight.
And I think we'll just increase the size of this ever so slightly.
Just move that down. In fact, I think I'm gonna change xmas to Christmas.
Make sure that's in the center.
Next I want to put a white box in the middle of the cover
because if you notice when you do do a search for a lot of word search books on
Amazon, they all have one thing in common is that they show,
most of them show an image of what the interior of the book looks like,
namely the word search puzzles. So that's what we're gonna do with this book.
So we're gonna click on our shapes panel, click on square,
get rid of that, move that to around the center.
Now we don't want this in black, so we're gonna choose white as our fill color.
And we're gonna put a stroke on this as well, a black stroke.
And we'll probably make that,
let's have a look around eight as well. So we'll just move that down a bit.
And now what we can do is go back to our word search puzzles
on the left here. And we're actually gonna choose one with this solutions in.
So we're just gonna choose this page here, click on it, it's control C to copy,
go back to our cover control V to paste,
reduce the size and move this onto our cover like so. And again,
center that. If we increase the size,
we can get a better idea of what that looks like. Okay,
so next we're going to add some images. Now again,
I went to Creative Fabrica and did a search just for Christmas.
We have lots of different options,
but I found these particular options from Genta
Illustration Studio. You can actually do a search. If I put in Christmas,
it'll list all the Christmas related images. So back to book bolt,
I'm just going to click on this little image icon on the left.
And all you need to do is just drag in the dots .png file. If you do that,
you'll get the transparent background.
So I just drop that in and you can see I've already done that.
So I've got two there now.
So all I need to do is just click on the image and it will put that on my book
cover.
So I'm just going to increase the size of that and just drag it into position.
Now on the layers panel on the right here, I'm just going to lock that layer.
And next I'm going to go to my images panel again.
And here's the Christmas tree that I've downloaded. And again,
I'm going to enlarge that and I'm gonna move that layer behind our
white square with the word search puzzle on. There we go.
And just enlarge that image until we've got something that looks like this.
Now you can see here that the Christmas tree,
which again I'm going to lock that layer,
you can see that it goes over the spine and onto the back cover,
which you could leave if you wanted to. However,
I'm going to get rid of that by doing this. Clicking on the shapes panel, again,
clicking on square, moving that to the top left corner,
changing the color to our dark green color and then just moving that across
and move that across like so. And now you can see it just cuts off that image of
the Christmas tree on the spine and the back cover. Makes it look a lot cleaner.
So the next thing to do now is download our cover file and our
interior file as .pdf files becasue these are then ready to upload
to the KDP platform.
So go over to the project button and then just click on download these projects.
Now you've got the two options here of RGB or
CMYK, Cyan, magenta, yellow, forgot what K stands for.
I normally just use rgb, but you can do whatever you prefer.
Most of my books,
well all of them have always saved in sRGB format,
so never had a problem. I've ordered my books, they all look good.
So I continue to do that.
So download this project and this takes a little bit of time and that downloads
as a zip file.
So you just click on the file and what I suggest doing is just opening the files
just to check that they look okay and there's our book cover.
Looks absolutely fine. And likewise for the interior as well,
we've got our PDF.
And if we scroll right down to the bottom there we have our page that we started
to build of our solutions. These are now ready to upload to the KDP platform.
If you want to know how to upload a book, then I have done a video on that,
which we'll link to up here. Now,
if you want to learn more about all the different types of KDP activity books
and puzzle books,
then I've done this playlist here about all the different types of activity
books you can create and publish on Amazon.
Don't forget to hit the subscribe button. Thank you very much for your time.
It is very much appreciated. And until next time goodbye.