This video is a beginner's guide to KDP puzzle books because they're one of the
biggest and most popular self-published KDP books on Amazon.
The reason being is that they sell well,
the interiors are relatively easy to create.
A big proportion of this video is going to be on showing you the resources for
creating these types of books. And in fact,
some of the tools will actually semi-automate the process for you.
And there's lots of different types of books within this overall puzzle book
niche. Here's a list of just some of the examples.
You can pause a video here and take a screenshot if you like.
So what this means is,
is there's lots of opportunities within this overall puzzle book
niche. So let's have a closer look. Now first of all,
one of the most popular types of books are the overall activity books or puzzle
books. And these are books that contain lots of different types of puzzles
within the same book. Here's an example here,
and you can see it's got word searches, mazes, cryptograms, sudoku.
Then you've got the more specific or single niche books. For example,
here we've got word search, we've got maze books,
and also we've got dot marker activity books. But not only that,
and this is one of the the big things I like about these particular niches is
that in a single niche, for example, word search,
we've got lots of different sub-niches.
Now these can be aimed at things like ages. So you've got young children, teens,
adults, elderly, but also in interests. Again,
if we look at these word search books, we've got things like summer word search,
anxiety relief, serial killer word searches, natural history.
And the advantage of that is that overall you may get a niche that's very
competitive, like this word search niche,
which has 30,000 results. But if it's got lots of those different sub niches,
it means you can target those sub niches which have less competition,
but are still selling well,
which means it gives your book a better chance of ranking on Amazon and getting
seen by customers.
And also some of the different puzzle types have less competition as well.
For example, if we take the dot market activity books,
you can see here we've only got 1000 search results.
Yet if you look at the best sellers ranks,
you can see that they're selling well.
So you've got a niche that's still selling well but has less competition,
again, which means more chance of getting your books seen by customers.
And again, if you were to take this stock market activity book niche,
you could divide that down into sub niches,
usually within different age groups for this particular niche. Now,
obviously these books are designed to be drawn in and written in.
So these are ideal types of books to be sold as KDP paperback
books and also occasionally hardbacks.
But I think you'll find that most of them are paperbacks. Now,
some of the common characteristics of these types of books is that they tend to
be 8.5 by 11 inch in size.
Most of them tend to be around that a hundred page mark in terms of sale price,
they used to be around that $6.99 mark.
But since Amazon have changed their fee structure,
I'd probably say that most of them are going to be around the $7.99 mark.
Now you will find that there is variation in different niches. Again,
if we go back to the word search niche,
you'll find that a lot of these actually are selling for more than the $6.99,
$8.99 mark. And you may find with some of the niches, they may be sort of $8.99,
$9.99, which means more profit margin, which again is always good.
Now, if we look at the covers of these books, they are all bold, they're bright,
the text is easily readable.
But also one of the main characteristics of these book covers is that they
often show an example of the interiors on the front cover of the books.
Again, this is common in things like the word search puzzle books,
the crossword books, and in fact, many of the puzzle books that you find. Now,
this is a technique I've employed in a lot of my log books in that I've put an
image of the interior on the front cover. And I think the benefit to that is,
is that it leaves a customer in no doubt about what the book is about
and what they're getting if they purchase the book.
So I think there's a better chance of actually getting a customer to click on
your book. And I think it's certainly worked for a lot of my books.
I do get a good click-through rate.
So let's now look at one of the most important parts of
creating these types of books, and that's the creation of the interiors.
It's one of the most difficult things that a lot of people find when creating
self-published KDP books. And as I said earlier,
the interiors are relatively easy to create,
especially when compared to things like coloring books,
which do require a bit more, you know,
illustration or graphic design skills.
So let's have a look at some of the tools that are out there. First of all,
we've got things like Book Bolt and within Book Bolt you've got the Book Bolt
Studio. Now this isn't free to use,
it does cost around $19.99 per month for the subscription,
but you do get a three day free trial. And in fact,
you could create one of these books within that three days.
So if we take a look at the interior creation parts of the software on the left
here, we click on this little maze icon, and if we scroll down,
we'll see the different types of puzzles that you can create.
And so we've got quite a few here. We've got word scrambles, cryptograms,
missing vowel puzzles, the popular word search, maze book interiors,
and also sudoku.
So you could create a book that's just devoted to one of these types of
interiors, or as I've showed you earlier,
a book that has lots of different types of puzzles within the one book.
Another resource, which is something I signed up for a few years ago,
is Puzzle Book Mastery. Now I will leave a link down below in the.
Description to all these resources that I mentioned in this video. Now,
I've not used this for a couple of years, it is $37,
so it's not free, but it is a one-off payment.
And here you can create a number of different types of puzzles.
We've got Cryptograms word match puzzles, word scramble puzzles,
and also again, the popular things like sudokus and word search.
We've got something like Tangent Templates,
which is a popular tool for getting interiors for low content books.
And here they haven't got so much in the way of puzzles,
but they do have these paper games available.
So if you do have an account with Tangent Templates,
you can also put these types of games within an overall puzzle book.
Now here's something I've not actually used,
but I came across this creator a couple of months ago,
and this is in Gumroad and it's a creator called KDP Tools. And they've got
quite a lot of tools here, which I'm actually going to explore.
And they're all based on Excel,
and there's tools here for creating lots of different puzzle types,
including mazes, word find puzzles, word searches,
nonograms, and they all look pretty reasonably priced. And in fact,
some of them are absolutely free.
So that may be worthwhile looking at as well.
You've got something like Fiverr, and here I've just put in Puzzle book,
and you'll find here there's lots of creators who will create a puzzle book
interior.
Now just one thing I'll say about this in that you may find that some of
these creators are just taking interiors from something like Creative
Fabrica and just reselling them. However,
having a closer look at some of them, they do look to be quite original.
So if you are thinking about that,
just do your own due diligence. You can ask the creator some basic questions,
ask them where they're getting their interiors from. Now,
here's a technique I'm going to show you for creating interiors of puzzle books
using Creative Fabrica and Canva. Now,
Canva is completely free of charge to use.
You can also use this technique if you are creating interiors with things like
Affinity Designer, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop,
even something like Keynote or PowerPoint. Now,
C,reative Fabrica I'll leave a link to in the description.
If you click on that link,
you'll find that you do get the first month for free and you can download
10 items for free. So again, you could create an interior,
try this out, create an interior absolutely free of charge.
If you do leave it after that first month, you do get charged $9 a month for it,
but you can cancel at any time.
So I just did a general search for puzzle books and I got a lot of these
selections here. If you are searching here,
make sure you do click on the print on demand box.
It does mean that you get the Print on Demand, a commercial license,
so you can use these to create your books. Now,
I went ahead and downloaded a selection of these interiors,
and these were in PDF format. So we go along to Creative.
Fabrica, click on Create a Design, click on custom size,
change the units to Inches.
So we're going to put in 8.5 by 11, create New Design.
So we'll have a blank page here.
So what we need to do is upload those PDF interiors. The way to do that,
go back to the Canva homepage, click on Create a Design again,
and at the bottom you'll see here import file. Click on that,
and then just upload those PDF files that you've downloaded from Creative
Fabrica. So you just need to click on an interior that you've downloaded.
So we'll open this one here and we'll open up a maze one as well.
Now you'll find that when you do this on Creative Fabrica,
when you upload a PDF file, some of the pages will look okay,
some of them won't look so good because it sort of changes the format
slightly. So just be aware of that, but it's quite simple.
All you need to do is just left, click the mouse,
just drag on the components you want to use, command c or control c to copy,
and then just go to your blank page. Command V, control V to paste.
And there you have a page. Now,
what you can do here is you can change the text if you like,
write something different or even change the font, like so.
So you can customize these to a certain extent. So we've got this one here,
which contains variety of different interiors. Now, as I mentioned,
sometimes the formatting comes out a bit odd as you can see this one here with
the draw the hands of the clock. But again, just left click of the mouse,
just drag to cover the components you want to copy, command C,
control C to copy. Then go to that document you initially created,
add a page, control V, control V to Paste. And again,
you can change the text, write something different, change the font,
change the size, whatever you like. Now,
here's another thing you could do if you wanted to customize these interiors
even more. If we go back to Creative Fabrica,
I've found these images of dinosaurs, and again,
I've got the print on demand usage allowed. So if we download those,
go back to the interior we're creating. Now on the left hand side,
click on uploads,
then what we're going to do is just drag in some of these images that we've
downloaded from Creative Fabrica. So it's just a case of dragging across.
And you'll see that these will upload.
So then all you need to do is just click on one of these images,
move it around on the page. At the top here, click on transparency,
and just turn down the transparency. So you could have something like this,
and then you could add another image, move that to the top.
And at the top here, I'm going to click on flip, flip horizontal, and again,
click on transparency and turn down the transparency. And of course,
you can adjust the size of these as you wish.
So it just creates a slightly different interior.
So if you are aiming these at particular age groups,
you can create a themed puzzle book or you can just create different
themed pages. And so it just adds a little bit more interest.
And so that way.
You can then start to build up an interior from lots of different
interiors you've acquired from Creative Fabrica,
which means you can create something more bespoke,
something more original. Because one of the issues is,
is that if you just take one of those interiors from Creative Fabrica,
upload it directly to KDP,
you may find that there are some other creators that have used that same
interior.
And the issue then is that you may get pulled up for duplicate
content, which can in some cases threaten your account and lead to a ban.
So using a technique like this, just changing the text,
mixing up the interiors can help solve that problem.
So this is a relatively cheap way,
an easy way to create an original interior. Now,
in terms of creating the covers, again,
you could go to a site like Fiverr. There's also a site like Getcovers
or you could create one yourself.
Now I've done lots of videos on this channel on creating covers.
So just have a, a search on the channel and pull up those videos. Now,
if you've not yet created a book,
I probably wouldn't recommend jumping straight into a puzzle book.
And instead I'd probably start on something more simple like a lined journal or
notebook. And for that,
I would recommend starting on this book tutorials playlist,
where there's videos there on creating basic journals,
uploading and publishing them to Amazon. Thank you very much for your time.
It's very much appreciated. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button,
and until next time, goodbye.