How to Publish a Word Search Coloring Book on Amazon KDP | Step by Step Tutorial (Trending Niche)

Do you want to learn about a side hustle that doesn't involve inventory or shipping? Well, in this video, I'll walk you through step by step how to publish on Amazon KDP using a tool called Book Bolt, which highly simplifies the process. We'll be creating a cute word search coloring book together, a niche that mixes the fun of coloring with the challenge of word searches. It's been a trending niche since the summer, and some of the top selling books in this category are selling hundreds of copies a month. So whether you're brand new or already experimenting with KDP, by the end of this tutorial, you'll know exactly how to research a niche, design your book, and publish it all in one tool, even if you have zero prior experience. Now, if you're brand new, let me quickly cover what Amazon KDP is. KDP stands for Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon's platform, where you upload your book files, and once they're live on Amazon, they take care of everything from printing, shipping to customer service. This means you don't have to worry about holding any inventory or deal with any shipping hassles. It's a true print ondemand model. And here's the best part. You really don't have to be a novelist or anything. There's a whole category called lowcontent publishing which includes books like journals, planners, puzzle books, and coloring books. They're in demand, fun to create, and surprisingly simple to make, especially with a tool like Book Bolt. So, that's the big picture of how KDP works. Now, let's roll up our sleeves and get started on creating a book together step by step. So, before we dive into creating our word search coloring book today, I want to quickly show you some of the niche and keyword research tools inside of Book Bold. These tools are powerful because they help us spot profitable book ideas, and they also make the brainstorming process a lot easier when deciding what books to publish. Now, I can't stress enough how important niche research is in the publishing process. The last thing you want is to spend hours designing a book that has very little demand or one that's stuck in an overcrowded market where it's impossible to rank and get sales. So, the tools I'm about to share will help you level up your ability to identify profitable niches and book ideas and hopefully give you a much better chance of driving more sales. So, there are actually many different research tools within Book Build, but I want to show you the products module, which actually one of my favorite ones. So, if you click into products, you'll see that there's an opportunity to search products and you can put in a keyword as well as select a category. So, in this case, let's say if I'm thinking of and it could be anything. Let's say you're thinking about creating a sloth related book or a hedgehog related book. So, in this case, let's say I put in hedgehog. And then there's also general. So, if you click on general, that means you're searching across all of these different categories. Or you can also niche down in your search and say, "Oh, in my mind, I'm actually thinking to create a hedgehog notebook and I wonder if that's a viable idea." Then you can just select notebook and then click on search and let's see what comes up. So this basically pulls up all the topelling books that are under this keyword and category that you have selected. So in this case it would be a hedgehog notebook category and the top selling notebook would be this one which was published April 2024. So that's last year and it is making around 126 sales per month which is actually really good for a notebook. Now if we scroll down further this is the second best performing notebook in that category and you'll see that in this case it is only making 16 sales and then the third bestselling 16 sales which is not that many and then five and so if the top five books and really just the top first book that is making that much sales I wouldn't really go into this niche. I don't think is that promising given the sales numbers that I'm seeing. So this is a process you want to go through to see okay you have an idea let's see if it's viable and then eventually you'll find something profitable. So for example if I were to look at a word search book let's see what word search books are trending. You'll see that under category there is no word search option is probably under activity book or puzzle book. But that's okay. What we can do is actually put word search as our keyword and see what comes up. But make sure in category we just go back to general just so then it searches through all of the different categories and very quickly book has returned some results. So let's see. So the top selling word search book is actually a coloring word search book which is exactly the type of book that I'm going to be showing you how to create in this video. So definitely stay tuned to the end. The second best performing book is also a coloring word search book. And then we continue to scroll down. The other great thing about this capability is that you will scroll down and see, oh, there are so many different word search ideas that I've never even thought of. So, it's also a really good brainstorming tool if especially if you don't have any ideas in terms of what you want to publish. Another one of my favorite research tools within Book Bold is the cloud module. So, let me click into that and show you what that looks like. So, basically, this module allows you to pull in the best sellers for each of these categories. This is especially useful when you're in the brainstorming stage. Let's say you know you want to create a notebook or a journal or a coloring book, but you're not sure, you know, what type of coloring book you want to create or what type of journal you want to create. You can use this tool to help you identify potential book ideas that you've never even thought of yourself and that are doing really well on Amazon. So, let's say if I keep it at top 100 right now and then I want to search for journals and see what the top 100 bestselling journals are on Amazon KDP, I can do that. I usually keep the BSR range as is one to 500,000. And for the price range, I'll just leave it open. So, anything between zero and $100 will still get pulled into my search. But in your case, if you want to niche down the search and say, I only want to see anything that is selling above, you know, $5 or under $20, you can do that as well. You can also put in keywords. So, for example, journals. If you have a specific journal that you want to search for, let's say related to a specific animal or a specific genre, you could do that. And in my case, I'm going to leave that blank and go ahead and click search just to show you what that looks like. So, very quickly, Book Bolt has pulled in the top 100 best-selling journals on Amazon KDP and including a lot of pertinent details related to each of the books. for example, the author, the publication date, which is crucial because I always want to look at best-selling books. And if there are some bestselling books that are, say, last published within the last 12 months, it gives me more confidence that I could potentially compete in that niche versus if all of the bestselling books within that niche are published, you know, 5 6 years ago, it might be a little bit more difficult for me to compete, especially because most of those books would have a lot of reviews already. And so you want to kind of scroll through and basically use this as a potential tool to brainstorm different ideas, continue your research to find a profitable book that you could publish. Lastly, I'll quickly also show you the keywords module which will be very helpful once we get to the publication stage when we're uploading our book to Amazon KDP because it'll help us determine the seven keywords that we want to put in as part of that process. For example, if we're doing a word search, uh we can put in word search here. And what it's going to do is to come up with some of the trending keywords that are related to the keyword that you had just put in. And the trending keywords is going to be ones that are pulled from both Amazon and Google, which is awesome. It will show you the search volume, which basically indicates the demand of that keyword, and also show you the competition as well. Ideally, you would want to focus on keywords that have a high search volume but a low competition because that will give you a higher opportunity to rank. So, this is another really useful tool that I wanted to quickly show you. Now that you're aware of the importance of niche research as part of the overall book publication process and aware of some of the key book tools that can help you in that process, let's move on to the exciting part of creating our word search coloring book. So to get started with creating the interior of our word search coloring book, what we want to do is to switch from the research module at this dropdown to the create module. So come to create, click on that and then you want to click on book bolt studio. So once you click on that, you'll have the opportunity to create a new project. So come up to projects and then click on new project. Here you will need to fill in the specifications of your book. So for project type, you'll need to let Bookbolt know whether you plan on creating a paperback book or a hard coverver book and whether you plan to design both the cover and interior within Book Bolt or just the cover or the interior. So in our case, we're planning to design our whole cover and interior on Book Bolt and it's going to be a paperback book. So we're going to select this option. In terms of project name, you could really name it anything you want. In my case, I'm just putting it as word search demo. And then moving on to trim size, we have selected 8.5x 8.5 in because most of the coloring word search books on Amazon are currently 8.5x 8.5 in. So it makes sense to go with what has been working. For interior and paper type, this is where we would select whether we want our interior to be printed in black and white or in color. Given we're doing a word search coloring book, it makes sense for our interior to be black and white. And we're going to do black and white interior with white paper. So now we need to indicate whether we want our book to have bleed or no bleed. For those of you who may not be familiar with the concept of bleed versus no bleed. When we say that the interior pages have no bleed, it basically means that there is a white space around each of your pages essentially creating a border around your graphic and text elements on each page. In contrast, when we say that the interior pages is with bleed, that means there's no white border around your page and your graphic and text elements essentially can bleed to the edge of each of your pages. So, in the context of our word search coloring book, in the case of noble bleed, there will be a white space around your page. And if you choose with bleed, your graphic elements can essentially fill the entire page all the way to the edge of your page. Personally, I prefer choosing with bleed with my books because it gives me more flexibility and the option to have certain elements go all the way to the edge of the page if I choose to, but either one would work. So, in my case, I'm going to leave it at bleed. And in terms of page count for my demo book, I'm going to put in 74 pages. And this will basically include four pages at the beginning, one page for the title page, which will also include some copyright language. Then I'll have another page on how to best enjoy this book, like a user's guide, and then another page which will allow the person to fill in their name. So it's basically a this book belongs to page. And then finally, I'll also have a blank page after that before we get into the actual word search puzzles. And then in terms of the actual word search pages, I'm going to have 30 word search pages. So each of the word search pages will also have a blank page on the back side. And because Amazon counts both the front as well as the back side as a separate page will basically have 60 pages. So the 30word search pages plus the back that will be blank. And then finally, I'll also leave another 10 pages approximately to put in the solutions to the word search puzzles. So overall, that will give us 74 pages. So you don't have to be too hung up on the number of pages if you're not sure, but try to put in approximately where you think you will land. And then as you're working through the project, if you end up pulling out pages or adding new pages, the great thing about using Book Bolt is that it automatically does all the margins for you. So there's no need to manually adjust any margins like in other methods that I may have shown in my previous videos. So it's super convenient. But for now, we're going to put in 74 pages, and we're going to go ahead and create our project. So, for purposes of this demonstration, I'm going to create an Axelott themed word search coloring book, which I thought would be a lot of fun and would be really cute. But obviously, whatever idea you decide to pursue, you want to make sure that you use the appropriate tools to vet the feasibility of that niche. But in my case, I'm just going to go ahead and create this Axel autoto themed word search coloring book. So, first of all, we want to start off with the title page. So, quickly, we want to go to text here within book bolt and click on add heading. Then, I'm going to change the font to something I like a little bit better. In my case, I'm going to change it to this one, but you can really pick any font you want. And then I'm going to put in for now cozy word search at the top because based on some research, it seems like everyone that's publishing in this niche has this word in there. So, so it might make sense to include it. And because this is a coloring book, I want to be able to get bit more of a coloring book look and feel. So, what I'm going to do is also go to effects here and go to this border option and then click on border. Check it off and then change this border line to black. What I also want to do is to move the weight all the way to 100 just so it looks a bit better and it's more defined line. And then after I've done that, I want to come here. This is for the actual font color. I want to change that to white. And so now we've created something that looks more like a coloring book sort of wording. And here I want to adjust the font a little bit. Maybe change it to 50. It's just a little bit too big. Perfect. And then I'm going to copy and paste this. And what I'm going to do here is to put in a name for my book. So maybe because it's Axelottle theme, I will call it Axelottle Pals. That sounds like a cute and fun name. And I'm also going to change the font here just to make it a little bit different than the font above. And I'm going to have to adjust the font size. Let's just say 270. Click. Okay. That looks pretty good. And then now I'm going to add another heading. And this time I'm going to just put in a word search coloring book. And then from there I also want to change the font. Maybe back to this one. Click okay. And then in terms of the font size I want to make it smaller. So let's say 25 and see how that looks. So I think that looks pretty good. And now we want to make it a little bit more fun. So maybe we can add in a picture of an axelottle here. Within book bolt there's actually various images that you could pull in. So, for example, they're linked to Pixab Bay as well as Upsplash. So, you can go ahead and search for the image that you might be looking for. They even break it down by color theme. So, if you want, you know, a cat that is gray versus a cat that is brown or the background being darker versus lighter, you can use these elements to sort of search for what you're looking for. They also have specific categories that you can search for. So, you can definitely use the images within Bookbolt. Otherwise, you could also easily upload images from other platforms or other sources. Or if you're an illustrator yourself, you can upload your own illustrations to create this book, which would be even more amazing. Otherwise, you can also upload from other AI or nonAI sources. But whatever images you upload, just make sure that you do have the licensing rights to use them for commercial purposes. So, in my case, in the interest of time, I've already pre-uploaded some of the images that I plan on using. So, I'm going to go ahead and pull in some of those for my interior pages. So, let's go ahead and pull this one in. And I'm just going to adjust the size. Perfect. And now, perhaps I'm going to put in by. And so, here's where you can put in your pen name. So, in my case, I'm just going to put in the same pen name that I used for a previous demo book and another video. So, I'm going to put by Ellie Doodle Wood. And I'm going to change that font to perhaps something more cursive. So I'm just going to select this and click okay. I think that looks pretty good. And now we want to add in some copyright verbiage. So I'm going to go ahead and add multi-line text here just cuz the text is going to be a bit smaller and there's not really a heading. So first I'm going to put copyright and then leave some space for the copyright logo. 2025 by Ellie Doodle Wood. And I'm going to change the font size of that to something smaller. So let's say 10 or 11. So maybe I'll start with 11. See how that looks. Okay. So that looks okay. I'm just going to zoom in a little bit more. And so now I want to put in the actual copyright logo. I need a bit more space here. And what you can do is come to the shapes elements here. And there should be a copyright logo right here. So, we're going to bring it smaller and move it right between there. We can also group these so they don't move around too much. And there we go. So, now I'm also going to copy in the other part of the copyright language which I've already pre-typed separately. So, now let's zoom out to see if that looks good or not. So, I think that looks really nice. So, now we're done our title page. We can move on to the next page. So on this next page, I've already pre-created in the interest of time, but you'll basically use the same approach that I just showed you for the title page to add in text and images. And so here I'm basically adding a guide on how to enjoy this book. So for example, in my case, I'll put this is a fun axelottle themed coloring word search book where you can color in the letters and illustrations on each page as you go searching for the words. Pages have varying levels of difficulty, and words can be found in any direction, including vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. and have fun. And the one thing is that you want to remind people to put in another paper between the page that they're working on and the next page within the book just to make sure, especially if they're using markers, that nothing bleeds through. So, this is just a reminder that I had put in. And I know a lot of coloring books also have a similar reminder in their books. So, next, let's go ahead and put in a this book belongs to page, which is just a fun page for kids to put their names on. And so I'm going to just go ahead and paste in what I had previously already created in the interest of time. But basically you would use the same method in terms of adding text and illustration. The line here is basically just from shapes. So you can come to shapes and add a line. So perfect. So we got the first few pages done. And now we're going to leave one blank page which would be the back side of this page here that this book belongs to. So I want the back side of that page to be blank before we start the actual word search puzzles on page five. So, here comes the fun part where we're actually going to start putting in our word search pages. And Book Bolt makes this so much easier. So, what we want to do is to come to this icon that looks sort of like a maze. Click on that. And you'll see that Book Bolt has so many different templates that you could just drag and drop into your project. There's all sorts of planner pages, all sorts of journal pages, log book pages. It is just incredible. Almost anything that you could think of, you'll probably find it here. You can also search. So, for example, if you want to do a, I don't know, a dream journal, they even have a template for that. Or if you want to do a gratitude journal, there's a template for that. Let's say a prayer journal, there's also template for that. So, it's pretty awesome. In our case though, right now, we want to get a word search template. So, let's scroll down to find a word search template here. And there we go. So, we're going to click on that. So now we want to go ahead and select the pages where we want the word search puzzle to appear on. So like I mentioned previously, we're going to have 30 word search puzzles for this demo book. We're going to have a blank page behind each of the word search pages just in case anyone's using a marker to color in. You want to prevent any risk of bleeding through to the next page. So we're going to leave each of the back side of the word search pages blank. So that's why we'll be skipping a page for each selection. So now we're going to go ahead and select basically all the odd pages. So maybe we can select odd, but then just unselect the ones that you don't want to have. So the last 10 pages are going to be for the solution. So I also don't need to select those. And I think that's good. So we've selected the 30 pages. Now we're going to click on continue to options. So now we can go ahead and put in the specifications for our word search pages and the puzzles that we're going to create using book bolt. So the first question is how many words do you want to have within each of your puzzles. So in our case we had selected five which seems like a good number. So basically on each board search people would be able to look for five words but you can really increase that or decrease that based on your preference but I'm going to keep it at five. The other things that you can select here is whether or not you want some of the words to show up diagonally or just horizontally and vertically. So by default it's just horizontal and vertical. But if you check off diagonal words as well, then some of the words may show up diagonally. There's also the option for reverse words, which means some of the words will be spelled in reverse. I prefer not to include reverse words just cuz it might be a little bit confusing, but I know a lot of the other books include reverse words just so it increases the difficulty level. So, it's really up to you. In my case, for this demo book, I'm just going to leave this unchecked. Now, we can move on to the next section where they're going to ask us for the specifications for each of our puzzles. So, the first question is, how many puzzles do we want to have show up on each of our pages? In my case, I selected one. You can really select any number, but just keep in mind that if you select too many, it's going to be really crowded and it's going to show up smaller. Given our book is only going to be an 8.5x 8.5 in trim size, and it's a square book, I feel like it would look a lot nicer and cleaner if it's just one puzzle per page. And then the next thing in terms of puzzles alignment, I'm going to select middle. So, in terms of the font for the puzzle, we want to make sure that we select a font that actually has an outline for people to color in. So, if we're just creating a regular word search, this wouldn't be an issue because we can literally select any font that we choose to. But because we're trying to create a word search coloring book, then we need to make sure we select an appropriate font that people can actually color in. So, in this case, I actually went ahead and uploaded my own font. So, here are the free fonts from Bookfilt, but you can also come to my fonts here and click on upload and then upload your own fonts. So, you might be wondering where can you find fonts like that for free. So, I actually just went to a free font site like 101 fonts here and search for fonts with outlines. So, if you come here and you go and look for outlines like this, you'll see a whole bunch of different fonts that has an outline where people can potentially color in. And so you just want to click through to find the one that you like personally and download that. So just as an example, if let's say I like this Utopia one and you want to make sure it has this little symbol here because that means that the font is free for commercial use. So if I like this font, I can go ahead and click download here and it's going to automatically go to my downloads folder here. You'll see that there's a true type font file there. So this is a TTF file. I'm gonna copy this into my downloads folder. It's just outside of this zip file. So, I can easily upload it. Now, if I go back to Bookbolt, then I can go ahead and click on upload and I can select this font, click on open, and you'll see that it's been downloaded right here. And I can select it just like any other font going forward. So, in my case, I'm actually going to use this font here for my word search. And in terms of letters text size, I'm going to keep it at default. letters color. I want it black because I'm just printing a black and white interior. So, I wouldn't want it to be any other color anyway. And in terms of letter case, you can choose for your words to show up all lowerase, all uppercase. I'm going to choose all uppercase. And in terms of line width, I'm going to leave it at four pixels. And cell outline color, cell color, and border color, I'm going to leave them all to be transparent, like no color. And for the section on clues, I'm going to leave it as no clues. You can have your clues show up in columns or in a row like in a line. But I actually want no clues because I want to manually add them myself just so the formatting looks a bit better, but you can definitely choose for it to be automatically included. So I'm going to choose no clues. Now we can go down to the solution section. So the solution pages basically shows the answers to your word search puzzles. So we'll have to put in the specifications for that as well. So, in terms of the solution dropdown here, we can have the solution pages show up manually in the selected pages that we click on later, or we could have the solution pages show up right after each of the puzzle pages or after all the puzzle pages. So, in my case, I'm going to do after all the puzzle pages, but just to make it easier for demonstration purposes, I'm just going to manually select solution pages. You can also choose to have no solutions for your puzzles, but I would recommend having the solutions. So, I'm going to put manually select solution pages for now. And then in terms of solutions per page, you could put one or you could put up to four. And then in terms of the between solutions gap, I'm going to leave it at default. Solutions alignment on the page will still be middle. In terms of solution highlighter, rounded rectangle, that's fine. You can pick any other style you want, but I think the rounded rectangle makes sense. Highlighter width one pixel. I'm okay with that. Solution highlighter color is just gradient. sort of a lighter gray. So, I think that's okay. We wouldn't want to pick an actual color anyways because the interior pages of our book are going to be black and white anyway. In terms of the letters font, I'm going to keep it the same just to be consistent with the puzzle itself. I'm going to leave the letters text size as default. Letters colors black again. Letter case all uppercase just to match the actual puzzle page itself. And everything else is going to be the same. For the solutions, I just left the border colors black. You can pick transparent just to be exactly the same as the puzzle above, but I think border color being black for the solutions is fine. And then we're going to come down here. I'm going to put no clues. I don't want the clues to show up on my solution pages. I want no title. I want to add my own title. But if you choose to use title, you can also pick the other options. I'm going to do no title. Now, this is the part where we can upload our actual word search words. So in our case, like I mentioned before, we're going to create 30 pages of word search puzzles. So we need 30 sets of words and five words per puzzle. So we're going to come here and basically download this example file just to make sure we have a format that we can upload that book will accept. Then you'll see that they already have some examples. In this case, it has more than five words for their examples, but I just want five. So I'm just going to put five on mine. So we can delete this and it's really just an Excel file. So let's say in my file I want some of the words to repeat. So let's say for my first puzzle I want to have exelottle and five words are all exxalottal. So people would need to find it five times on the word search. All I need to do is this and I get a space here. And then for let's say my next puzzle I want to put in some other words. Let's say I want to put camp and I want camp to show up twice. Then I want to put tent intent to show up twice. Math show up once. So that makes up my five words for the next one. And then let's say for my other puzzle I want to put in cook twice, sleep twice, and then bath once. And really just put in any words that make sense for the vision you have for your book and so on and so forth. So I'm not going to go through this whole thing here just for the demo, but basically you would want to put in 30 sets of five words for your puzzles. So, in the interest of time, I had gone ahead and put in all of the words. So, now I have 30 sets of five words ready for my 30 word search pages. So, let's go ahead and import this file. So, we're going to file. So, now we want to select where we want our solution pages to appear. So, I think after all the word search puzzles, I'm going to have a title page for the solution pages and I'm going to have a blank page on the back side of that page, which means my solutions will start on this page. And since I'm going to have four solutions on each page and I have 30 puzzles in total, I'll need eight pages. So, so the solution title pages here, the back side is going to be blank. So, I'm going to start here. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. So, that's perfect. So, our eight solution pages are going to appear from pages 67 to 74. And I'm now going to go ahead and click on submit. So, we're going to wait for Bookbolt to generate all our puzzles for us. And now you will see that based on what we had provided, it has gone ahead and generated all of the puzzle pages in the pages that we have specified every other page basically because we want the backs to be blank. And now you'll see it has all the solutions in the back as well. So that looks perfect. So the only thing now I'm going to go ahead and do is to make the pages look prettier. So for example, I would want to add the actual word clues. Then I didn't select the option to have Bookbolt add them for me directly because I prefer to be able to add them where I want them. And then also I would want to add a title as well and also some illustrations where I can. So I'm going to go ahead and show you one page as an example. For example, for this page I would want to put in word search number one, let's say. So I'm going to type in word search number one. And then I would also want to make sure I have the clues. So in this page, if I recall, I had put in axelottle five times. So that was my first page. So I would want my clues to say axelottle x* 5. So I'm going to go ahead and basically put in and I'm going to copy and paste this for now. And I'm going to put in a lot* 5. And so that would be my clue. And I'm going to go ahead and maybe put a border around it just so it looks a little prettier. So I'm going to go to shapes, put in a perhaps a rectangle. And we can go ahead and make this rectangle hollow. Okay, this is the hollow. This is where I'm going to put in the border. And then I want to make the border thicker. So I'm going to click on okay. And now my glue has a border around it. So something like that. Now the other thing you can do is to include some illustrations on the file so that it looks a little prettier. So the tip that I have for you is usually I'll go to the solution page for that. So like word search number one is all the way down here. So you might want to add titles here too. Or you can use the book bolt option previously to actually automatically generate the titles. But because I didn't do that, I would want to manually add them back in here. So for example, if I come here, I would want to make sure I perhaps resize some of this so I can have space for the titles. And then go ahead and put in the titles. So and I'll change the font size just so it's a little bit smaller. So let's say 15. And then we zoom in a bit. and then move this. Okay. So now the tip that I want to show you is where we see blanks here. So these are the answers to where exelottle is showing up. So where we see blanks, we can actually put an illustration there just to make it prettier. So just remember, so let's say from R to T to M, this is empty. I can put in an illustration there. So let's come back up to word search number one. And I am going to put in a rectangle. I'm going to change this to white. And I'm going to put it on remember R O R T M. So this section we know that it's not going to overlap with any of the actual words that people need to search for. So we can kind of cover that up. And once that's covered up, I'm going to come back to my uploaded images and just pick an image I want to use for that. So just as a quick example, I can put that there like that. And so you would just want to repeat the same process for all of your word search pages. So, in the interest of time, I have now gone ahead and updated all of the remaining pages using the same approach I mentioned earlier. Basically adding the titles, the clues, as well as the illustrations where appropriate. And so, all the way down, I'm going to show you also what the solution pages look like. So, for the solution pages, I also added the titles and wherever appropriate, I also added the illustrations just to match with what I have in the actual word search pages. So, this takes a little bit longer. It's up to you if you want to bother to add the illustrations into the solutions just to match what you have in the word search pages. I just think that it's a little nicer and it's more consistent, but it is a little bit more timeconuming. So, now that we've completed all the word search pages and also the solution pages, we are basically done our interior pages. And so, we can now move on to designing our cover. Thank you for making it this far into the video. If you're enjoying it so far, please don't forget to give me a big thumbs up and hit that subscribe button. And now let's go on and create our book cover. So now let's go ahead and have some fun designing our cover for this book. So scroll all the way to the top on your lefthand panel and click on the cover template. And you'll see that Bookbolt has already automatically populated the KDP cover template, which means we don't have to manually go and download the template and import it into our project, which saves us so much time. And the template is already based on the number of pages that we have in our project as well as the trim size we had selected. So it is really awesome and saves a lot of time. So now with the template already here, we can go ahead and start designing. So I'm going to start off by designing the front cover. Then we're going to move on to the back cover after that. So similar to the interior pages, I had already pre-selected some of the graphic elements that I want to use just the interest of time. So we're going to go ahead and pull those in. And so this is a camping background. Now I'm gonna pull the axelato who is camping in there as well. And I'm gonna give him a little friend so that he doesn't look as lonely over there. Perfect. Now we also want to add the title. And you want to make sure that the title in terms of the font is consistent with the interior title page that we had just so the whole book looks coherent. So what I'm going to do is start off by adding the cozy word search wording. So, I'm going to go and add heading. And we're going to type in cozy word search. And of course, we want to update the font to be consistent with what we had previously over here. So, I'm going to come down here to select the same font. Click okay. And now, again, I want to create that effect where there's an outline around the word. So, I'm going to go here again and go into effects, click on border, and select the border option. Then in terms of the border color, I'm going to select black and I'm going to click on okay. And in terms of the weight, I'm going to pull it all the way to 100. Looks good. Now you'll see that the font color itself is also black. So you can't really see the border. So we're going to change the font color. So I'm going to highlight that again. I'm going to change the actual font color, the text color. And perhaps I'm going to select something bright. Let's select the yellow. And that looks pretty good. So I'm going to move this over here. So, I'm going to zoom out and zoom in again just so we can see what we're doing here. Okay. So, now you want to do the same thing for the other parts of the title. So, in the interest of time, I've already pre-typed those. And I'm just going to paste them in here. And similar, you want to add in a word search coloring book as well, right underneath of here. So, we can rearrange the words just so they're centered. Okay. So, that looks good. And now, what I want to do is also just make it very obvious on the front cover that this is a coloring word search. So, what I want to do is go ahead and put in this time instead of add heading, we're going to put add multi-line text. And here we want to change it to the font that we used for the actual word search puzzles. So, the ones with the outline. We're going to go here, go to my fonts, and the one that I had used was this one. So, I'm going to select that, hit okay, and take out all these words. And I'm going to just type in random letters. So, put Y c U T E L K R QB. And the whole idea is just to put this on your book. And I might have to change the font size a little bit. Seems a little too big. 25 or something. Yeah. And then you just continue and type up the letters to cover the whole bottom part of this. And you can put it anywhere. Like your design is probably going to be different from mine, but the whole idea is just to include on some part of your front cover that makes it obvious that this is a coloring word search. So, in the interest of time, I had already pre-typed all of this. So, I'm going to just paste that in. And I'm going to move this so it fits. Okay. And so, once I have that, the other thing I want to do is to use a shape here and make it look like I highlighted those words. I took the black shape. I just took the rectangle. And I can change the color perhaps to something lighter. Then, I'm going to just rightclick and send it backwards just so that it's behind the words. And you would repeat this process for any other real word that you have within the mix of these characters. So for example, I also have axelottle spelt out here. So I want to do the same thing. And I'm going to send backwards. And you can adjust it later just to make it look nicer. And then I also have the word fun here running vertically. So I have to adjust it to vertical. And then do that. And then again send it backwards. So there we go. So this looks like a pretty good front cover. We can again like adjust it a bit more later on. So now we're going to move on to designing the back cover. So for the back cover, I'm going to keep it simple. I think I'm going to just have a solid background which looks coherent with the front cover. So I'm going to just take a rectangle here and I'm going to just drag it out to fill the page. You can zoom in a little just to make sure you don't you didn't leave any gaps between the front cover and the back cover. And so if it looks good, then we're going to change the color to something we want. So I'm going to change it to this navy blue color just cuz I feel like it matches the night sky here. And again, just select a color that makes sense for your overall design. So now we can add in some words as well as perhaps examples of what the interior pages look like. So I already pre-typed some of the words that I want to include here. I'm just going to paste it in. Obviously the words would be different for your book depending on what the theme is. And so now what we want to do is to actually put example pages. And you can select your favorite two or three pages from your whole book and use those as examples here. So, the best way to do it easily is to just go to your interior pages. Let's say, oh, this is one of my favorite ones. I can come here and I'm going to go to download up here and then I'm going to go to download current page and hit on that. And you're going to give it some time. It's going to generate a PDF of just this page. So, once you have that, it's going to open up automatically or if it doesn't, you can go to your download folder and open it up. I'm going to zoom out. And what you want to do is to take your snipping tool and use the snipping tool to just take a screen copy of this. And once you have that, so you're going to save this file into your downloads or anywhere you can save it on your laptop. Save it. And now you're going to come back to Book Bolt on okay. And come back to your cover. And now we want to go to images within Book Bolt. Click on upload image. And you can take the screenshot that you had just pulled in and do this. And just bring it into your project. And now you can resize it in whatever way you want. So basically I would follow a similar process and pull in the other screenshots that I want to include on this page. And as you can see for this one I decided to make it look like I actually colored it in. I just did this on the Adobe PDF that I had downloaded from Book Bold before I took the screen copy. So you can do that as well, but it's not necessary. If you just want to leave them black and white is totally fine as well. So, I'm going to just resize those on the page just to make sure they fit nicely. Going to put this one here. And then I think I'm going to put an XLT here as well, just to make the back cover a little bit more fun and make it match the front cover. So, pull in this one. It looks very cozy there. And just maybe put it. It's like they're leaning on this page. Maybe I'll flip it around. Perfect. So, now you see that I've left a space down here. And that's because that's where the barcode is. So, what you want to do once in a while when you're doing your design is to check on whether or not any of your critical elements are going over any of the margins or going or going over the barcodes. So, to do that, you can actually just click on the back cover here and then go to this little checkered icon and that's basically the opacity icon. Can bring down the opacity and you'll be able to see through the back cover. And now you'll see that the barcode is actually here. Because if you have it like that, if you try to upload this to Amazon KDP, it'll actually get rejected because that's a formatting issue. So you want to make sure you stay clear of the barcode. Also, there are other areas that you want to stay clear of, but you'll see those in the margins. So you don't actually need to update the opacity to see that. You just don't want any critical elements to go past any of these green margins. So I think overall that looks good. So we're going to bring the opacity back to 100. And we pretty much have our cover design completed. We are now ready to download our project into a PDF file so that we could upload those on Amazon KDP and get our book published. So, in order to download your project, you want to go up to download and hit the drop down. And from the drop-own menu, you want to select download current project CMK printed books. Click on that and wait a couple of minutes. And there we go. So, now we're going to click on okay. All right. And you'll see that it's opened up the download folder where my files have been downloaded. So, this is the front cover which we can upload to Amazon KDP later. And this should be the interior. So now we're ready to actually hop onto Amazon KDP to upload our files. Once you have both your book cover and interior pages completed and downloaded from BookBuild to your computer, then we are now ready for the final step of uploading and publishing our book to Amazon KDP. So right now, what you want to do is to log into your account on Amazon KDP. And if you don't already have an account yet, then you would want to go ahead and create one first. So once you've logged into KDP, what you want to do is to click on the create new title or series button. So let's go ahead and click on that. And from there, we're going to be publishing a paperback. So we're going to click on create paperback. So now we're going to go ahead and fill out this form. So firstly, the book language, we're going to keep it as English. And for book title, I'm going to put in cozy word search pals, which would align with what I had on the book cover. In terms of subtitle, I'm going to put a cute word search coloring puzzle book for adult, teens, and kids. In terms of series, this is an optional question, and since my book is not part of a series, I'm going to skip over it. Addition number, I'm also going to skip over. In terms of author, I'm going to put in my pen name, which is Ellie Doodlewood. Uh, contributors, I don't have any, so I'm going to skip over that as well. So here you would want to put in the description of your book which should accurately describe all the key features of your book and also include some elements that would entice the customer to want to purchase your book. So in the interest of time I had already pre-written the book description which I will now paste in here. And basically this is what we have. Discover the perfect mix of fun and relaxation with this cute axelott word search coloring book. Inside you'll find 30 unique pages each featuring a cozy word search puzzle paired with at least one adorable axelottle illustration to color. Every page is designed to be bold, easy to color, and single-sided, so you can enjoy coloring with markers, pens, or pencils without worrying about bleed through. I also have a number of bullet points, which would capture the key features within the book, such as a number of pages. So, there's 30 word search puzzles within the books, and each of the pages has at least one or more excell illustrations for people to color in. The solutions are also included at the back of the book. I also included the book size, which is 8.5x 8.5 in. So once we have the description completed, we can move on to the rest of the form. So the next question is publishing rights. So you want to confirm whether you own the copyright and hold necessary publishing rights. So as long as all the illustrations and images that you have used, you have the appropriate licensing rights to use them for commercial purposes, then you're safe to check off this box. And then the answer to the next question would be no. In terms of reading age, because my target audience could be anywhere between an adult to a teenager to a kid, I'm going to leave this as is and not actually select an age range. This is also just an optional question. In terms of primary marketplace, I'm going to leave it as Amazon.com. This is basically where you expect the majority of your book sales. So, the fact that you selected Amazon.com doesn't mean that your book will not be available in the other marketplaces. It still will be available. But here, it's just asking you which one is your primary marketplace. So for us, we're going to leave it at amazon.com. So in the category section, we would now want to select up to three categories that best describe our book. So we're going to go ahead and click on this choose categories button. And right away, you'll see a drop down here. So just in the interest of time, I already pre-selected the three categories that I want to place my book under. But just for high level, you would want to scroll through each of these categories and find the ones that is most relevant to the book that you're publishing. And so for example, in my case, I want to click on children's books. Then there's a subcategory that pops up. We're going to go click on that as well and find a most relevant subcategory. So in my case, it's going to be activities, crafts, and games. So once you click there, you'll see that there's yet another subcategory. So you can pick activity books, crafts, and hobbies, or games. I think activity books would be most relevant for us. And then from there, you'll see yet another subcategory that you could further drill down to. So it could be coloring books, diaries, mazes, sticker books, etc. I don't see word search specifically, but given ours is a coloring word search book, we could potentially click on coloring books or we could just not select one and just leave it as a general activity book. But I think in my case, I'm going to click on coloring books. And then again, I'm going to add another category. So from here, I'm going to look at the drop down and see if there's anything else that looks relevant. So right away, I see crafts, hobbies, and home. There's potentially something there. From there, I'm going to click on the subcategory. So, given that we mentioned that our book is suitable for both kids and adults, I think I can probably put in coloring books for grown-ups. And from there, you'll see your friend placement categories. So, general is if you can't find anything relevant here. For us, I think we're doing an exalotto marine animals. I'm going to click on animals. So, now we can go on and find our third category. So, here again, we're going to repeat this process. Go through to see what's relevant. We're going to click into humor and entertainment to see what's there. In terms of the subcategory, I see puzzles and games, which would be highly relevant for us. And then here, we can look further into the next subcategory, but I don't think I see anything. I see crosswords, which is different from a word search. So, I'm going to not select anything here, but come over to placement here to see if we find anything. So, here I see a word search option. So, I'm going to go ahead and select that. So, now I have all three of my categories selected. So, we can click on save categories. So now we want to move on to the next two questions. And so the first question is whether our book is a lowc content book i.e. journals, notebooks and planners. So I would say ours is not really a lowc content book because based on KDP's description of low content book basically that means you have minimal or no content on the interior pages and also the pages are generally repetitive and designed to be filled in by the user. So in our case, you would think of repetitive pages like every page of a planner is the same, every page of a journal is the same, every page of a composition notebook is just lines. So in those cases, that would be a low content book. But for us, because every page of a word search puzzle is actually a different word search puzzle, I would say that ours is more like a medium content book. So I'm not going to check off the low content book here. Large print book basically means any books that is printed in font size 16 or higher. So in our case, because ours is a word search book, it's not really like a story book or a novel. I'm going to leave that unchecked. It's not really a textheavy type of book. So now we're going to move on to the keyword section of this form. This is where we put in the seven backend keywords to help customers who are looking for our type of book to locate it. And this is basically telling Amazon the keywords that we want our book to rank for. And there are three key things we want to consider when we're selecting our seven back-end keywords. Number one is relevance. We want to make sure that the keyword that we select is actually relevant to the book that we're publishing. Because the last thing you want to do is to publish our book and tell Amazon that it's relevant for a keyword that is actually not relevant for because what's going to happen is Amazon will put your book in front of customers that are looking for this nonrelevant keyword and when the customers look at it, they're not going to buy it. So that's going to impact your conversion rate. So there's no point in trying to rank for a keyword that is not relevant to your book. The second key element you want to consider is the demand. So you want to rank for keywords that are high demand. So a lot of customers are actually searching for it on Amazon and that will help to bring in a lot of traffic and help to get your book seen. The third element though is you want to pick a keyword that has low competition because just high demand is not enough. If there's a lot of traffic going to that keyword but yet there is like 300,000 books that are already ranked on that keyword, chances are you still might not be seen. So, we want to find something that is high demand and low competition. And that's where keyword research tools like Book Bolt really come in handy. And I'm going to show you an illustration of how we could use Book Bolt to help us determine the seven back-end keywords. So, we come over to Book Bolt. We want to make sure we're in the research module. From there, we're going to scroll down to where it says keywords. I'm going to click on that and click on search. So, from here, I would want to put in a broad keyword that I think would be relevant to my book. So in my case, I think word search is a very good one. So I'm going to put in word search and then click on search. And you'll see that book has now populated both the Amazon most trending keywords as well as Google's most trending keywords based on the broad key term that we had just put in which is word search. So from here we want to focus on the side that says Amazon because we're posting on Amazon KDP. And so here you'll see the suggested more niched down keywords that leverages the broad key term that we put in which was word search. So in this case you see one word word search which would be relevant to us as well because I have pages within the word search that is really just one word repeated five times that you would basically search for the same word five times on that word search page. So we could use one word word search. It seems like it has a very high search volume which is great news. The other thing I would also want to do to validate whether this is a feastable keyword is to confirm on Amazon whether or not this is low competition or high competition. How many books are already ranked under this keyword. So now I'm going to hop on to amazon.com and search for this key term and let's see what we find. So after searching we want to look at how many results there are. So in this case there are 8,000 results. That means there around 8,000 books that are ranked under this keyword. So 8,000 is still pretty good. Anything under 10,000 I would say is acceptable from a competition perspective. So given that it checks off the box for high demand, for relevance as well as for competition, I think this is one of the keywords that we could use as one of our seven back-end keywords. So now we basically want to continue a similar process to identify all seven keywords. So in the interest of time, I have already done that. So I'm going to go ahead and put that into Amazon KDP. So now that we have our seven backend keywords populated, we can now move on to the rest of the form. So, for publication date, we would want to leave it as publication date and release date are the same. For release date, I'm going to leave it at release my book for sale now, which means that once Amazon KDP approves your book, which could actually take up to 72 hours, it will automatically go live. So, now we can go ahead and click save and continue. So, for ISBN, I would want to click on assign ISBN, which means I'll be getting a free KDP ISBN from Amazon. If you already have your own ISBN you want to use, you can click on the add your own ISBN instead. But I think in most cases you will not have your own ISBN already. So you would want to click on assign ISBN here. And it looks like Amazon has now given us our ISBN, which is great. So we're going to move on to print options. So given this is a coloring word search book, we're not going to have any sort of colored interior. So we're going to keep it a black and white interior with white paper. So this is perfect. In terms of trim size, as you may recall, we had selected 8.5 by 8.5. So, we need to change it to that. So, this is 8.5 by 8.5 inches. So, in terms of bleed settings, we did select with bleed. So, we want to select bleed here. And then in terms of the paper bag cover finish, that's really up to you. In most cases for coloring books and activity books that I've seen, they're generally using glossy. So, I'm going to go with glossy. And now we get to the fun part, which is where we get to upload the actual interior and cover files that we worked on and downloaded from BookBolt previously. So, we're going to click on interior, going to open that up, and it might take a couple of minutes. Perfect. So, now we can go ahead and upload our book cover as well. So, we're going to click on upload a cover you already have here. And we're going to go ahead and upload. Perfect. And it asks, does your cover include a barcode? So in our case, we did not already include a barcode on our cover. So we're going to let Amazon put a barcode on our cover for us. So we're going to leave this unchecked. Now Amazon is asking us whether we had used AI in generating our book. So that would include our book cover as well as our interior pages. So just to clarify, there is actually no ban on using AI. Like it's absolutely okay to publish if you've used AI. But this is really just an information collection from Amazon that they want to know whether your book has leveraged any AI or not. So the key thing here is just to be transparent about it if you did use AI. So in our case, we didn't actually use any AI specific illustrations or text. So I'm going to go ahead and click no. But if you did use any, you would want to click yes. And then you would want to specify whether you used AI for text for images or translations. And then in terms of text, was it just some sections with minimal or no editing or some sections with extensive editing by you? Whether it's the entire work and similarly you would go through these questions for images and translations as well. But in my case, I'm going to keep it as no and we're going to move on to the next stage. So here we get to launch our book preview. So based on all the uploaded files that we provided to Amazon KDP, they're going to let us preview our book. And so this is where you want to check that everything looks good with the margins, with the pages before we actually move on to the publication stage. So now very quickly, we see our cover. I think it looks awesome. No issues with the margins, which is great. And now we're going to move on to the interior pages. Take a quick look at it and make sure everything looks good. So, it would be an issue if any of these items or critical elements are hovering over the margins here, but that shouldn't be an issue because we did use the book bolt template and margins, which actually allowed us to ensure that nothing was actually crossing the margins when we were designing the book. So, as long as you've clicked through and everything looks good, then we can go ahead and click on approve. So, now we have completed the form on this page and we're going to go ahead and click save and continue. Okay. Okay. So now for territories, you're going to select the territories where you have the rights to sell this book. So in our case, I'm going to leave it at all territories. Primary marketplace, I will also leave it at amazon.com. And now we're on to the pricing, royalties, and distribution section, which is where we get to determine the price of our book. So from here, we'll see Amazon.com, and there's all the different marketplaces here. The thing is once you populate the Amazon.com price, it'll automatically convert to the other currencies and populate the rest of the marketplaces for you. So you wouldn't have to go through one by one, but you can certainly edit them one by one if you choose to. So based on some of the research that I've done on Amazon on some of the competitors that are publishing similar books, most of them are priced at $9.99. And so you would want to do a similar research process as well for your books and take a look at the people that are posting similar books on Amazon and how much they're pricing at. So, in my case, I'm going to leave it at $9.99 for now and see what that comes out to in terms of royalty. So, taking into account the printing cost of 284 and the 60% royalty rate, we're going to be left with $3.15, which is not bad. So, I'm going to go through and see the other marketplaces. And there we go. Now that we've inputed everything, we can go ahead and click on publish your paperback book. at which point Amazon will take up to 72 hours to review your book just to make sure there are no formatting issues or copyright issues. And once they're comfortable with it, then your book will automatically go live. So, I'm going to go ahead and click on this. And there we go. And that's how you can create and publish an activity book step by step with Book Bolt. Just to give you some more perspective, many popular coloring and activity books on Amazon sell anywhere from hundreds to even thousands of copies each month. So, even at just a few dollars in royalties per sale, that can actually quickly add up to thousands of dollars in monthly income, it really shows there's a strong demand in this space and that with the right niche and design, these kinds of books can really find a solid audience. So, if you'd like to try out BookBu, I've linked it in the video description below. They've also given me a special offer for my audience, so you can get 20% lifetime discount if you use my code IV20 at checkout. What I really like about Book Bolt is that it's an all-in-one tool. You can literally research profitable niches, design interiors and covers, and even optimize your keywords and descriptions. Basically, everything you need to go from idea to publish book all in one place. And if you just want to test it out, there's also a 3-day free trial, so you can definitely explore all the features risk-f free. So, that's it for today's video. If you enjoyed it, please don't forget to like and subscribe, and I will see you next time.