The first ever puzzle book that I published (and also messed up a bit!)

This blog is not written by AI. Humbly request you to please ignore some typos and grammatical mistakes! :)

I want to talk about the first ever book that I published. 

My first ever wordsearch book was the Large Print Bible Word Search: A Journey through Bible History. As my first book, I wanted to make it very special. The ambitious, but naive me did not know the amount of work it is going to take to make it. Lol

I decided to call it "A Journey Through Bible History" because I wanted the puzzle doers to go through some key events from Bible History (that I know of) and at the same time have fun hunting for words in the Book.

I decided to do 77 puzzles with 24 words each, as 7 and 24 are some beautiful numbers used in the Bible. After 2-3 days of brainstorming, I decided on the 77 topics to find words from.

I started working on the project. Mind you, I was working at another place when I started this indie wordsearch book project. Naive me decided to hand-pick each word for the puzzle book from the topics that I selected. Idea was simple, get the topic, open the bible, quickly read through and pick words from there one-by-one. Oh my, little did I know that it would take MONTHS to finish it as I found myself juggling between job and the book project.

Finally, once some major commitments at work was completed, I got back to the book project. Determined me focused on it and finished the word finding tasks from Bible and now I have a list of 1800+ words. Awesome!

Now all I need to do is, put them on my book making software, make the wordsearch puzzles, add the word list, add a relevant scripture and the book will be done! (or so I thought)

After several days, I completed the book, made the best book cover that I could (back then!) with the knowledge that I had after going through several tutorial videos online.

Not knowing anything about publishing, clicked export, filled in some boxes on Amazon KDP and hit submit. DONE! What a relief it was. Happy with the accomplishment, I travelled to my home country for vacationing. A few kind friends and family brought my book! Hooray! Was super-excited seeing the sales!

While I was travelling, I was notified that my puzzle making software screwed up by omitting several words from the puzzle grids! Oh my! That was the time when I realized that I really messed up by not double checking! I just trusted the software to do its job. However, I should have known that this software was also an year or so old. They were also growing and learning, by making mistakes, just like me!

I came back from my holidays and talked to the puzzle software company about it and fixed it all and updated the file on Amazon. Yep, that was a lot of frustrating days and nights. It was such a silly thing but I wanted the book to be perfect. After I realized the book had errors, I wished and probably even prayed no one would buy the book until I fix it all.

I realized I made another mistake as well, which I am fixing right now. I claimed the puzzle book to be LARGE PRINT without honestly knowing what that meant! Rookie mistake 101. I dug deep into font sizes and learned that fonts in LARGE PRINT books must be of size 16pts or 5.6mm or 0.22inch. Now Amazon doesn't go check every book one-by-one so it is on the Author to give what they have promised.

So, here I am, fixing the book. Promises made, promises kept. Fortunately (maybe), the book did not make too many organic sales as I did not know Amazon marketing or book promotions back.

Also decided to update the interiors to include a short history about the event instead of just a random but relevant bible verse.

Hopefully Bible Word Search lovers will appreciate my efforts this time! :)

Here is the link to the Revised Bible Word Search: Link to Amazon

Lessons learnt: 

• Always double check.

• If I make a promise, I have to keep the promise.

• Make sure whoever does your puzzle book gets a great experience from it!

Ciao :)