My wife and I started with some Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), and looked to make some medium content books to see how this whole thing works. We accidentally created two new word search books and they’re for sale. Please give them a go. They are certainly our first foray into the world of publishing and word search books. I think we did okay.

The Technical Details⌗

We didn’t want this to be a time consuming thing. We really wanted to see if we could get some books published with as little effort as possible (hence medium content books like word searches; they are often books that can be generated algorithmically). This means that we can figure out a theme or idea and get it published in a few hours. How did we do this? A little coding of course.

I wrote a word search generator in Python, which for my first interpretation is very naive. It just finds spaces that words can fit, and keeps going until it gets all words into the puzzle. If it cannot get all words in, it tries again and does so up to 100 times. We haven’t yet found one that doesn’t work, but this all does depend on the word count, length and puzzle size. It’s naivety means that it doesn’t create interesting word patterns that cross each other often, so most words end up being isolated. They also don’t go diagonally as much as I’d like. I am working on the next algorithm that will be more intelligent and find better patterns. The new algorithm will also allow us to play around with different difficulties more easily, and make for more interesting patterns.

I will post more about these books as we go along with how we generate them. I will also start dabbling in maze books as it’s something that I really enjoyed when I was younger.