Creating & Publishing my first Game Book

October 2025

Game Book Concept

What is a Game Book

A Gamebook, also known as a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book (now a brand/trademark), or interactive narrative fiction book - is a work of printed fiction that allows the reader to participate in and influence the storyline by making choices at various points in the text. These books are characterized by a non-linear narrative structure, typically organized into numbered paragraphs or sections.

Coming up with the Concept

Three years ago I built a physical escape game in a box with a pirate theme "The Captain Nemeth Treasure Chest". After many playtests and 100+ players, I had been looking for a way to make the experience more easily accessible and distributed more broadly. I contemplated making a web/app game out of it but decided against it as I was trying to build something physical. In July this year (2025) I discovered the Amazon KDP programme, allowing anyone to self-publish a book. This immediately got me interested in porting the physical game into narrative puzzles.

Tools

• Writing the Book: Google Docs

• Creating the Puzzle Structure Diagram: Lucid Charts (or any other charting software)

• Image Editing: Photoshop / Paint.net / Krita / Pinta

• Scripting: 

  • Google App Scripts - Compiling the book, reformatting/margins, styling (heading fonts and styles)

  • Bash Scripts -  Compressing PDF, Preparing images for publication, Compressing Cover Image for web publishing

• Data Storage: Google Drive

Creating the Book Content

From Physical Box to Narrative Puzzles

Looking at my existing escape game box, the story was easy to write since it would be the same as the box: you find a box with pirate stuff inside; follow the clues that lead you to the treasure. This would work great in a book format since story milestones would match with book chapters.

I also needed to look at which puzzles would or would not work in book format. For example, I had some trick items in the box that required physical manipulation. These had to be replaced. This would be a problem because all the playtesting and real plays of the physical box made me confident in the puzzles, but introducing new puzzles would require additional playtesting and I had given myself only 1 month to complete the project.

Combining Items

Some puzzles required combining multiple items together. This would not be easy in book format because I needed the reader to be exposed to the puzzle and have some reference items to look at easily. I came up with the "Unlockable Items" concept for the book (initally called "clues" but not all items gave clues so renamed it to "Items"). I put the items at the back of the book and a reference table at the beginning of the book (freely navigatable) if readers need to quickly find them. My wife suggested I added a checkbox next to each item, that readers can check when they have unlocked it.

Hints

I had physical enveloppes for hints for each of the puzzles. I converted them into hint sections at the back of the book, separated with blank pages to avoid spoiling the reader. The physical hints would give the actual combination to open the physical lock, but in book format I could just have the reader jump to the page where the box was opened/puzzle was solved. This way the reader would not know the actual solution and could try again to solve them if they wished so.

Island Navigation

In the physical box, there is a part towards the end where you are looking at the map of the treasure island and identifying the treasure location and dig there. I already knew this could be represented as a dedicated chapter about island navigation using a compass with proper illustration and flavor text of each island region making the experience more immersive. Also for fun, unless the reader keeps a bookmark, I only added navigation instructions back to the start of the island in a few regions, meaning the reader could be actually lost until they reach one of those pages with the "back to the beach" instruction.

Designing the Puzzles structure

Once I identified all the puzzles and how they should be linked together, I needed to lay everything down. I used a diagram charting software (Lucid chart or equivalent) to connect all the puzzles, their solutions, hints and other story milestones together. This visualization helped me run through the various chapters and identify where I was missing some connections, back navigation points and where I would need to insert "blank" pages to avoid spoilers.

Playtesting the Puzzles

I manually created a powerpoint presentation using Google Slides using links for navigating between the various pages and sections of the story. There were also easily accessible links to items and hints as needed. It kinda worked but was not ideal because there is no easy way to bookmark where the reader was before jumping. But if you open multiple copies of Google slides document then I could achieve what I needed: allowing the reader to use the reference tables to jump to hints/items/codes on the second document while still facing the puzzles on the main document.

I ran through the presentation multiple times to manually test and had my wife test too (fresh pair of eyes). It took her about 2.5 hours to complete the whole thing and the new puzzles I had introduced seemed intuitive (except minor hiccups I could fix by providing more info).

Writing the Book

I tested a few times and was satisfied with the flow of the story, puzzle structures and items/hints structure so I could start structuring the actual book.

In my case, the escape game box has a mix of sequential and parallel puzzles, with some puzzle pieces hiding in the stories related to other puzzles. So I couldn't clearly define linear chapters. Instead I divided the book into multiple parallel investigations with a central hub (the airport) that allows the user to navigate easily between the investigations. Ultimately all investigations lead to solving a central puzzle which unlocks access to the final treasure island sequential path.

Dynamic Page Numbers

Besides book structure I needed to think about how I would accomplish dynamically generating the page numbers based on navigation instructions: "If you do A, jump to page X", but X is not defined yet. I achieved this with some Google Script magic:

(a) Each PAGE of the book is represented by a tab in a Google Doc

(b) Create multiple Google Docs, for each chapter or book section (intro, chapter A/B/C/..., items, hints, etc).

(c) Insert a dynamic page numbers by using the text "$page" with a link to the corresponding tab in the corresponding Google Doc.

(d) Create a Google App script that compiles all the tabs for all the sections of the book into a single output Google Document, keeping track of which tab maps to which page number. Then replace all "$page" with their corresponding page in the final output.

This approach was really useful because it meant I could easily move chapters around, move pages (tabs) around, add/remove tabs, etc and the script would automatically re-generate the full book with the new dynamic pages.

I also codified the tab names (ex: tab name starting with "(R)") to automatically align certain pages to the left or right page of the book by inserting blank pages automatically at book compilation time. This would help control the reader's attention by avoiding spoilers, hiding certain parts of the story/puzzles behind an existing page or starting new chapters on a new page.

Note: I'm happy to share the Google App script if you reach out to me, it's not that complicated.

Fonts

I needed to identify different fonts, font size and margin/padding properties for the different types of text elements of the book: Title, subtitle, paragraph, list item. And I created another tab with sample text for each element. I then created another script that goes through all the tabs and sections of the book and automatically reformats all the text matching those styles. This helped me save hours of manual work.

Margins

Similarly, I had to set the margins, as per the Amazon guidelines based on the size of the book. I played around with multiple book sizes, looking at existing puzzle books from larger formats to pocket formats, including cost estimates, to settle on the 5.5"x8.5" format which seems quite common. And my images were *mostly* illustrative and didn't require large formats like you'd find in bigger puzzle books. Based on the book format and number of pages (estimated) you can determine the margins sizes. I created a script that automatically applies the margins to all the tabs & sections of the book. I basically tried to automate many of those settings since it would allow me to play with the configurations and resize the book as needed.

Tables & Images

I wanted good control of the image positions  on the page, specially relative to the text around it. I could not achieve it by simply inserting images into body of the document and moving text around. When ported to the compiled book or printed to PDF, it would also be shifted, inserting random blank spaces around the image, thus pushing text down to a second page and messing up the page numbers. Instead, when specific alignment was required I used tables, inserting the text and images in different cells and aligning individual cells, merging them, etc. to achieve the desired effect. This worked great in printed and PDF format BUT (and that's a big caveat) this will not work well if you intend to publish for Kindle/epub which expects the text and images to flow. I don't have a Kindle to properly try it, but that was my understanding. This technique however helped me achieve the "compass navigation" for the Treasure Island section of the book, by aligning page numbers to the various cardinal directions around a compass image (N/S/E/W/...).

Page Numbers

Since I needed the reader to easily find a page, I decided to go with large page numbers. I spent some time tweaking those, re-running a custom script of course to save time not having to manually update each font size for 300 footers by hand.

Items & Codes

Items and Codes must be accessible at any time when the reader is reading the main story. If they need access to an item or they have found the solution to the puzzle, they must be able to jump to the page matching the item/solution code. To achieve this, I reserved the back of the book for those two sections and added the codes written vertically using a very large font for easier navigation. I also created reference tables at the beginning of the book that the reader can bookmark or photocopy if needed.

Note on Avoiding Spoilers

• When looking at the reference table for the items, you don't want story spoilers, so I used very generic item names.

• When looking at the codes table, I inserted a lot of wrong codes, some I knew were common mistakes playtesters/players had made when solving my box, others just to pad the table and hide the real codes. Those pages in the book would just have an illustration+flavor text of "nothing there / wrong code" or similar.

Because all the codes and items had that vertical text with the name/code on it for easy navigation, they all had to be on the right side of the book. So I inserted blank pages after each of them to make sure the left side would be blank. This was my initial approach but it resulted in a lot of wasted paper. So when I designed the Treasure Island navigation experience, I needed to create dig sites for each of the sections of the island. I used all that blank space to generate illustrations and flavor text for each dig site. I could use those left-side pages for dig sites because accessing a dig site was done using a page number and not a code or item name.

Items could have multiple pages (+ a blank page to avoid spoiling the next item). For codes I wanted the reader to get back to the main body of the book asap because I wanted to keep all the codes on all the right-side pages of the book. So when a code was correct, at the bottom of the page there would be a navigation instruction sending you to the next section of the book that you just unlocked. My wife also suggested I added a control text at the top of the page like "Continue reading if you come from page XXX". This was a great idea. It had an issue which is that some puzzles span across multiple disjointed pages but it mostly worked.

Publishing

Mandatory Sections

I looked at multiple other books that I own from different categories to understand the sections that are not related to the game itself: preface, foreword, table of contents, about the author, copyrights, etc.

Generating the PDF for print

My Google App Script would help compile the book into a single Google Doc output document. After that I simply needed to print + save to PDF to generate the book. Generating the 300 pages PDF takes a few minutes though and outputs a 650MB document, which is just around the maximum size accepted for Amazon KDP.

Note that I had to eventually cut some pages off the book because I initially estimated at <= 300 pages and designed all the margins based on that. But my book was at 315 pages and that would completley change the inner margins due to the center folding. This required me to shift all of my content. So instead I sacrificed a few less useful hints and red-herring codes to go back below 300 pages initial margin setup.

I also regularly uploaded to Amazon KDP to check if all the content was properly fitting within the print margin, including bleed and inner fold margin, since I couldn't check that with Google Doc.

Generating the PDF for e-book readers

Because the generated PDF was huge which was OK for print format, it would need to be compressed for ebooks. I wrote a bash script (that i can run on my machine) that optimizes and slightly compresses all the images. This reduced the size from 650MB to 40MB making it more easily distributable on the web with only a small loss of image quality.

Creating the Cover

Amazon has a cover design tool, but I didn't really like the output, so I used image editing tools instead.

I looked at various book covers and tried to design something fancy with colorful images. I'm not really an artist so I was struggling with getting something that looks good. Instead I opted for a plain grey background with white text and a single representative logo/icon. I wrote the back cover with description of the puzzles and content of the book and who is the book good for. 

I can't really comment on the effectiveness of my cover to attract readers though, I'm definitely not a marketing expert. We will see if that works. But multiple people gave feedback, book in hand, about liking the clean design of the cover, sample size of 3...

ISBN

Before you can publish your book, you'll need an ISBN for each version: paperback, hardcover and digital. You can go with the ISBN automatically generated by Amazon but it will cause problems if you intend to sell your book outside of Amazon - ex: in bookstores or non-amazon publishers, as they might reject it. You will need another ISBN for those publication outlets OR you obtain your own ISBN instead of using the one provided by Amazon. Each country has different ways to provide ISBN for publishers. For me, as a Singapore-based publisher, you can request ISBN for free with the National Library Board. You'll need to deposit 2 copies of your physical book and 1 PDF copy for digital publications within 4 weeks of publication, but that was a small thing to do and it also means your book will be archived in Singapore which was great. in US there are multiple organizations that sell ISBNs solos or in blocks of 10,100,... You'll need to research your specific case.

Once you have an ISBN you can make small edits to your book without requiring a new ISBN. If you make significant changes to the book and/or its structure, you will need a new ISBN corresponding to a new version of the book.

Uploading to Amazon KDP

When uploading to Amazon you'll need to create the book listing page which includes keywords, description etc. The amazon interface was really bad here, and I couldn't easily find the info when searching on Amazon itself so I used Gemini to help me list all the keywords that would best match my book, based on the book description and any info it could find online about the Amazon KDP programme.

You'll also need to upload your cover and your PDF (max 650MB). Then you must review your content and approve the publication.

You can set a publication date in the future or immediate publication. I set a date in the future so I could synchronize the release with the other services that I would publish to.

You will also need to select book size, paper type, color/b&w, etc. This will impact the quality of the book but also the price. I chose a matte cover instead of glossy because I don't have colors on the cover that need to pop.

Once you approve the book content and printing info you need to set the pricing. You can set the price in USD and it will show you the margin, printing cost and amazon commission. You can automatically apply the price to all the regions your book will be sold in and manually fix prices in certain regions if you need to.

Once all is done you click "publish" and Amazon will review your book. It usually takes 2-3 business days. You can't make any changes to your content while this is happening. After the review is complete (hopefully successful review), you can upload another PDF (to fix typos etc) and you'll need another round of reviews. 

Draft copy

You can order special printed versions of your book, not for sale, that will allow you to check the quality of the final print. Amazon charges you printing fees + delivery fees. I highly recommend this because it doesn't cost much (~10 USD total) and you can now try your book or run more playtests with the physical copy. By doing so i noticed some issues in consistency and navigation which I quickly fixed and resubmitted the PDF for review.

Releasing the Book

When you are satisfied with everything you can select the title on your Amazon KDP bookshelf and click release. It will take some time (couple hours to couple days) for the status of the book to be Live and another few hours/days for all the Amazon stores to list your book as "in stock".

You can also order a bunch of "Author Copies" that Amazon will charge only print+delivery cost, that you can use as gift (ex: to thank your playtesters with a signed copy) or to give to influencers and such. You can order up to 999 at a time if you wish to sell those copies yourself.

Preview

When your book is listed on Amazon stores a "preview" button shows up allowing users to read part of the book before buying it. I noticed it takes the first ~10 pages of the book. I would recommed not putting any spoilery information within those first few pages if you can. in my case it showed the first puzzle that players face (the maze to open the captain's lockbox) which was acceptable. I haven't found a way to control the preview pages, if you know any please let me know.

Uploading to other sites

For Game Books i usually find them on DriveThruRPG and itch.io so I published my PDF there as well as my own website. 

DriveThruRPG also allows publishing the paperback copy of your book on demand but the cost was 20-30% more expensive than on Amazon and required me to create a new cover using their own tools which was too much hassle when I already have another print on demand service. I'll do it if I have a lot of requests coming from the site.

DriveThruRPG also has a preview feature and you can select which range of pages the user can preview before buying your PDF/Book. You should choose judiciously to avoid spoilers.

For itch, I recommend also giving away the cover for free alongside the sale of the PDF. 

Creating the Youtube Intro

For your website, itch and DriveThru you'll need to add a Youtube video link. I created a 90s short video presenting the theme, showing the book's different angles (backpage, front title page, some of the inner pages avoiding spoilers) and discussing the origin of the book and who it is for. The Youtube description would include book description and links to the various distribution platforms and my website of course.

Well I hope you found this high-level information useful. There is a lot that goes into the details though and it would take multiple pages to write it all. Many of such details are very specific to the structure of your book, your country, languages, etc. 

If you have any question as usual don't hesitate to reach out: games@firebiscuit.com