Difficulty ladder inside one puzzle volume
“Easy · Medium · Hard” on a KDP cover is a listing contract. The buyer opens Look Inside to check that those names exist as sections they can see — in the table of contents, and on the first pages. A book that printed every band but hid the labels is the same product as a shuffled dump. The shopper cannot tell the difference before they pay.
How steep the climb should be is a different job. The difficulty progression article owns the ramp: one batch per level, no two-level cliff, the first section finishable. This page owns the label. Once the bands exist, they have to be named where the listing can prove them.
What the buyer is checking
A shopper who searched a type and saw Easy / Medium / Hard — or the module’s real band names — on the cover has three questions. Look Inside answers them or it doesn’t.
- The names are in the book. Not only in the subtitle. A contents line for each band, or a section title on the first page of that band, is the check. “100 puzzles, mixed difficulty” is not.
- The first pages match the first name. If the cover leads with Easy, the first puzzle in the sample sits under an Easy heading. Opening on a mid-band grid while the cover still says Easy is a contradiction the review will repeat.
- The later bands exist. Look Inside rarely reaches Hard. The contents page has to carry Medium and Hard as later section lines so the shopper can see the top of the ladder without flipping there.
That is the whole contract. The puzzles can be correct and the listing still fails if the names are missing.
Named sections, not a dump of the same type
The failure mode is familiar: generate every band, pour them into one “Puzzles” section, ship. The slope may even be right. The contents page still prints one line. Adjacent batches of the same type collapse to a single run. The buyer who opened the sample to verify Easy / Medium / Hard sees a type name and a page count. They do not see the bands.
The fix is composition, not another generate pass. Give each band its own named section. Puzzle Book Studio builds a two-level table of contents: a section line, then a child line per puzzle-type run inside that section. A section that holds one contiguous run of one type prints as one line using the section title — no indented child. Name the sections Easy, Medium, and Hard — or the module’s real labels — and those words become contents lines. Leave them as one untitled pile and the contents page cannot do the listing’s work.
Do not shuffle the whole book if the listing promised labeled bands. A global shuffle interleaves the pages. The section titles can survive; the sample will not. Shuffle inside a section if you want variety. Keep the section order the cover named.
The slope itself — how many steps, how tall each step, where the cliff must not sit — stays on the progression page. This page only insists the steps are labeled.
Use the module’s real band names
There is no universal Easy / Mid / Hard switch on every Puzzle Maker Pro module. The section titles should be the labels the generator actually used, or plain names you wrote for a lever that has no band word.
- Sudoku 9×9 prints seven named levels: Very Easy, Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard, Tough, Extreme. A three-section book that only used Easy, Normal, and Hard should say those three words — not invent Medium to fill a cover template.
- Smart Numbers and Train Tracks both use Easy / Medium / Hard / Expert. If the volume stops at Hard, the contents page stops at Hard. Do not print Expert as a section you did not generate.
- Hitori is Easy / Medium / Hard. Three names. Use them.
- Geometric Mazes 2D has no Easy / Medium / Hard dropdown. Difficulty is grid size plus a complexity slider. The section title is a name you choose — Small, Open, Dense — for the setting you actually ran. Do not stamp Easy on a large high-complexity maze because the cover template had three slots.
If you need more than three sections, use the extra names the module already has. If you need fewer, drop a band. Do not rename the ones you kept.
How Look Inside proves the bands
Look Inside is the front of the book. It is not a separate sample file. The first pages have to do two jobs at once: show a real puzzle at print size, and show the labels.
Keep front matter lean so the contents page and the first Easy section title survive in the preview. Title, a short how-this-book-works line that names the bands, contents, then the first Easy page. A dedication and a two-page introduction push the first label out of the slice.
The contents page is the only place most shoppers will see Medium and Hard. That is why the section titles have to be the band names, not “Part One.” The first puzzle page still needs its own section title. A shopper who skips the contents should still land on the word Easy.
Commercial rights for the books you generate are part of the Puzzle Maker Pro license, as stated on the homepage.
What this is not
Two neighboring products use difficulty words and are not this listing.
A kids edition and an adult edition of the same type are two listings, two covers, two samples. That split lives on kids and adult versions. An Easy section inside an adult volume is not a kids book.
A TPT easy pack, a mid pack, and a challenge pack are three classroom listings of one type. Each listing is one band. That is a separate-SKU job, not a labeled ladder inside one KDP volume.
The whole point
A labeled difficulty ladder is a promise the table of contents and Look Inside can be checked against. Name each band as its own section, use the module’s real labels, and put those names where the sample reaches. The ramp article designs the slope. This page makes the slope visible before anyone pays.