Same puzzle, faith audience, and not one indie book on the page.

Who holds page one

What the numbers say

• Faith content attracts publishers because it comes with ready-made distribution: church bookshops, gift buying, denominational catalogues. That is what you would be competing against, not the puzzles.
• Prices are low for the category — $6.94 to $9.99 on 192–240 pages — because publishers print at scale. The one book charging $13.99 sits at rank 11,105 with 107 pages.
• Scripture accuracy is a hard requirement. Getting a verse or a translation wrong in a Bible puzzle book is the kind of error this audience reports in detail and never forgives.
• 192 pages is the shelf standard, set by three Brain Games volumes. Arriving with a hundred looks like half a book.
• Contrast this with cryptograms: same effort, same audience age, but there no publisher has shown up at all. Where you spend your month matters more than how well you spend it.

What I would actually do

Where these numbers come from, and what they are not

Every figure was read off Amazon.com on 18 September 2026: the organic results for that query with sponsored slots removed, then each listing's own page for rank, review count, publication date and length. Prices are US list prices at that moment and move constantly. Best Sellers Rank is a live position, not a sales figure — a rank read on a Tuesday can differ from the same rank on Sunday. “Indie” means the listing shows no traditional publisher, the closest public signal for a self-published title; it will occasionally mislabel a small press. Only paperbacks were counted. And know the width of the lens: this is the first page of one query — eight organic listings — not a census of the niche. A shelf that looks closed to newcomers here may be open on a neighbouring phrase, and seasonality is not accounted for: gift-driven categories rank differently in September than in November. One snapshot is not a trend.