How to format a book for KDP

1. Clean up the manuscript first

Everything downstream is easier if the manuscript is structurally clean, and no formatting tool can guess at structure that is not there. Before you import anything:

• Apply real heading styles to chapter titles — Heading 1 in Word, or the equivalent. Not bold 18pt text; an actual style. This is the single thing that determines whether your chapters arrive as chapters.
• Remove manual page breaks between chapters. The formatter inserts its own, and yours will fight it.
• Delete every double space after a full stop, and every run of empty paragraphs used as spacing.
• Replace tab-indented first lines with a paragraph style that indents. Tabs survive the import and then sit on top of the styling.
• Mark scene breaks consistently — one convention throughout, whether that is # or * * * or a blank line.
• Turn off track changes and accept everything. Tracked changes can import as visible text.

2. Choose the trim size

Do this before anything else that touches layout. Trim size sets the page count, and page count sets the gutter margin, the spine width and the printing cost. Changing it later invalidates all three.

For a novel, 5.5" × 8.5" or 6" × 9" covers most cases. For non-fiction, 6" × 9". For anything with worksheets, 8.5" × 11". The reliable method is to take three books off your own shelf that sit where you want yours to sit, and measure them.

3. Set the margins

KDP's minimums are 0.25 in outside, top and bottom — 0.375 in if your interior bleeds — and an inside (gutter) margin that grows with the page count, because a thicker book curves more at the spine.

These are minimums. A book set at the minimum reads as cramped — for a 6" × 9" novel, something nearer 0.875 in inside and 0.75 in outside looks like a book rather than a document that met a requirement.

4. Build the front matter

Ten pages or so, in a fixed order, most of it opening on a right-hand page. It is not optional decoration: the copyright page carries your ISBN and rights statement, and a book without recognisable front matter reads as self-published from the first page.

Our guide to front matter covers what belongs on each page, including what the copyright page has to say.

5. Typeset the interior

The decisions that make a page read as a book rather than a manuscript:

• A serif typeface at 10–12pt, with leading around 120–140% of the type size.
• Justified text with hyphenation on. Ragged-right is a valid choice but an unusual one in fiction, and unhyphenated justified text produces rivers of white space.
• First paragraph of a chapter or scene not indented; every subsequent one indented by around 0.2–0.3 in. Never both indented and spaced.
• Running heads — author on the verso, title or chapter on the recto — suppressed on chapter-opening pages and blanks.
• Page numbers suppressed on chapter openings and blank pages, and absent from the front matter proper.
• Chapters starting on a recto, which means accepting the blank versos that produces.

6. Fix the widows and orphans

A single line stranded at the top or bottom of a page is the most visible sign of an untypeset book, and it is the last thing to fix because any earlier change moves them all.

Work through the whole PDF at 100% looking for them. The fixes, in order of preference: reword a sentence slightly, adjust the tracking of a paragraph by a hair, or allow one page in a spread to run a line short. Never fix one by changing the leading of a single page — it shows.

7. Work out the spine, then make the cover

Only now, with the interior final and the real page count known. KDP's spine is the page count multiplied by the paper caliper: 0.002252 in for white, 0.0025 in for cream, 0.002347 in for premium colour.

The full cover is back cover + spine + front cover, with 0.125 in of bleed around the whole sheet. Download the template KDP generates from your trim and page count rather than building the sheet by hand.

8. Make the ebook, which is a different job

The ebook shares your text and almost nothing else. There are no pages: the reader chooses the type size and the text rewraps around it.

• No page numbers, no running heads, no fixed margins — the reading app supplies all of that.
• Relative type sizes only. An absolute 12pt paragraph ignores the reader's own setting, which is the accessibility failure most ebooks ship with.
• A navigable table of contents generated from the headings, not typed by hand.
• Scene breaks as a styled element, not blank lines — blank lines collapse.
• Images sized for screens, with alt text.

Upload EPUB rather than .docx. You keep control of the styling, and you can check the file in Kindle Previewer before Amazon's converter touches it.

9. Check before you upload

1. Read the entire interior PDF at 100%. Not on a phone, not skimmed — you are looking for pages that are wrong, not pages that are ugly.
2. Check the table of contents against the actual chapter titles. Renaming a chapter and not rebuilding the contents is the most common late error.
3. Open the EPUB in Kindle Previewer and change the type size twice. Anything that breaks will break there.
4. Confirm every image is 300 DPI at its printed size — not 300 DPI at whatever size it happens to be.
5. Run KDP's own previewer after uploading, and read the first and last page of every chapter in it.