KDP Book Interior Formatter (print-ready PDF and EPUB)

About the KDP Book Interior Formatter (print-ready PDF and EPUB)

Choose your manuscript — a Word .docx, a Markdown file or plain text — and get a paperback interior laid out the way books are: chapters that start on a right-hand page a third of the way down, drop caps, indented paragraphs with no gaps between them, scene breaks, running heads with your name on the left and the chapter on the right, page numbers, a title page, a copyright page, a dedication and a table of contents with the right page numbers, and notes collected at the end.

The margins follow Amazon KDP’s paperback rules for your trim size: the inside (gutter) margin grows with the page count exactly as KDP asks, the outside margins respect the bleed setting, every font is embedded, and the file has an even page count and none of the bookmarks, links or comments KDP’s checks flag. The same manuscript also becomes a reflowable EPUB e-book with a linked contents list and notes. Everything happens on your device; your unpublished book is never uploaded.

Common uses

• Self-publishing a novel, memoir or poetry collection as a KDP paperback without paying for a formatting service.
• Making the e-book and the paperback from the same manuscript so both say exactly the same.
• Re-formatting an existing book at a new trim size, or with a larger type size for a large-print edition.
• Checking how many pages a manuscript will make at each trim size before choosing one (and pricing the book).

KDP’s paperback rules this follows

• Trim sizes from 5 × 8″ to 8.5 × 11″ and A4, as listed by KDP (Set Trim Size, Bleed, and Margins); A5 (14.8 × 21 cm) is a KDP Japan size, printed there without standard colour ink.
• Inside (gutter) margin by page count: 24–150 pages 0.375″, 151–300 0.5″, 301–500 0.625″, 501–700 0.75″, 701–828 0.875″. The page count depends on the margins and the margins on the page count, so the book is laid out again until they agree; the extra inside margin you choose is added on top.
• Outside, top and bottom margins at least 0.25″, or 0.375″ with bleed. With bleed every page is 0.125″ wider (on the outside edge only) and 0.25″ taller, with a trim box marking the cut.
• Page numbers run in order, with even numbers on left-hand pages; the front matter uses roman numerals and the text starts at 1 on a right-hand page. The page count is made even, and no more than one blank page is ever inserted at a time (KDP allows at most four in a row).
• Fonts embedded, text at least 7 pt (running heads, page numbers, notes and superscripts included), lines at least 0.75 pt, transparency flattened, and no bookmarks, annotations or crop marks (Paperback Submission Guidelines). Fonts whose licence forbids embedding are refused. KDP asks for pictures of at least 300 DPI: the report lists any that print below it.

KDP updates its rules from time to time: check its current guidelines and the print previewer before you publish.

Book typography it applies

• Justified text broken into lines with the Knuth–Plass method (whole paragraphs at once, as TeX does), so spacing stays even instead of the loose lines word processors make.
• No widows or orphans: at least two lines of a paragraph at the foot and head of every page; headings never end a page.
• Chapters open about a third of the way down a new page, optionally with “Chapter N” above the title, and a three-line drop cap; the first paragraph after a heading or a scene break is not indented.
• Running heads (your name or the title on left pages, the chapter on right pages) are left off chapter openings, where the page number moves to the foot of the page, centred; blank pages carry neither.
• Pictures print at their 300 DPI size, up to the width of the text (small ones are shown at least 1.5″ wide and listed in the report as below 300 DPI), and move to the next page when they don’t fit while the text carries on.

Fonts

The built-in typeface is Noto Sans (SIL Open Font License), which covers Latin, Greek and Cyrillic text. Most novels are set in a serif typeface: choose My own font files and add the regular, italic, bold and bold italic files of a font you are licensed to embed — EB Garamond, Crimson Pro, Libre Baskerville and Literata, for example, are released under the SIL Open Font License, which allows embedding. A missing style is drawn from the regular file (slanted or thickened), and the report says so. Characters a font lacks are taken from Noto Sans.

The EPUB e-book

The EPUB follows EPUB 3.3 and Kindle’s publishing guidelines: a title page with the title and author, a linked table of contents near the start (no page numbers), a navigation document and an NCX for the Kindle menu, one file per chapter, notes linked both ways, and pictures. It has no cover inside — KDP adds the cover you upload — and no embedded fonts, so readers can choose their own. Open it in an EPUB reader or Kindle Previewer to check it before uploading.

Limitations

• No hyphenation: justified text in narrow columns can have some loose lines. Choose left-aligned text, a smaller size or a wider trim if a page looks gappy.
• Scripts that need complex shaping or right-to-left ordering — Hindi and other Indic scripts, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai — can’t be set in the print PDF yet (the report names them); their EPUB is fine.
• Word formatting is read from styles: headings, bold, italic, lists, tables, pictures and footnotes come through, but fonts, colours, text boxes, columns and floating pictures in the .docx are not kept. Centred lines and page breaks inside a chapter are kept; page breaks between chapters are left out, because every chapter starts a new page anyway.
• Pictures in a Markdown file must be embedded (data: URLs); web addresses and file paths can’t be read. Captions are kept only when they are marked as captions.
• Pictures are always placed inside the margins: full-page pictures that run off the edge of the page (bleed), as in picture books and cookbooks, can’t be made here. Transparent pictures are printed on white.
• Older .doc files must be saved as .docx first. Very long books (over about 800 pages) can take a minute or two on a phone.
• This makes the interior only; make the cover separately (the Book Cover Size Calculator gives the exact size and spine width).

Privacy

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