Formatting Your Book for Amazon’s KDP
Last week in my self-publishing series, we talked about formatting your eBook for Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform. Now it’s time to format your paperback or hardcover book for KDP. We’re nearing the end of the self-publishing series, so if you’re not quite ready to publish yet, check out the previous topics on drafting, editing, book covers, permissions & images, and deciding where to publish.
Formatting Your Book — Key Instructions
Formatting the file for a paperback and hardcover book took more time than the eBook did, but I was able to use the exact same file for both the paperback and the hardcover copies of my book. The best advice for doing both come from the KDP help website, which walks you through the process and what to include:
Ultimately you need a properly-formatted PDF of your manuscript to submit your work and a PDF version of your book cover. Note that the instructions for formatting the manuscript differ slightly depending on whether you’re using a PC or Mac, so make sure you’re following the right instructions. You can also format your book using Pages for Mac. Or, other authors I know have used Adobe Illustrator to format their books as well. Your book cover creator can help you get the exact right size and design for the book cover file. Companies like GetCovers, which I used for my book cover, work on books for KDP all the time. Visit the article on book cover creation to learn more about creating an amazing cover.
For the manuscript file, you can also hire someone to format your work. It’s not difficult, but it can be time-consuming so if you’ve got cash, but not time, it may be worth your while to find someone to format the book for you. Prices seem to range from $25 to hundreds and, as always, you likely get what you pay for in terms of the final product.
Formatting in Microsoft Word
Let’s assume you’ll be doing the formatting yourself. If you’re ready to format your manuscript right now, open up one of the two links above to get started! Below, I’ve shared a general overview of the process and some places where I ran into trouble. Here’s my advice for getting through the process.
Odd vs Even Pages
When formatting a book, your odd numbered pages will end up being a right-facing page, which means when you have the book open in front of you, that page will be on the right. Many books start chapters, sections, the title pages, and other important pages on an odd or right-facing page. The instructions above point out which pages (e.g. the title page) must fall on a right-facing page.
Trim Size, Bleed, and Margins
One major difference between your eBook and paperback or hardcover editions will be formatting the file to be printed as an actual book. That means your trim size (the height and width of the book pages), bleed (whether your images “bleed” outside of the margins to the edges of your pages), and margins (how close to the edges your text goes) really matter. The most common book size is 6"x 9" and that’s what I chose to make my book. There are a lot of other options you can choose as well. With the margins, I started out setting these to the bare minimum and then quickly learned to give myself a bit more room along the edges. It seemed like the book would be easier to read and look better too. I recommend playing around with your margin settings until you’re really happy with how they look.
Front Matter, Body Matter, and Back Matter
This is the most involved part of formatting the book. This section walks you through everything you should add to your book from start to finish and how to do it. A lot of these steps, I covered already in this article, but the trickiest parts for me ended up being the page numbers and page headings.
Page Numbers
I found Word’s page number function to be incredibly finicky. Page numbers typically go into the page’s footer area. That seems easy enough, at first. Start the page numbers after your front matter and typically they don’t appear on new chapter/section pages or sometimes on image pages. It took me a long time to figure out that I needed to put in a page break every time I had one of these “special pages”. Then, I needed to unlink that page from the previous by unselecting “Link to Previous Page”. Then, also make sure “Different First Page” is checked to ensure page numbers didn’t show up on those pages. You have to do that on your special pages and the page after it where the page numbers start up again. On that page, writers must make sure the next section’s page numbers continued from the previous section. It was a mess and I spent hours doing this. There must be an easier way, but I found that I just needed to go through each page and diligently set it up correctly.
Page Headings
Page Headings, which appear in the Headers, were similar, but they were a bit easier to manage. Left page headers show the author name while right page headers show the book title. Again, these don’t show up on new chapter pages and pages with large images, blank pages, or section break pages. You’ll need to do the same thing as above to ensure these show up correctly: create a page break and select the options outlined above. I definitely had some moments here where the headers would either show up, not show up, or get screwed up, but eventually I figured this out.
If you have any questions about whether a page should have page numbers or headings, look at another book. I ended up referring to previously-published work a lot during the formatting process.
Exporting to PDF
When you’re done, you’ll save the file as a PDF and make sure to select the option “Best for Printing”. This is the file you will upload to KDP and this is the file that’s worth checking over a few times to ensure everything looks perfect.
Final Touches
From the PDF version, go through the book several times making sure all of your pages look good, have the right page numbers, and that the important pages fall on a right-facing page. I did the following each time I made a change:
- Ensured all of my important pages (title page, new chapters, new sections, back matter, etc) started on a right-facing page
- Made a pass or two making sure all pages looked good. What I was looking for were awkward paragraph breaks, text that started too low at the top of a page, section titles at the end of a page without text following, images that fell awkwardly on pages, correct spacing, and other things that just didn’t look right.
- Looked through every single page to ensure the page numbers were correct
- Ensured all headers were correct
- Updated the Table of Contents
- Updated the Index
Since I am not a Microsoft Word wizard, this whole process took me quite a bit of time, but I learned a LOT about Word along the way and I have a greater appreciation for what it can do now more than ever. Next week, I’ll discuss the actual KDP upload process. Now that you have your beautiful manuscript you are almost ready to publish!!
Comments or Questions?
There are a lot of little details that go into the book formatting process. If you have questions that this article didn’t answer, post a comment below. I will answer and update the article!
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