If you’re currently writing, or intending to write, a book to self-publish on Amazon KDP, these articles are for you. The idea here is to help make your road to publication smoother. Technical issues can be very puzzling and frustrating to deal with and I want to try and help you avoid them. Laying the groundwork early in the process will save you a world of pain at the crucial uploading stage.

Reading this might convince you to hire a designer to help you with all, or some, of the process. A professional could help give your book more shelf appeal and overall sheen. However, if you’re confident to proceed alone, these articles should help you through the process.

You’ll find the concluding article here: Preparing your print book or e-book for Amazon KDP—2: complete files

Let’s start at the beginning!

Because it’s likely you’ll be publishing both a print version and an e-book, I’ll cover both. By “e-book” I do, of course, mean the ‘reflowable’ variety, suitable for e-readers such as Kindle, not static-layout PDFs.

It’s a good idea to get as much as you can in place up-front in your manuscript. It’ll give you more confidence that your book production will go smoothly, and with the expected end result. Also, you don’t want to have to go back and re-do loads of stuff later—it’s time-consuming and makes formatting errors more likely.

An overview of book structure

The running order of a printed book’s front pages is normally:

• Title Page (book title, author, publisher) with Verso backing it (publication details, copyright, etc.);
• Dedication (if desired) with a blank page backing it;
• Contents (only if desired, but a separate TOC will be needed for an e-book, even if one is not included in your print version);
• Foreword by someone else (if desired).

All the above pages should be numbered with lowercase Roman numerals (i, ii, etc.).

If there’s an introduction by you, or a prologue, that comes next and starts on page 1 (Arabic numerals). Otherwise, page 1 is the start of the first chapter. There should be a way to specify the page numbering convention for each section (Roman, Arabic, etc.) in your chosen layout app.

You’ll need either a separate document for each chapter/section or a single document with a deliberate page break at the end of each chapter/section. For a page break don’t use forced line breaks to move content onto the next page—always insert a page break, a special item that’s designed for that purpose, from the menu.

It’s a common thing to start each new chapter on a right-hand page, although it’s not obligatory—just do whatever you prefer. If you do want that, you’ll just have to add a blank page at the end of any chapter that finishes on a right-hand page.

For an e-book, the order of sections is the same but you don’t need to create blank pages.

Page layout

For a printed book, your document should have facing pages with mirrored left- and right-hand layouts for margins, header and footer.

Left-hand pages generally have the book title in the header, right-hand pages the chapter number and/or chapter title. Blanks pages usually have no header, footer or page number, although they do count as numbered pages. Chapter or section first pages don’t normally have a header as there will be a chapter or section heading.

Because paperbacks don’t open flat, text in the middle of a spread can be hard to read. To counter this you might want to consider having wider inner margins than outer ones.

Page numbers (usually in the footer) can be either aligned with the outer margins or centred on the text column width.

You might also want to create a distinct page layout for chapter first pages with a chapter heading style.

For an e-book, the concept of left- and right-hand pages is, of course, immaterial.

Paragraph and character styles

Creating your own paragraph and character styles will speed up the process of text formatting and help keep things consistent. It will also save you time if you decide to change some of the styling later as any change to a custom style will be document-wide. That means you won’t have the ordeal of going through your text and changing all instances separately. If you do change a custom style, make sure you check that text re-flow hasn’t caused any issues.

If you’re creating an e-book it’s good practice to name your styles in all lower-case and hyphenated, with no spaces. This is the convention for EPUB CSS style names—e.g. “body-text-bold”, and there’s no harm in also using it for print book styles.

Paragraph styles define the overall style for whole paragraphs, which I know sounds obvious. They can include settings such as base font, text size, line spacing, paragraph spacing, character spacing, alignment, indents, and more. They are also used for headings and subheadings.

Character styles are for picking out individual words and phrases that depart from their umbrella paragraph style. I recommend using them to assign bold, italic, or bold italic, to regular text rather than using your app’s ‘B’ and ‘I’ buttons. A character style only needs to specify the things that vary from the paragraph style. This will come in handy for an e-book style sheet too, as these styles will translate into ‘span’ styles in an EPUB’s CSS style sheet.

For more on text formatting styles, see Make your book layout quicker and smoother as you write.

Table of contents

Each book creation app will have a different way of handling this. As I use Adobe InDesign for page layout and e-book creation I’ll describe the method that’s used there.

In InDesign you can generate a table of contents (TOC) through a function that identifies the instances of a style of your choosing. This can be anything, but normally it’ll be the chapter heading style you’ve created and assigned. It then logs the title texts that are in that style and what pages they’re on, to assemble a table of contents.

You might not want a TOC for a printed book, but for an e-book you’ll need to generate one. This, of course, will ultimately not refer to page numbers, but will set up hyperlinks to the section starts.

E-book requirements

The key here is to keep things as simple as you possibly can with the formatting because of the range of possible e-reader apps available on various devices. Some are better than others at retaining formatting but the worst (especially the free ones) will mangle anything remotely complicated. If your book is a novel, for example, it’ll have a fairly straightforward layout anyway.

You can choose and embed fonts in your EPUB, but they will almost certainly be ignored by most e-readers in favour of the stock ones. In addition, e-readers allow their users to choose their preferred text fonts and sizes, so trying to dictate those is futile. Try to stick to just simple styles like heading, subheading (if needed), body text for paragraph styles and bold, italic and bold italic for character styles.

Pages are immaterial in an e-book, as its structure is akin to a website that flows to fit the screen size. What look like pages are in fact just continuations in the flow of a single body of text. If the reader chooses to enlarge the text on their screen, the section of text contained on each ‘page’ will change and the number of ‘pages’ will increase. Each chapter is like a separate web page, with the table of contents its overarching menu.

If you use any images, they should simply be placed inline with the flow of the text. Don’t use any wraparounds, floats or other clever stuff. An image should maintain its position in the document as text reflows to the reader’s screen format. Image resolution should be 300 pixels per inch at 100% size. The colour mode should be RGB, even if the image is monochrome.

E-book structure

A complete EPUB is basically a ‘zip’ folder containing HTML files for the sections/chapters. This folder will normally comprise:

• a CSS style sheet (normally called “template.css”) for styling the content;
• a table of contents (“toc.ncx”) for the reader’s convenience;
• any linked files such as fonts (although these will rarely be used by an e-reader!) and images;
• sundry bits and bobs.

I can recommend the Calibre app, which is free at the time of writing. It has an e-book editor you can use to check and tweak your e-book files. In its palette you can see all the files that make up the e-book. You can open, edit and save any file as needed.

Further information

Don’t forget to read the concluding article here: Getting your book ready for Amazon KDP—2: complete files. You might want to check out this article too: Make your book layout quicker and smoother as you write.

If you’re confident to go ahead and prepare your book for publishing, here’s to a successful outcome! If, however, you decide you need help bringing your printed book and/or e-book to life, I’m all ears. Feel free to get in touch anytime to discuss your project in a relaxed no-obligation chat.

You can see examples of my book design and production work here.