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 preceding article here: Getting your book ready for Amazon KDP—1: first steps

Let’s start at the end!

It helps to know what you need to end up with for your book submission. Remember, Amazon has no obligation to publish your book. If what you upload does not meet their guidelines, your book is going nowhere.

It’s likely you’ll be publishing both a print version and an e-book, so I’ll cover both.

Book artwork for print

What files do you need?

There are two parts to a print book—the cover and the text pages. You should present these separately, and differently, from one another, albeit both as PDF. Actually, you need a third PDF, of the front cover only, to use for the cover thumbnail on your Amazon listing.

The cover

You should supply your final cover artwork for print as a single flat file. Imagine a paperback’s cover removed from the book and laid out flat. In order, from left to right, it will comprise the back cover, the spine and the front cover. That’s in the Western format—if your book is Arabic or Hebrew, for example, the reverse will be true.

If you are creating the cover artwork yourself, I recommend downloading the correct cover template from Amazon. You will need to know the exact page size you are intending to publish at and the number of pages (i.e. sides, not leaves, and not including the cover) your book has. Knowing the number of pages is vital to allow for the correct spine width. Therefore it is best to leave finalising the cover until your text pages are at the correct page size and ready for publication.

Don’t forget that your book will almost certainly need an ISBN. It will also need the corresponding ISBN barcode which you should apply to a specific position on the back cover. There are many utilities online for purchasing ISBNs and barcodes, or for creating barcode artwork from existing ISBNs. Your barcode must be in solid (100%) CMYK black (K), preferably as vector artwork. Try to obtain a vector EPS file and use that on your cover.

The text pages

You should present your text pages in a single pages format, not as double-page spreads. The page layouts, however, should take into account their positions as left- or right-hand pages. There is more about this in Getting your book ready for Amazon KDP—1: first steps.

Specific technical requirements

Before making your final PDFs for print there are further technical considerations.

Fonts

Your flat cover artwork should ideally have no embedded fonts in it—you should convert all fonts to curves/outlines. If your cover artwork is a flat raster file, this won’t be an issue. The colour mode should be CMYK. You need to convert any RGB colours or spot colours to CMYK.

In the text pages file there is no need to rasterise the fonts or convert them to curves/outlines. Embedding fonts within that PDF is fine.

Images

All image elements should be in either CMYK colour or greyscale. Raster images should be at least 300 pixels per inch resolution when viewed at 100% size. Photoshop format images are fine but you should flatten any multi-layer files to a single layer. Always make a copy to flatten, as you want to be able to edit your original layers in the future.

Bleed

If your cover design has elements that reach the edges, you will need to add 3 mm bleed all round. In that case, the width and depth of your cover artwork will be 6 mm more than the finished flat size. You don’t need to include any trim marks, so leave those off. It’s similar with the text pages—you don’t need to add any bleed if there is no printed matter that reaches the edges. If there is, apply 3 mm bleed to the top, bottom and outer edges of all the pages. Which is a page’s outer edge depends on whether the page is a right-hand or left-hand one.

Colour mode

The next question is: colour or black and white? Most book texts are for printing in black ink only. If your text pages are to be in black only, make sure there are no colours in your file. Only CMYK black (K), and any tints thereof, should be present. If there is colour content in your text (and you are specifying colour printing), make sure everything is in CMYK. Even then, smaller text, such as body text, should ideally be in solid black only to avoid registration issues.

E-book files

By “e-book” I do, of course, mean the ‘reflowable’ variety, suitable for e-readers such as Kindle, not static-layout PDFs. The content in these is free to flow to the viewer’s screen size and shape. It must also allow for flexibility in font styles and sizes.

Other than the actual text content, an e-book bears almost no relation to its printed version. Trying to make them match visually is futile—in format they are completely different beasts.

An e-book ‘file’ isn’t really a file at all—it’s a folder containing a collection of files. The structure is identical to a Zip folder, so the editing of one can be treated in exactly the same way. You can add or remove files within an e-book simply by changing the folder extension from .epub to .zip. If you do edit in this way, don’t forget to return the extension to .epub when you’ve finished. Alternatively, use an editing utility like Calibre.

In terms of requirements, the main ones are that the e-book has:

• each chapter text as a separate HTML file;
• a functioning table of contents, called “toc.ncx”;
• a basic styles template, called “template.css”;
• a referenced front cover image included in an “images” folder;
• any images used also in the same “images” folder and linked in their respective positions;
• any embedded fonts included in a “fonts” folder, although these will almost certainly not be used by any e-reader app—they’re really just a backstop;
• a “content.opf” file that contains author and publisher metadata, and references to the content files and folders.

E-book testing

It’s important to test your EPUB to make sure it displays in an acceptable way on mobile devices. I recommend installing a range of the most popular e-reader apps on any ‘phones or tablets you have and previewing your book. You will find that each app displays your book in its own way, and that is something you’ll have to accept. However, you do want to catch any formatting that appears broken in some apps so you can attempt to mitigate that. Your book has to be readable, even if an e-reader doesn’t adopt your intended style.

Also, before you attempt to upload your EPUB to Amazon, run it through the Kindle Previewer. That’ll identify anything that’s missing or incorrect in your EPUB. Your EPUB will be rejected if you don’t correct any formatting or content errors, so make sure you rectify any that are flagged.

Further information

If you haven’t already done so, have a look at the previous article in this series: Getting your book ready for Amazon KDP—1: first steps. 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.