How to Format a Paperback Book in MS Word for Amazon KDP

Amazon makes it very simple to format a paperback book for publication, and the process is absolutely free. It's currently in Beta, but will soon be rolled out as completely live.

It's much easier than formatting your paperback for Createspace as well, which is an added bonus.

[SkyyGod_ACTUAL]

Writing my first book, after spending 2 hours reading formatting tips online and struggling with MS Word I found your video and fixed my manuscript in 5 minutes! Thank you!

[stacytate]

I was JUST about to edit margins thinking there was an error. So glad to hit play on this!

[kingpolo]

This is great content! You got straight to the point unlike some others.

[TheGeofamily]

Very helpful. Thank you. I publish my books on Amazon but have always previously used the cut and paste templates - very tedious! Just a note in answer to some comments below - In the UK the most popular size is 5" x 8" for paperbacks. In fact most bookshelves which display paperbacks are constructed to house this size.

[LindaPow]

great video Amazon should be paying you and youtube.. look forward to viewing more vids

[thebasicchristian]

Thank you so much!! I was about to pay someone to do this! Thank you!

[PairDesigns]

Thank you very much, this was really helpful. I appreciate the insight and the links! I really like KDP University, super helpful as are the real user tips you have provided here.

[patriciadanna]

Thank you. Great presentation. You made it look easy! Glad I found your video.

[makelifeholistic]

Thanks, I am still starting to do this and hope I will manage to follow as you make it so easy. Thanks.

[audrob]

Thanks so much for your post. That was easy to duplicate.

[rumaniandude]

Diablo 2. I see you too are a classy gentleman

[josephmartin]

Thank you so much sir, for such a well put video! So helpful, and will be formatting myself now:) Also, love the Diablo and SC2 games lol (dont seem to have time to play anymore lol)

[EvaWright]

Thank you. I really needed help. I've had the book on kindle through Createspace years ago but it went out of print and now it needs to be revised with a new cover for part two. Word has some popup gobbledygook about pictures needing formatted and when I uploaded it to amazon it pulled up 30+ pages of errors. So I am starting formatting all over again.

[anujmahajan]

Thank you it was really helpful and informative.

[rossokeefe]

Technical question...6x9 is being touted as the most common size for a paperback, but isn't that really large? Conventional book store paperbacks are more like 5x7.5 (roughly) aren't they? Anyone weigh in on this because I don't want to do a paperback only to find it doesn't fit with what I'm seeing on bookstore shelves?

[truewordsdeutschland]

Thanks for the video. but you forgot one important thing dude. (as i forgot it in the begining, too) THE PAGE NUMBERS! ^^

[CaitlinJBall]

Okay, you just saved me a zillion hours of work with that table of contents. I feel so dumb, I've been doing it by hand and every time I make a change I have to go back and change the page numbers. Thank you so much for this upload. Do you have one on how to format page numbers with a background picture?

[laughsingwrite]

For print books, you need a gutter. Also, for headings, use the style feature to set the font size, spacing before and after....

[naomimadelinwrites]

THANK YOU. I didn't realise there were templates - this is so clear and helpful. Saved me from hours of brain ache and lots of mistakes! But yes - do we add page numbers?

[nomecognome]

I know this video is old, but it was useful. I have a huge problem tho. The word count of my book is about 100k, written in Times New Roman (12pt) and it's about 420 pages. The problem is, using the average trim size I get something like 700 pages, and if I use a bigger one I think it'll just look awful.
I checked a couple of titles of books that I read and, even those that have more or less my same word count, don't end up having an extra 200 pages. How do I fix this?