Amazon will accept almost anything you upload. Readers will not. We build a validated, reflowable Kindle file that holds its shape on a six-inch e-ink screen, a phone at two in the morning, and a tablet turned sideways — and we test it on real devices before it ever touches your KDP account.
Kindle eBook formatting is the process of converting a finished manuscript into a validated, reflowable EPUB 3 file — delivered as a KPF for Amazon KDP — with a working navigation structure, semantic chapter hierarchy, correctly sized images, and a reading experience that survives every device, font size and orientation a reader can throw at it.
It is not exporting a Word document and hoping. It is not a template. It is the difference between a book that behaves and a book that gets one-star reviews about the table of contents rather than the story.
Done properly, nobody notices it. Done badly, it is the only thing anybody notices.
KDP is permissive by design. Upload a Word document with inherited styles, phantom section breaks and 4MB photographs, and Amazon will convert it, publish it, and charge you a delivery fee for every megabyte. It will even look passable in the online previewer.
Then a reader opens it on a Paperwhite at their preferred font size, and the chapter headings drift, the indents vanish, the images blow past the margins, and the table of contents goes nowhere. They do not email you. They leave a review, or they return the book, and you never learn why.
We construct the EPUB from the manuscript's structure, rather than letting a converter guess what your Word styles meant.
E-ink, phone, tablet and desktop. Both orientations. Multiple font sizes. The previewer lies; hardware does not.
EPUBCheck runs on every file. If it does not pass, it does not ship, and you never find out the hard way.
Not a feature list. This is the baseline below which a file should not be sold to an author.
Every chapter is marked up as a real heading rather than a bold paragraph, because that single decision is what builds a Kindle table of contents a reader can actually navigate. It is also what allows a screen reader to move through your book chapter by chapter, and what lets Amazon generate a reliable "go to" menu. Bold text looks the same and behaves like nothing at all.
Paragraph indents are set with CSS rather than tabs or spaces, so they survive conversion instead of appearing on half your book. Scene breaks, epigraphs, block quotes, letters and text messages each keep their meaning whether your reader is on the smallest font setting or has tripled the size because their eyes are tired.
A logical EPUB 3 navigation document with an NCX fallback for older Kindles, then tested by tapping every single entry on a physical device. If a reader taps chapter fourteen and lands in chapter nine, nothing else you paid for matters. This is the failure that generates one-star reviews about the file rather than the story.
Every interior image is resized to the dimensions Kindle actually renders, compressed without visible loss, and colour-checked for both e-ink greyscale and backlit colour. This protects the reading experience and your royalty: Amazon charges a delivery fee for every megabyte, on every single sale, forever.
Your file is validated against the EPUB 3 specification before it leaves us, and it does not ship until it passes clean. Amazon quietly forgives errors that Apple Books, Kobo and Google Play reject outright — which is why so many authors only discover their file is broken on the day they decide to go wide.
Kindle e-ink, Fire tablets, the iOS and Android apps, and the desktop Cloud Reader. Portrait and landscape. Smallest font and largest. Dark mode. The Kindle Previewer is a simulation and a useful one, but it is not the truth, and it will not show you what your reader sees.
Every book fails in its own way. A cookbook breaks differently from a poetry collection, and a graphic novel breaks differently again. Click any example to look closely at the decision that had to be made, and what it protects for the reader.
It is the first question we ask, because it is the one mistake that cannot be patched afterwards.
The text flows to fit the screen. The reader controls the font, the size, the margins, the orientation and the theme. Novels, memoir, business, self-help, history: if the words do not depend on where they sit on a page, this is your answer.
Fight this and you will produce a book that is unreadable at the font size your older readers actually use.
The page is locked, like a PDF. Children's picture books, cookbooks with side-by-side ingredients and method, photography books, comics. The design carries meaning, and reflowing it destroys the meaning.
Choose it for a novel and you have built a book nobody can read comfortably on a phone.
These are not edge cases. This is the list we work through on nearly every rescue job that lands on our desk.
Every file we deliver meets this specification. If a supplier cannot show you theirs, they do not have one.
| Element | How we build it | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Body text | Reader-controlled — never forced | We never lock your reader's font size or typeface. Their eyes, their call. |
| Chapter openings | Semantic h1/h2 with styled first line | Holds position at every font size; drop caps degrade gracefully rather than breaking the first line. |
| Paragraph indents | CSS text-indent, not tabs or spaces | Tabs and spaces are converted inconsistently and are the single most common source of ragged Kindle text. |
| Scene breaks | Styled ornament with protected spacing | Never a row of asterisks that lands orphaned at the top of the next screen. |
| Images | Optimised, max-width constrained, captioned | Sized for e-ink and colour, compressed to protect your Amazon delivery fee. |
| Tables | Rebuilt for narrow screens | Reformatted so they remain readable at six inches, not shrunk into illegibility. |
| Navigation | EPUB 3 nav + NCX fallback | Works on modern Kindles and older devices alike. |
| Front and back matter | Correctly ordered and marked up | Title, copyright, dedication, also-by, about the author, and a call to action that actually converts. |
The Kindle Previewer is a simulation. It is useful, and it is not the truth. We check the file the way a reader meets it.
Paperwhite, Oasis, Scribe and the basic Kindle. This is where the majority of your readers actually are, and it is the hardest surface to satisfy: greyscale, slow refresh, and a reader who has almost certainly changed the font.
Backlit, colour, and a different rendering engine to e-ink. Images that looked correct on a Paperwhite can be muddy or oversaturated here, which is why we check both.
iOS and Android, where the screen ratio and the font stack change everything. A huge share of Kindle reading now happens on a phone in the last ten minutes before sleep.
Where reviewers, book bloggers, your editor and your publisher will open the file — and where a broken table of contents is most obvious.
No mystery packages. You will know what you are getting before you pay for it.
The file Amazon actually wants, built and packaged so you can upload it without touching a converter. It carries your metadata, your cover, your navigation and your interior exactly as we built them, with nothing left for KDP to guess at.
EPUBCheck clean and yours to keep forever. This is the file that proves the work was done properly, and the one you will need the day you decide to sell wide, submit to a library aggregator, or move to another retailer.
Optional, and strongly recommended if you plan to go beyond Amazon. Tuned for Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play, Nook and Draft2Digital — platforms that validate strictly and reject the errors Amazon silently forgives.
Optional, for older devices, back-catalogue consistency, or ARC distribution to reviewers still using ancient hardware. Increasingly rare, still occasionally essential.
Optional. The EPUBCheck output and a plain-English summary, so you have documented proof the file is clean — useful for publishers, agents, and anyone who has been burned before.
Optional, and we tell every client to take them. They are the working files behind your book. With them, any competent formatter can pick up where we left off. Without them, you are locked to whoever built the file. You should never be locked to anyone.
Five stages. The first one is the one most suppliers skip, and it is the one that saves you money.
Before we quote, we read the structure. If it needs an editor rather than a formatter, we will say so and lose the job.
We construct the EPUB from real semantic structure, not from Word's guesswork.
E-ink, phone, tablet, desktop. Both orientations, multiple font sizes, dark mode.
EPUBCheck runs. It passes, or it does not ship. There is no third option.
Your files, your source, and two rounds of changes with no argument.
Text books are priced by word count. Illustrated books are priced by page count — the calculator switches automatically when you tell it what kind of book this is. Your price and your delivery window update live, and nothing is hidden.
Required steps are marked with *. Optional extras can be removed from the summary with the cross icon.
This decides how the book is priced and how it must be built.
Text books are priced by word count, because word count is what drives the work.
Amazon is forgiving. Apple, Kobo and Google Play are not — if you plan to go wide, take the second EPUB.
Be honest here. It is cheaper than discovering it halfway through.
Images drive both the work and the delivery fee Amazon charges you per megabyte.
Your standard window is calculated from everything above. The express options are priced against that window and update live.
Two are included. Add more if a co-author, editor or publisher is reviewing alongside you.
Editing, proofreading, cover design, ISBNs, Amazon advertising and any paid tools or accounts are not included. We format what you send us; we do not rewrite it.
We are not going to pretend you cannot do this yourself. We are going to be specific about what it costs you when it goes wrong.
| Feature | DIY / Auto-Convert | Book Formatting Experts |
|---|---|---|
| Table of contents | Generated from bold text; often lands in the wrong place. | Built from semantic headings and tested by tapping every entry on a device. |
| Image handling | Uploaded at full size; you pay the delivery fee every single sale. | Resized, compressed and colour-checked to protect both the reading experience and your royalty. |
| Wide distribution | Passes on Amazon; rejected by Kobo and Apple. | Validated EPUB 3 that survives the platforms that actually check. |
| Complex elements | Tables and footnotes collapse or strand the reader. | Rebuilt for narrow screens; notes link both ways. |
| Testing | Checked in the online previewer, which is a simulation. | Opened on e-ink, phone, tablet and desktop in both orientations. |
| If something breaks | You find out from a one-star review. | Two revision rounds, and if the fault is ours it does not count against them. |
The craft is not generic. A cookbook and a poetry collection fail in completely different ways.
Clean prose, protected scene breaks, and chapter ornaments that hold their position at any font size. Drop caps that degrade gracefully rather than shoving the first line sideways. The reader should fall into the story on page one and never once think about the file.
Pull quotes, frameworks, sidebars, checklists and a heading hierarchy that mirrors the argument rather than merely decorating it. Business readers skim, return, and search — so the navigation has to be genuinely usable, not just present.
Letters, diary entries, dated sections and photographs handled as structure rather than decoration. Timeline shifts and voice changes marked clearly enough that a reader always knows where and when they are.
Fixed layout with text anchored to the artwork it belongs to, tested in both orientations on real hardware. The words must never reflow away from the picture they describe, because for a five-year-old that is not an inconvenience, it is a broken book.
Ingredients and method that stay side by side, because a recipe that splits across a screen boundary is a recipe nobody can cook from. Every photograph compressed hard enough that a 200-page cookbook does not quietly eat your royalty in delivery fees.
Two-way linked footnotes and endnotes that return the reader to the exact sentence they left, plus bibliographies, tables, indices and cross-references that survive a six-inch screen. This is the work most suppliers quietly get wrong.
Line breaks preserved exactly as written, stanzas protected from reflow, and indentation that means something rather than drifting. Poetry is where careless eBook conversion does the most visible damage to an author's intent.
Prompts, rules, exercises and space handled honestly in a format that has no fixed page. We will also tell you plainly when a workbook simply should not be an eBook, which is more often than most sellers will admit.
One shared design system so that book four does not look like a different publisher made it, plus combined navigation that treats an omnibus as a single readable volume rather than a pile of files stapled together.
An EPUB is one of the most accessible formats ever created — and almost nobody builds one that way.
Screen readers navigate by heading, landmark and list. If your chapters are bold paragraphs, a blind reader cannot move through your book at all.
Alt text that describes what the image means rather than what it is called. A decorative flourish is marked decorative; a chart is described.
We will build to the accessibility standard. We will not sell you a legal compliance certificate, because we are not the body that issues one and nobody honest would claim otherwise.
Not marketing. This is the actual list, and a file does not leave until every line is ticked.
Send these six things and the build starts immediately. Send half of them and we will both be waiting.
Word or Google Docs, proofread and signed off. If it is still with an editor, we would genuinely rather wait than format it twice — and we will tell you so, even though waiting costs us the booking this month.
At full resolution. We check it against Amazon's current requirements before you upload, because a cover rejected at the last step is the most avoidable delay in publishing.
At the highest resolution you have, not the copies already squeezed and degraded inside your Word file. We can always compress down; we can never rebuild detail that was thrown away.
Copyright page, dedication, also-by list, acknowledgements, about the author, and whatever call to action ends the book. The back matter is where your next sale actually comes from, and most authors treat it as an afterthought.
Verse, letters, song lyrics, code blocks, two-column layouts, footnotes, tables, images with captions. Tell us on day one rather than on delivery day, and it costs you nothing extra.
Exclusive to Amazon through KDP Select, or going wide to Apple, Kobo and the rest? It changes which files you actually need, and it is cheaper to decide now than to come back for a second EPUB later.
Three commitments we will put in writing, and one thing we refuse to pretend.
Every file passes EPUBCheck before delivery. If it does not pass, you do not receive it, and we do not invoice for it.
Two revision rounds are included. If the error is ours, the fix does not count against them, and there is no argument about whose fault it was.
Formatting does not sell books. It removes reasons to abandon one. Any supplier promising you rankings or royalties is lying to you, and you should walk away.
When a judgement call comes up — and one always does — this is what we measure it against.
They choose the font, the size, the theme and the orientation. Every decision we make must survive all of those choices, not just the ones that flatter our design.
A heading is a heading because of what it means, not because it is bold. Get the semantics right and the navigation, the accessibility and the wide-platform validation all follow for free.
Nobody finishes a well-formatted book and praises the formatting. They just finish it. That is the entire brief, and it is harder than it sounds.
If you remember nothing else from this page, remember these three things.
This single choice governs everything downstream, and it is the one that cannot be undone cheaply. Prose reflows. Artwork does not.
A converter guesses what your Word styles meant. A formatter reads the book and builds the structure the author intended.
The previewer is a simulation. EPUBCheck is a fact. Real devices are the truth. Do all three or you are guessing.
Verified feedback from Kindle formatting projects. Several of these arrived as rescue jobs.
My last book had one-star reviews about the table of contents, not the story. That is a horrible thing to read. The rebuilt file fixed it and the complaints stopped completely.
The cookbook was the problem: every previous quote either broke the recipe grid or cost more than the photography. Fixed layout was the right call and someone finally said so.
Three hundred and forty footnotes, all of them linked both ways. My department circulated the file as an example of how it should be done.
I had formatted five books myself and thought I was fine at it. The first proof they sent back showed me eleven things I had never noticed on a real Kindle.
The picture book kept reflowing away from the illustrations in every other version I was sent. This one holds, in both orientations, on every device I own.
They told me my manuscript needed a proofreader before it needed a formatter. It cost them the job for six weeks and earned them every book since.
Wide distribution was where my old files fell apart. Amazon forgave things Kobo and Apple did not. The separate validated EPUB solved it in one go.
The accessibility work was not something I had thought to ask for. A blind reader emailed me about it. That email is why I am writing this one.
Twenty-two titles migrated from a badly converted back catalogue. Consistent, validated, and delivered with the source files so I am never trapped again.
The twenty questions authors actually ask us, answered directly.
It is the process of turning a finished manuscript into the files Amazon actually accepts and readers actually enjoy. That means a validated, reflowable EPUB 3 (delivered as a KPF for KDP), a working navigation structure, semantic chapter hierarchy, correctly sized images, and a reading experience that holds together on a six-inch e-ink screen, a phone at 2am, and a tablet in landscape. It is not the same as exporting a Word file to EPUB and hoping.
You can, and Amazon will convert it. The problem is what the conversion does to the manuscript: inherited Word styles, phantom section breaks, images that balloon your delivery fee, an unreliable table of contents, and paragraph indents that come and go. It usually looks acceptable in the online previewer and then breaks on a real device. Uploading a properly built EPUB means you decide how the book looks, not the converter.
Reflowable means the text flows to fit whatever screen it lands on: the reader chooses the font, the size, the margins, and even the orientation. That is the right choice for almost every prose book. Fixed layout locks the page like a PDF, which is what illustrated books, cookbooks and children's picture books need, because the words belong to the artwork. Choosing the wrong one is the most expensive mistake in eBook formatting.
A KPF for direct KDP upload and a validated EPUB 3. If you select wide distribution you also receive a separate EPUB tuned for Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play and Draft2Digital, because those platforms are not as forgiving as Amazon. Add MOBI legacy support if you still need it. Source files are available as an add-on, and we recommend taking them: you should never be locked to one supplier.
No, and it should not. That is the whole point of a reflowable book. What we guarantee is that it stays intentional everywhere: chapter openings behave, images sit where they belong, nothing collapses, no orphaned headings, no stranded lines. We test on e-ink, phone, tablet and desktop, in both orientations, before it goes anywhere near your account.
The calculator gives you a live window based on what you actually select, and it is honest rather than optimistic. A standard novel is usually a few days. An illustrated or heavily footnoted book takes longer, because the work is genuinely harder. If your date is fixed, Priority, Express and Rush options are priced against your calculated window and shown live.
Text books are priced by word count, because that is what drives the work. Illustrated and picture-heavy books are priced by page count instead, because a 40-page picture book is far more work than the word count suggests. Interior complexity, image volume, deliverable format and revisions each adjust the figure. Nothing is hidden: build the package in the calculator and the total moves with you.
That moves into a custom quote. Very long manuscripts, box sets, omnibus editions and multi-volume works are not a package problem, they are a scoping conversation. Choose the Custom or Advanced Build option in the calculator and it will switch to quote mode.
Yes, and properly. Two-way linked notes that return the reader to the exact sentence they left, not to the top of the chapter. For academic and reference work this is the single most common failure we see in files formatted elsewhere, and it is the thing scholars notice first.
We can, and increasingly you will want it. The Accessibility Tags add-on builds semantic markup, image alt text, declared language and a coherent reading order so that screen readers can navigate the book properly. We will not claim a legal compliance certification for you, but we will build the file to the standard that makes accessibility possible.
The final, proofread manuscript in Word or Google Docs, your cover file, any interior images at the highest resolution you have, your front and back matter, and a note on anything unusual, such as verse, letters, code, or a two-column layout. If the manuscript is still being edited, we would rather wait than format it twice.
Two revision rounds are included with every project. If the error is ours, we fix it and it does not count against your rounds. If you have found a typo in the manuscript itself, that is what the rounds are for, and you can add more in the calculator if a co-author or publisher is reviewing alongside you.
Only if you ask us to. The KDP Upload Assistance add-on covers walking your file through the upload, the previewer checks and the publish step. We never take ownership of your KDP account and we never publish without your explicit say-so. The account, the royalties and the rights stay yours.
Not directly, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What bad formatting does is cost you: one-star reviews about broken navigation, returns, and readers who never try the second book. Good formatting removes a reason to leave. That is worth a great deal, and it is not the same as a sales promise.
Yes, and it is a large part of what we do. Send us what is live and what you have as a source file. We will tell you honestly whether it needs repairing or rebuilding, and we will not charge you for a rebuild if a repair is what it needs.
Yes. Series get a consistent design system so that book four does not look like a different publisher made it, and box sets get a combined navigation structure that treats the volumes as parts of one book rather than a pile of files stapled together.
Editing and proofreading, cover design, ISBNs, Amazon advertising, and any paid tools or accounts. We format what you send us; we do not rewrite it. If the manuscript needs editorial work, we will tell you before we start rather than after.
Yes, but it is a separate service and a genuinely different craft. A print interior is a fixed physical object with gutters, bleed, trim size and page-count arithmetic. A Kindle file is elastic. Anyone who tells you they are the same job has not done both.
Yes. Your manuscript is not shared, not used as a sample, and not shown in a portfolio without your written permission. Every example on this page is either our own work made for demonstration or published with the author's consent.
Build your package in the calculator, and you will see the exact price and the exact delivery window before you commit to anything. If your project does not fit a package, request a custom quote and tell us what makes it unusual.
Build your quote above and you will see the exact price and the exact delivery window before you commit to anything. If your book does not fit a package, tell us what makes it unusual and we will scope it honestly.
