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How to format a book in Word for a KDP paperback

In Word, a paperback is a stack of sections built in order: trim, mirror margins, one section per chapter, headers, page numbers, PDF. The steps, and where Word falls short.

The Nueel team12 min read

Word can produce a paperback interior that KDP accepts. Amazon publishes its own step-by-step for doing exactly that, and plenty of books on the shelf started as .docx files. What makes it hard is not any single setting. It is that the settings depend on each other, and Word does nothing to tell you when one of them has gone stale.

The idea that makes the rest make sense: in Word, a book is a stack of sections. Everything that belongs to a chapter as a unit lives in its section: that it starts on a new page, that its first page has no running head, that its numbering starts at 1. Get the sections right and the rest is form-filling. Get them wrong and you spend an evening chasing a header that keeps reappearing on chapter openings.

The order below matters, and one step comes around twice: the inside margin depends on the page count, and the page count is only known at the end.

Before you start

This guide assumes a manuscript whose chapter titles carry Heading 1, whose body carries Normal, and which has no tabs for indents and no stacks of empty paragraphs. Cleaning a file to that point is its own job, covered in preparing a Word manuscript. Do it first; every step below leans on the styles.

KDP also offers blank Word templates with the page size and margins set. They save steps 1 and 2, but their margins cannot know how long your book will be, so check the inside margin anyway.

1. Page size

Layout → Size → More Paper Sizes. Enter the trim, say 6 × 9 inches, and set Apply to to Whole document.

If any image or color runs off the edge of a page, the book needs bleed, and the page becomes larger than the trim: 0.125 inches wider and 0.25 inches taller, so 6.125 × 9.25 for a 6 × 9 book. KDP notes that Word may round 0.125 to 0.13 and says that is fine. A book with bleed must be uploaded as a PDF. Most novels have no bleed and should not add any.

2. Mirror margins, and the box to leave empty

Layout → Margins → Custom Margins. Under Multiple pages, choose Mirror margins. The Left and Right fields become Inside and Outside, and Word now treats pages as left and right pages of a spread.

KDP’s minimums for a book without bleed:

Page count Inside margin, at least
24 – 150 0.375″
151 – 300 0.5″
301 – 500 0.625″
501 – 700 0.75″
701 – 828 0.875″

Top, bottom and outside must each be at least 0.25 inches without bleed and 0.375 with it. Those are minimums, not targets: an outside margin of 0.25 inches is legal and looks like a photocopy. Our judgment, not a KDP rule, is to start around half an inch outside and well above the minimum inside; the reasoning is in how wide your margins should be.

Then there is the Gutter box, which is where KDP’s own help disagrees with itself. Its Word walkthrough says: “Do not enter any value into the Gutter field.” Its general margins page says that when software has separate fields for the inside margin and the gutter, you should “input the same value for your inside margin and the gutter.”

In Word, those two instructions produce different books. Microsoft documents the gutter as extra space added to the inside margin. Type 0.5 in Inside and 0.5 in Gutter and the text sits a full inch from the spine. KDP will accept that, since the minimum is comfortably met, but the text block on a 6 × 9 page loses half an inch of width, and a 280-page book can come out twenty-odd pages longer, with a higher print cost per copy. Follow the Word walkthrough: put the whole inside margin in Inside and leave Gutter at zero.

Why you will come back here

Say the book is 290 pages with a 0.5-inch inside margin. The copyedit adds a few thousand words and it becomes 304 pages: now in the 301–500 band, where 0.5 inches is below the minimum. You widen the inside margin to 0.625, the lines get shorter, and the book reflows to 312 pages. Nothing about the manuscript changed that you would notice, but the interior needs checking again and the spine on your cover is now wrong. The spine is covered in setting up a cover file.

The cheap way through: set the inside margin one band above where you expect to land, and check the page count in Word’s status bar once more before export.

3. Styles that set the book

Right-click each style in the gallery and choose Modify. Normal gets the body typeface and size, justified, single spacing, nothing before or after, and a first-line indent (KDP suggests 0.2 inches). Heading 1 gets the chapter title’s look and generous space above; KDP suggests 60 points before and after.

The first paragraph of a chapter is conventionally set without an indent. Create a style called First Paragraph, based on Normal with the indent at zero, then open Heading 1’s Modify dialog and set Style for following paragraph to First Paragraph. Every new chapter you type now starts flush.

4. One section per chapter

At the end of the front matter and of every chapter, choose Layout → Breaks. Two of the options matter:

  • Next Page starts the next section on the following page, whichever side it falls on. This is what KDP’s walkthrough uses.
  • Odd Page starts it on the next odd-numbered, right-hand page. If the chapter before ends on a right-hand page, Word puts a blank left-hand page in between.

Opening chapters on the right is a convention of traditionally published books, not a KDP requirement. It costs a blank page roughly every other chapter, which in a 40-chapter novel is about twenty pages of paper you pay to print. Many trade paperbacks open chapters wherever they fall. Pick one and use it throughout.

There is one place where you should use Odd Page regardless: the break before chapter one. KDP requires odd page numbers on right-hand pages. If you restart the numbering at 1 in chapter one (step 6) and chapter one lands on a left-hand page, page 1 is on the left, and the file breaks that rule.

KDP allows up to four consecutive blank pages mid-book, so Odd Page breaks are safe. Blank pages you did not ask for are diagnosed in the blank page in Word, which also explains why deleting a section break merges two sections’ settings.

5. Running heads

Double-click the header of chapter one’s second page. Three options do the work, and they behave differently:

  • Different Odd & Even Pages applies to the whole document. Tick it once, and left and right pages get separate headers: by a common convention, the author’s name on the left and the book’s title on the right.
  • Different First Page belongs to each section. Tick it in every chapter, or that chapter opens under a running head.
  • Link to Previous makes a section’s header a copy of the one before. Turn it off in chapter one, so the front matter can stay bare, and leave it on everywhere after, so a header typed once repeats through the book.

Each header type links separately: first-page, odd and even, and the same three for footers. Unlinking one does not unlink the others, which explains most of “I removed the header and it came back.”

For the chapter title in the running head, do not type it into forty sections. Insert a StyleRef field (Insert → Quick Parts → Field) pointing at Heading 1. Word looks for a Heading 1 on the page and, finding none, looks back toward the start of the document, so every page shows its chapter’s title and the header stays linked. What goes in a running head and where folios sit is in running heads and page numbers.

6. Page numbers that restart

The front matter is numbered in lowercase roman, and the book proper starts at arabic 1.

  1. In chapter one’s footer, turn off Link to Previous.
  2. Insert → Page Number → Bottom of Page, and choose a centered or outside position.
  3. Page Number → Format Page Numbers: set the format to 1, 2, 3 and Start at to 1.
  4. In the front matter’s footer, set the format to i, ii, iii.

With Different First Page on, chapter openings show no number either, unless you put one in the first-page footer too. Many books do.

7. Where Word is weakest

Everything above is procedure. These three are where a Word book looks like a Word book.

Widows and orphans. Word’s widow and orphan control is on in the Normal style by default, and it does prevent a paragraph’s last line from sitting alone at the top of a page. It does so by moving a line to the next page, which leaves the page it came from one line short. In a book, facing pages should end on the same line, and Word does not keep them in step. Fix the worst spreads by hand, usually by editing a line out of a paragraph. More in widows and orphans.

Hyphenation. Word does not hyphenate until you ask. Open Layout → Hyphenation, choose Automatic, then Hyphenation Options and limit consecutive hyphens to two or three. Turn it off for Heading 1 (Paragraph → Line and Page Breaks → Don’t hyphenate), because a broken word in a chapter title looks like a mistake.

Justification. Without hyphenation, Word stretches word spaces until each line reaches the margin, and the gaps sometimes line up into white channels down the page, called rivers. Hyphenation removes most of them. What it cannot add is a paragraph composer, which weighs every line of a paragraph together before choosing breaks; InDesign documents one, Word documents nothing equivalent. Expect some loose lines. Why rivers form is in hyphenation and justification.

8. Fonts, images, then the PDF

Fonts. KDP’s instructions: File → Options → Save, tick Embed fonts in the file, and leave Embed only the characters used and Do not embed common system fonts unticked. If a font’s license forbids embedding, KDP’s checks will keep reporting it unembedded; change the font.

Images. File → Options → Advanced → Image Size and Quality, tick Do not compress images in file. Do this before inserting pictures: Word does not restore pixels it has already thrown away. KDP asks for at least 300 DPI, and its Word-to-PDF help adds that Save as PDF downsamples images while Print to PDF keeps them at 300.

The PDF. On Windows, File → Save As, choose PDF, and under Optimize for choose Standard (publishing online and printing). Then open Options, where two boxes are worth understanding:

  • ISO 19005-1 compliant (PDF/A) sounds like a print setting and is not. PDF/A is an archiving standard. KDP does not ask for it, and ticking it does not make the file print-ready.
  • Bitmap text when fonts may not be embedded turns text into pictures of text when a font cannot be embedded. If that ever happens, your body text prints as an image. Treat it as a symptom and change the font.

On a Mac, Microsoft warns that PDFs made through its online service use only fonts Microsoft has the rights to and substitute the rest. Choose the option that writes the PDF on your own machine, labeled Best for printing in recent versions.

Word cannot write PDF/X, the standard printers mean by “press-ready.” KDP does not name a PDF/X standard for interiors, so this does not matter there. IngramSpark requires PDF/X-1a:2001 or PDF/X-3:2002, so a Word book going to IngramSpark needs a conversion step in a tool such as Acrobat Pro. The rest of what a printer means by print-ready is in the print-ready PDF checklist.

9. Check the PDF, not the document

Open the PDF in a reader, not in Word, and check:

  • The page count, against the margin table. If it crossed a band, go back to step 2.
  • Page 1 is a right-hand page, and every odd number is on the right.
  • No chapter opening carries a running head. Check every opening, not a sample.
  • Fonts: in the reader’s document properties, every font should show as embedded. One that does not is the one KDP will flag.

Then upload and read KDP’s Print Previewer, which flags pages with text outside the margins, and order a proof before you publish. Short pages and loose lines show on paper in a way they do not on screen.

Every step here can be done in Word, and it stays done until the page count moves. The page count feeds the margin band, the odd-page breaks, the blank pages and the spine, and in Word you re-check all of them by hand after every round of edits.

Nueel, our product, so weigh it as a pitch, does that re-checking automatically: it reads the same Heading 1 paragraphs as chapters and checks the PDF against KDP’s specifications, including the inside margin for the page count the book has now. The free preview typesets your first chapter without an account, and pricing is public.

Sources

Common questions

How do I set up a 6 x 9 book in Word?
Go to Layout → Size → More Paper Sizes, enter 6 for the width and 9 for the height, and apply it to the whole document. Then open Layout → Margins → Custom Margins, choose Mirror margins under Multiple pages, and enter an Inside margin at least as large as KDP's minimum for your page count: 0.5 inches for 151 to 300 pages, 0.625 for 301 to 500. If anything bleeds off the page edge, the page size becomes 6.125 × 9.25 instead.
Should I put a value in Word's Gutter box for a KDP book?
No, if you are using mirror margins. Word adds the gutter on top of the inside margin, so the inside margin alone is the number KDP checks. KDP's Word walkthrough says to leave the Gutter field empty. Its general margins page says to enter the same value in both fields, which in Word doubles the inside margin: the file is still accepted, but the text block is narrower and the book longer than it needs to be.
Should each chapter be a section break or a page break in Word?
A section break, Next Page or Odd Page. Only a section can have a first page without a running head, so a chapter that begins after a plain page break gets the header of the page before it. Next Page starts the chapter on the following page; Odd Page starts it on the next right-hand page and inserts a blank left-hand page when needed.
Why does my chapter one start on a left-hand page in Word?
Because the section starts on whatever page comes next. If the front matter ends on a right-hand page, a Next Page break puts chapter one on a left-hand page, and restarting the numbering at 1 there puts an odd number on the left, which KDP's guidelines do not allow. Use an Odd Page section break before chapter one so it opens on a right-hand page.
Can Word make a PDF/X file for printing?
No. Word's PDF export offers PDF/A, an archiving standard, not PDF/X, the printing one. KDP does not require PDF/X for interiors, so Word's ordinary PDF is enough there. IngramSpark requires PDF/X-1a:2001 or PDF/X-3:2002, which means converting Word's PDF in a tool such as Adobe Acrobat Pro.

Nueel is a web app that turns a finished manuscript into a typeset book, in your browser: import your Word file, choose a design, export a print-ready PDF and an EPUB. See how it works.