Did you know you can use Kindle Create files to format your paperback?

Yep. I done wrote a book. Or rather, I collected my favorite stories into one perfect-bound collection, also known as a book.

It took some doing to get to this point. I never put a print book on amazon before because I was daunted by the formatting issues. But then I found out that you can use a .kpf file type for your Amazon paperback upload. This may be very common knowledge for a lot of people. However, there were enough people asking me how I formatted my book that I figured it could be useful information for folks.

The first step is you want to download and install Kindle Create, which is free software made by Amazon for book formatting. You simply upload your manuscript Word file to Create at startup and it does most of the work for you.

Kindle Create has buttons for your front matter, such as title page, table of contents, and copyright page. One thing I found out is that your copyright page ISBN number needs to match the ISBN you’re using on Amazon or your book will be rejected. So keep that in mind as you move forward.

Once everything looks good in the preview, you can hit the “Generate” button on the top right of Create, and that will export your .kpf file. This is the file that can be uploaded to both your ebook and print book on Kindle Direct Print.

I feel like a lot of people don’t know this is an option because KDP doesn’t say in the instructions for upload that you can use a .kpf file type, which seems like a major oversight. But it works! And it’s way easier than I thought it would be.

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments. And Please check out my book. It’s a damn good book, worth your time.