Your Kindle file is not only a book. It is the sample a stranger reads before deciding to buy, the page count Amazon uses to pay you in Kindle Unlimited, the source X-Ray reads to build its character list, and the thing your series page is quietly judged on. We format all of it, not just the prose.
Kindle eBook formatting is the work of building an interior that behaves correctly inside Amazon's ecosystem, rather than merely inside a reading app. The same file drives the retail sample, the free download, the page-read count in Kindle Unlimited, the X-Ray index, the series grouping and the Look Inside panel. One file, six jobs.
Most formatting is sold as though the only audience were a reader who has already bought the book. That reader matters enormously, and they are the last person in the chain. Everyone before them is deciding whether to become them, and what they are deciding on is the first few screens of your file.
So we format for both. The prose has to hold at any font size on any device. The structure also has to survive being sliced into a sample, indexed by an algorithm, counted into normalised pages and grouped into a series. Those are different problems, and only one of them is usually solved.
Amazon gives away roughly the first ten percent of your book to anyone who clicks the sample button, and shows a slice of it in the Look Inside panel to anyone who does not. That portion of your file is doing more commercial work than every other page combined, and it is the portion authors spend the least time on.
If your front matter is bloated, the sample runs out before the story starts. If your first chapter opens badly on a phone, the browsing reader closes the tab. If the Look Inside lands on a copyright page, that is the impression your book makes. All three are formatting decisions, and all three are fixable before you publish.
We arrange the front matter so the free sample ends somewhere useful, on a hook, rather than in the middle of an acknowledgements list.
The first screen a browsing reader sees is chosen deliberately, not inherited from whatever the converter put in the spine first.
Everything before the buy button is a shop window. We build it like one, then check it on the surfaces where the window is actually looked at.
The reading experience is the floor, not the ceiling. These six things come with every file we build.
The free sample and the Look Inside panel are cut from the front of your file, and where they land is a consequence of how the front matter is ordered. We put the copyright, the dedication and the also-by list where they belong, so a stranger meets your first chapter rather than your legal text. Ten percent of a book is a great deal of selling if it is spent on the right ten percent.
Kindle Unlimited pays on normalised pages read, and that count is derived from your file. Bloated front matter, empty pages, oversized image blocks and stray blank sections all distort what gets counted. We build the structure so the page count Amazon derives is an honest reflection of your book, and we tell you what it comes out at.
X-Ray builds its list of characters, places and terms from the text and the structure of your file. A book with no real headings and no semantic chapter marks gives it nothing coherent to work from, so the panel comes back thin or eccentric. Proper markup is what makes the feature usable, and readers of series notice when it is missing.
Kindle runs its own typesetting layer over your file and overrides a surprising amount of what you specified. Hyphenation, justification, ligatures and kerning are decided by Amazon, not by you. We build to work with that engine rather than fight it, so the result is deliberate instead of accidental.
Series titles that do not group on Amazon lose sales quietly and permanently, because a reader who finishes book two cannot find book three. Series fields, reading order, contributor records and box-set navigation are set up so the storefront treats your books as a body of work rather than six unrelated listings.
Kindle Previewer is Amazon's simulation of Amazon. It is fast, it is free, and it renders things differently from the Paperwhite in your bag. Every file we build gets opened on physical devices as well, because the previewer and the hardware disagree often enough to matter.
Six books, six different demands on the same storefront. Open any of them to see the decision behind the interior and what it protects commercially.
Where you sell decides how you are paid, and how you are paid decides what the file has to optimise for. Settle this before the build, not after.
You are paid on normalised pages read, so the file has to be structured to count honestly and to keep a subscriber turning pages. Front matter is trimmed hard, back matter earns its place, and anything that inflates or deflates the page count gets examined rather than ignored.
You are also locked to Amazon for the term. That is a legitimate choice and it does mean the file can be tuned specifically for Kindle, using the toolchain and the features that only exist here.
You are paid per sale across several stores, and the file has to be a validated EPUB 3 that Apple, Kobo, Google Play and the library aggregators will accept without argument. Nothing Amazon-specific can be load-bearing, because most of it will not travel.
The Kindle version is then tuned on top of that master rather than instead of it. Slightly more work, and you are never rebuilding from nothing the day an exclusivity term ends.
Six problems that live outside the reading experience entirely, and cost authors money every day.
Each element, how it is built, and what it protects on the storefront rather than only on the page.
| Element | How we build it | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Front matter order | Trimmed and sequenced so the sample reaches the story | The free ten percent is your shop window. Spending it on a dedication is spending it on nothing. |
| Opening screen | First spine item chosen deliberately | Look Inside starts where the file starts. That first screen is the impression a browsing reader forms. |
| Heading hierarchy | Real semantic headings at every level | Drives the Kindle go-to menu, the X-Ray index and the page-read count, all at once. |
| Enhanced Typesetting | Built to remain eligible, never to defeat it | Amazon's engine controls hyphenation and justification. Fighting it produces worse results than working with it. |
| Image blocks | Sized and placed so they do not inflate normalised pages | In Kindle Unlimited, a badly placed full-bleed image can distort what you are paid for a page nobody read. |
| Back matter | Also-by, next-in-series link, and a real call to action | This is where the next sale comes from. It is the last thing the reader sees and the first thing most authors neglect. |
| Series fields | Series name, number and reading order set in KDP | Ungrouped series titles cost sales silently. The reader who wanted book three simply never finds it. |
| Metadata block | Title, subtitle, contributors, language and identifiers | Wrong metadata affects search placement, the also-boughts and whether Amazon treats your books as related at all. |
We check the file where it is judged commercially, which is not the same place it is read.
The panel is rendered by Amazon's own web viewer, and it is not the Kindle app. Spacing behaves differently, some styling is dropped entirely, and images can appear at sizes you did not choose. We open the listing view and look at what a browsing stranger will actually see.
We send the sample to a real device the way a customer would, and read it end to end. The interesting question is not whether it looks nice. It is where it stops, and whether stopping there makes anybody want to pay for the rest.
The file goes through the pipeline that produces the KENP figure, and we compare that number against what the book should honestly be worth. If padded matter has inflated it, we say so. If a structural problem has cut it short, we fix it.
The structure is tested for whether it gives the indexer something usable: named entities in real headings, chapter marks it can anchor to, and a body it can parse. A thin X-Ray panel is a visible defect on a series page.
Paperwhite, basic Kindle, Fire tablet, and the app on both phone platforms. Amazon's typesetting engine does things on device that its previewer does not always show, particularly to justification and hyphenation on a narrow screen.
Books have to group. We check the series page, the reading order, the volume navigation inside a box set, and whether tapping through from the end of book one actually gets a reader to book two.
The files, plus the things nobody else hands you.
Packaged for KDP, carrying your metadata, your cover and your interior exactly as built, and already run through the previewer on our side. You upload it. Nothing is left for Amazon to guess at, and nothing is left for you to configure at the last screen.
Validated, and yours permanently. It is your evidence that the job was done to standard, and it is what you will reach for the day an exclusivity term lapses, a library platform asks, or you decide Amazon should not be the only address your book has.
Where your free sample ends, what the first Look Inside screen shows, and what your normalised page count came out at. Three numbers most authors never see, written down before you publish rather than discovered afterwards.
Every field you will be asked for at upload, filled in and ready to paste: series name and number, contributors, language, description structure and the categories worth arguing about. It turns a fiddly hour into ten minutes.
Every interior image at the dimensions Kindle renders, compressed to protect your royalty, and checked in greyscale as well as colour. Supplied separately as well as embedded, so you have them for promotion.
Markup and stylesheets, unpacked. Take them. An author who owns their source is an author who can walk away from any supplier, including this one, and that is how it should be.
Five stages. The second one is where most of the commercial value is created, and it is the one almost nobody sells.
We read the structure and ask where you are selling, because Kindle Unlimited and wide distribution pull the build in different directions.
We decide where the sample should land, what the Look Inside opens on, and how the front and back matter should be ordered to earn their space.
The file is constructed from real semantic structure, styled to work with Amazon's typesetting engine rather than against it.
Sample, Look Inside, page count, X-Ray readiness and series grouping, then the physical hardware pass on top.
Files, source, metadata sheet and the sample report, followed by two rounds of changes with no argument.
Prose interiors are quoted on word count, since that is the honest measure of the labour. Illustrated books are priced by page. Everything else adjusts the figure, and both the price and the delivery window move as you select.
Required steps are marked with *. Optional extras can be removed from the summary with the cross icon.
This decides how the interior is built and how it is priced.
Word count is the honest measure of work in a prose interior.
Where you intend to sell. It genuinely changes what we build, not just what we charge.
Be accurate here. It costs less than discovering the truth halfway through.
Images affect the build, the file weight and what Amazon deducts per sale.
Calculated from your selections above, and priced against your own window.
Two are included. Add more if a publisher or co-author is reviewing with you.
Editorial work, proofreading, cover artwork, ISBN purchase, advertising budget and subscription software all sit outside this service. We build the interior. We do not write, rewrite or market the book.
Plenty of suppliers will build you a book that opens nicely. Very few of them ever look at the listing it lands on.
| What you are comparing | Standard Formatting Supplier | Book Formatting Experts |
|---|---|---|
| The free sample | ✕ Nobody checks where it stops. It stops wherever ten percent lands. | ✓ Front matter arranged so the sample ends on a hook, and we read it end to end before delivery. |
| Look Inside | ✕ Opens on whatever happens to be first in the file. | ✓ The opening screen is chosen deliberately and checked in Amazon's own web viewer. |
| Kindle Unlimited | ✕ Page reads are treated as Amazon's business, not the formatter's. | ✓ Structure built so the normalised count is honest, and the figure reported to you before launch. |
| X-Ray | ✕ Never mentioned, and usually impossible from the file supplied. | ✓ Semantic structure and entity marking prepared, so the panel is worth a reader opening. |
| Series and box sets | ✕ Each book formatted in isolation, series fields left for you. | ✓ Shared interior standard, volume navigation and metadata that makes Amazon group the books. |
| Testing | ✕ Kindle Previewer, once, at the default settings. | ✓ Previewer, physical hardware, the live listing view and the downloaded sample. |
The storefront asks different things of different books. A thriller and a cookbook fail commercially in completely different places.
The whole business model depends on a reader finishing book one and immediately finding book two. That means correct series fields, a back-matter link that works, a shared interior across the set, and a sample for each volume that does not waste its ten percent recapping what came before. Series formatting is a commercial system, not six separate jobs.
Bought largely from the sample, because the buyer is checking whether you actually know anything. The first chapter has to arrive fast and look organised. Frameworks, checklists and a heading structure that follows the shape of your thinking do more persuading inside the Look Inside panel than your blurb ever will.
A genre read almost entirely on subscription, where page reads rather than sales pay the bills. Front matter comes down to the minimum, the story starts early, and the back matter has to carry the reader to the next book while the feeling is still on them.
Two-way linked notes, tables that survive six inches, an index that means something without page numbers, and an X-Ray panel that a scholar will genuinely use. This is also where structure translates directly into being able to find anything at all in a book of eight hundred pages.
Sold on the photographs, delivered under a per-megabyte charge, and read by somebody with wet hands in a kitchen. The sample has to show a real recipe rather than an introduction, and the file has to weigh less than the pictures want it to.
Six books in one file needs volume-level navigation, a combined contents structure, and a decision about what the sample should contain. Get it right and the box set outsells the individual titles. Get it wrong and the reader cannot even reach book two.
A reader who has already bought your book will forgive a great deal. They have committed. The person who has not bought it yet will forgive nothing at all, because they have no reason to, and closing the tab costs them nothing.
That is the whole argument for treating a Kindle file as a shop rather than a document. The reading experience keeps the reader you have. The first ten percent, the Look Inside panel and the series page decide whether you get any more.
Read to the end and checked against the story, because a sample that ends on a hook and a sample that ends in a list of previous titles are different products.
Your normalised page figure is derived from the file, and the file is ours. If it is wrong, that is a formatting problem with a financial consequence.
Books grouped, order correct, navigation working. A series that does not group is a marketing budget being poured into a hole.
The actual list. Every line is ticked, or the file stays with us.
Six authors who arrive at this page. One of them is usually you.
Your income is page reads, not sales, and nobody has ever explained to you where that number comes from. It comes from your file. Structure, front matter and image handling all move it, and a formatter who has never thought about it is a formatter who has been guessing with your revenue.
Book four is coming and the first three do not group properly on Amazon. Every advertising dollar you spend on book one is leaking, because the readers who finish it cannot find what comes next. This is a metadata and back-matter problem, and it is entirely solvable.
You have traffic to the listing and almost no conversion. Before you rewrite the blurb again, read your own free sample on a phone. There is a reasonable chance it ends before your first chapter does anything interesting.
Your rights have reverted and you are self-publishing a book that a house once handled. The file you were given, if you were given one, was built for their pipeline. The storefront work, the series setup and the back matter were all theirs, and now they are yours.
Preorder set, promotion booked, and the file is not ready. Rush and Express are priced against your own calculated window, and nothing gets skipped to hit them. If we cannot do it properly in the time, we will tell you before you pay.
Six titles going into one file, and you have realised nobody has explained how the navigation, the sample or the page count should work in an omnibus. They work quite differently, and getting them wrong costs more than the bundle earns.
Three promises in writing, and one refusal.
The file goes up at KDP without an error banner and it renders as built on the devices your readers own. If it does not, that is ours to fix immediately, and the fix is not deducted from your revision rounds. A file that fails at the upload screen is not a deliverable in any sense.
Sample cut, opening screen, back matter and series fields are part of every build, not an extra we mention after you have paid. They are the reason the file makes money, and charging separately for them would be charging you for the point of the job.
Formatting does not create demand. Its actual job is to strip out the reasons a browser abandons the listing and a finisher never opens the sequel. Anyone selling you a page-read guarantee in exchange for a formatting fee is selling you something they cannot deliver.
When a judgement call comes up, and it always does, this is what settles it.
Most of the people who open it have not bought anything yet. Everything before the buy button is retail, and it should be built by someone who knows that.
Kindle overrides more of your typography than you think. A formatter who tries to defeat that produces a worse book than one who designs for it.
The end of a book is the start of the next sale. Back matter, series links and grouping are formatting decisions with a direct commercial value, and they are usually left to nobody.
If nothing else from this page survives, keep these.
On a phone, as a stranger, all the way to where it stops. Most authors have never done this, and most are unhappy when they finally do.
If you are in Kindle Unlimited, that number is your income and it is derived from your file. Not knowing it is not a neutral position.
Grouping, numbering and back-matter links. The cheapest sale you will ever make is to somebody who has just finished book two at one in the morning.
Rated 4.9 out of 5 across 247 reviewed projects.
I had already paid someone else to format this book once. The chapter headings shifted every time a reader changed the font size and I only found out from a review. This team rebuilt the interior from the structure up and sent me photographs from four real devices before I uploaded anything. First launch day I have not spent refreshing the reviews in a panic.
What sold me was the audit. They came back and told me two chapters had been pasted in from another document and were carrying invisible styles, and that fixing that first would save me money later. Nobody had mentioned it in three years of self-publishing. The proof needed no corrections at all.
My book has footnotes, tables and two appendices, and every quote I got either ignored that or doubled the price because of it. Here the pricing was laid out step by step and I could see what each element cost before I committed. It arrived early and the notes link both ways, which nobody else had even offered.
The proof came back from the printer with the margins exactly where they should be, the running heads correct, and not one chapter opening on a left-hand page. This is my fourth book and the first time I have not had to pay for a second proof copy.
English is my second language and I was nervous about the back and forth. Everything was explained plainly, and when I asked the same question twice they answered as if it were the first time. The revisions were turned round inside two days and I was never made to feel like a nuisance.
I write cookbooks, so the interior is the product. Ingredients have to sit beside the method or the recipe stops working, and the last person I hired reflowed the whole thing into nonsense. These people understood the problem before I had finished describing it and the finished layout is genuinely beautiful.
Straightforward from beginning to end. A fixed price, a delivery window they actually hit, and files that went up to KDP and IngramSpark without a single rejection. I have since sent them two more titles and recommended them to my writing group without hesitation.
My memoir has photographs and I had resigned myself to them looking muddy. They optimised every image, told me honestly which two were too low-resolution to save, and suggested crops instead of shrugging. That candour is worth more to me than the discount I was chasing elsewhere.
I sent them a 480-page reference book with a nightmare of cross-references and a table on nearly every spread. They quoted it accurately, they did not come back later asking for more money, and the index still works. Any author will tell you what that is worth.
The questions authors actually ask us, answered without sales language.
More than most authors expect. The same file produces the free sample, the Look Inside panel, the page count you are paid on in Kindle Unlimited, the X-Ray index and the way your series groups on Amazon. A file that reads beautifully and wastes its first ten percent on front matter is a well-made book with a broken shop window attached to it. We format both.
Around ten percent, measured from the start of the file, though the exact figure moves a little by title. That means the boundary lands wherever your front matter puts it. Eight pages of copyright, dedication, epigraph and also-by list before chapter one and a significant portion of your selling window has been spent on material that persuades nobody. It is a reordering problem, and it is free to fix before you publish.
KENP is the normalised page count Amazon derives from your file to work out payment for Kindle Unlimited borrows. It is not your Word page count and it is not your paperback page count. It is calculated from the file, which means the file's structure, image handling, spacing and matter all influence it. Formatting cannot invent pages honestly, and bad formatting can absolutely distort the count in either direction.
You can make the count accurate, and you can stop it being suppressed by structural problems. What you should not do, and what we will not do, is pad the file to inflate it. Amazon actively looks for that and the penalties range from lost payments to account action. The honest version of this is worth having; the dishonest version is a genuinely bad idea.
X-Ray is the panel that lets a reader tap a character or a term and see where it appears and what it means. Amazon builds it from your file, and it builds it well only when the file has real structure to work from. For series fiction, epic fantasy, history and anything with a large cast, a full X-Ray panel is a visible mark of quality, and a thin one is a visible mark of the opposite.
Because Previewer is Amazon simulating Amazon, and the simulation is imperfect. It is genuinely useful for catching gross errors and it is the fastest feedback loop you have. It also renders justification, hyphenation and image scaling differently from the physical device sitting in your bag. We use Previewer as the first check and hardware as the deciding one.
It is Amazon's own typesetting layer, which handles hyphenation, kerning, ligatures, drop-cap rendering and word spacing on eligible files. You cannot switch it off from your side, and you would not want to, because ineligible files get a noticeably cruder reading experience. What you can do is build a file that stays eligible and works with the engine. Fighting it is how authors end up with rivers of white space in justified text.
More than you would like. The reader chooses the typeface, the size, the line spacing, the margins and the theme, and Amazon's engine makes the final call on hyphenation and justification. What remains yours is structure, hierarchy, relative proportion, image treatment, spacing relationships and ornamentation. That is still a great deal of design, and it is the part that has to be done properly, because it is the part that survives.
By deciding what is first in the file, because that is what it shows. If your spine begins with a title page followed by two pages of legal text, that is what a browsing stranger meets. We order the opening deliberately, then look at the live listing after publication to confirm that Amazon is showing what we intended, which it usually is and occasionally is not.
Almost always because the series name, the series number or the reading order was entered inconsistently across the titles, or left blank on one of them. It looks like a small clerical thing. Its effect is that a reader who has just finished book two cannot find book three, and they will not hunt for it. We set the fields up as part of the build and check the series page afterwards.
After, always, and it should be shorter and more purposeful than most authors make it. A finished reader is at their most receptive and their least patient. One clear next step, meaning the next book in the series with a working link, then the also-by list, then the newsletter, then everything else. Three pages of acknowledgements between the last line and the next-book link is a sale being thrown away.
Yes, and they are a genuinely different build. A box set needs volume-level navigation so a reader can jump to book four directly, a combined contents structure that does not collapse into a hundred flat entries, and a considered decision about what the sample should show. Six files stapled together technically opens on a Kindle and is not an omnibus edition in any useful sense.
They are companion services with different emphases. The other page is about the reading experience: the interior, the devices, the validation, the craft of the file itself. This one is about what Amazon does with that file commercially, meaning the sample, the page reads, X-Ray, the series and the listing. Most authors want both, and buying either one gets you a properly built Kindle interior.
Yes, and updating a live title is straightforward. You upload the new file and Amazon replaces it, without losing your reviews, your ranking or your listing. Existing owners can be sent the updated version in some circumstances. Give us the published file and the listing URL. We will say plainly whether a repair will do or the interior has to be rebuilt, and we say it before any money changes hands.
On the 70 percent royalty option there is a delivery charge based on the size of your file, deducted from every sale. A heavily illustrated book converted without care can carry several unnecessary megabytes, and that cost recurs on every copy for the life of the title. We resize, compress and check each image, then tell you what the file weighs and what the deduction works out at.
We can walk you through the upload, and we never take ownership of the account. Your KDP account holds your rights, your royalties and your tax details, and it should never be handed to a supplier, including this one. If you want company at the upload screen, that is what the walkthrough is for. If you would rather do it alone, the metadata sheet tells you exactly what goes in each field.
They become links, and the direction matters. A footnote that takes a reader forward but never returns them to the sentence they left is worse than no footnote at all, because now they have lost their place in your argument as well as their patience. We build them to travel both ways, and we test the return path by tapping every one on a device.
You need a validated EPUB 3, and the sensible moment to build it is now rather than in eighteen months. The stores outside Amazon check files far more strictly and reject things Amazon quietly tolerates. If you take the portable master with your Kindle build, going wide later is an afternoon's work. If you do not, it is a second project at full price.
Ending in a place that gives a reader permission to stop. That includes the middle of an acknowledgements page, a table of contents, a list of your other titles, or a chapter that has just resolved something. What you want is a sample that stops while a question is open. We read the cut point, and if the front matter is pushing it into the wrong place, we move the front matter.
The free sample, on a phone, as a stranger. That single act tells us more about a Kindle file than any inspection of the markup, because it shows the book the way the only person who matters commercially sees it. Send us your listing and we will do it, tell you where it stops, and tell you whether that is where it should stop.
The calculator gives you a fixed price and a fixed window before anything is agreed. If your book is a series, a box set or a Kindle Unlimited title, say so on the way through, because it changes what we build.