Publishing your book

Once you've written and revised your book, this page covers getting it ready to publish, so it gets accepted the first time you upload it.

A check before you upload: KDP preflight

Amazon's KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) is where most self-published novels go, and it's strict about a few things. So it doesn't reject your book after you upload, run KDP preflight from the Toolkit menu. It checks these things before you upload and tells you what isn't ready:

• Whether your title, author name, and description are filled in.
• Whether you've added a cover.
• Whether your page count fits the trim (a book can be too short or too long for a format).
• Whether any chapters are empty.
• Whether you've included a table of contents.
• Whether every chapter is marked Final.

If everything is green, you're ready to upload.

Is the book finished: delivery readiness

Preflight checks whether KDP will accept the file. Delivery readiness checks whether the book itself is finished. Run Delivery readiness from the Toolkit menu and it gives you a checklist of things that are easy to forget:

• Empty or very short chapters. A blank chapter, or one you left at fifty words.
• The pages a published book has. Mainly a copyright page, plus the title and About the author pages.
• Comments left open. Notes you left yourself while drafting and didn't resolve, with how many there are and where.
• Permissions not yet cleared. Any quoted lyric, poem, or passage in your permissions ledger still marked to request instead of granted. Missing one of these could get you a letter from a lawyer.
• Unused story bible entries. A reference or glossary term you added but never used in the book.

None of this stops you exporting. Short chapters or a missing About the author page are often on purpose. The checklist just makes sure nothing is missing by accident.

Your cover and listing details

On the Metadata page, the KDP metadata section has everything a store shows readers. You fill it in once, and your exports and the preflight check use it.

Cover image

Your front cover, used in the EPUB and shown on the dashboard.

Title & subtitle

As they'll appear on the listing and the title page.

Author name

Your name or pen name.

Genre & categories

How stores categorise the book and help readers find it.

Blurb

The back-cover description.

Keywords

The search terms KDP asks for.

ISBNs

Your print and ebook ISBNs, if you have them. They're added to the copyright page automatically.

There are free tools on this site for two of these fields: the ISBN checker validates and converts an ISBN, and the Amazon description formatter turns a blurb into the HTML KDP accepts. To work out what you'll earn, try the KDP royalty calculator.

KDP publishes in fewer languages than Galley writes

Galley writes in 54 languages. Amazon KDP sells books in about 45, and its lists are different for ebooks, paperbacks and hardcovers. Some of the gaps are surprising, so Galley checks your book's language and tells you, so you don't find out when you upload.

Ebook, paperback and hardcover

English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, the Nordic languages, Catalan, Galician, Basque, Irish, Welsh, Icelandic, Hebrew and Persian.

Ebook and paperback, no hardcover

Japanese.

Paperback and hardcover, no ebook

Polish and Ukrainian.

Ebook only

Arabic, Hindi, Traditional Chinese, Gujarati, Malayalam, Marathi and Tamil. There is no KDP paperback in these.

Not on KDP at all

Simplified Chinese, Korean, Bengali, Thai, Urdu, Russian, Greek, Turkish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Vietnamese and others.

In a book whose language KDP doesn't publish, the KDP preflight, the Kindle store file and the seven-keyword and BISAC fields are switched off, with a note explaining why. These limits only apply to Amazon.

Nothing about your exports changes. The print PDF, the EPUB, the Word file and the submission package all still work, because you can still publish through IngramSpark, Kobo, Apple Books, a local printer or a publisher. Check Amazon's current list before you decide, because it changes. This one was checked on 29 August 2026.

The copyright page

Galley writes the copyright page for you. Add a copyright page to your front matter and it fills in the standard wording from your book's details: the rights line, the "this is a work of fiction" disclaimer, your ISBN, and the edition line.

It's made of blocks you can edit, reorder, add or remove. You can keep the defaults, or add your own imprint, rights notice or printing line. The parts that come from your book's details (title, author and year) are live fields, so if you change the book's title, the copyright page updates too.

The cover template

A paperback cover is one sheet: back, spine and front, plus bleed. The spine's width depends on how many pages the book has and the paper it's printed on, so it changes whenever the interior does. Cover template in the Toolkit typesets your print PDF, counts its pages, and gives you the wrap at that size for KDP, as a PDF with the spine, the folds, the safe area and the barcode box marked. Pick cream or white paper, or colour, and where the barcode goes.

It measures the PDF your current typeface and size would export, so make it once the interior is final. IngramSpark's papers are slightly different, so check their own calculator before uploading there. There's also a free version on this site that takes a page count you type in.

Where your book can go

Galley exports standard files, so you can publish them anywhere:

Amazon KDP

The print PDF for the paperback and the EPUB for Kindle. Galley's trim sizes and preflight check are set up for KDP. Check the language list first if you're not writing in English.

IngramSpark & print-on-demand

The same print PDF, correctly sized with a proper gutter (the inner margin that vanishes into the spine).

Kobo, Apple Books, Draft2Digital

The EPUB, with your cover.

A literary agent

The submission package, in the format they expect.