Publishing your book

You've written it, revised it, and made the files. This last stretch, the part that intimidates most first-time authors, is where Galley tries hardest to make things painless. The goal is a clean upload on the first try, with no formatting nightmare in between.

A check before you upload: KDP preflight

Amazon's KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) is where most self-published novels go, and it's fussy about a handful of things. Rather than let it reject your book after you upload, run KDP preflight from the Toolkit menu. It checks everything ahead of time 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.

Green across the board means you're good to upload.

KDP preflight: each requirement checked or flagged, so you fix things on your side rather than in a rejection email.

Is the book finished: delivery readiness

Preflight answers a narrow question, will KDP accept this file. Delivery readiness answers the wider one, is the book done as a book. Run Delivery readiness from the Toolkit menu and it reads across the parts of your project that a rushed author forgets, and hands you a checklist rather than a verdict:

  • Empty or barely-there chapters. A blank page waiting to ship, or a stub you left at fifty words.
  • The pages a published book has. A copyright page above all, plus the title and about-the-author pages.
  • Comments left open. The notes-to-self you scattered while drafting and never came back to, counted and located.
  • Permissions not yet cleared. Any quoted lyric, poem, or passage in your permissions ledger still marked to request rather than granted. The one that ends in a lawyer's letter if you miss it.
  • Loose ends in the story bible. A reference or glossary term you defined but the book never uses.

Nothing here blocks an export, it's a checklist, not a gate, and short chapters or a missing about-page are often deliberate. It just makes sure the only reason something's missing is that you meant it to be.

Your cover and listing details

On the Metadata page, the KDP metadata section holds everything a store shows shoppers. Fill it in once and your exports and the preflight check all read from 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 file and surface the book.
Blurb
The back-cover description.
Keywords
The search terms KDP asks for.
ISBNs
Your print and ebook ISBNs, if you have them. They flow into the copyright page automatically.

Two of those fields have free tools on this site if you need to check one before you paste it in: the ISBN checker validates and converts an ISBN, and the Amazon description formatter turns a blurb into the HTML KDP accepts. What the listing then earns is 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 reads the language off your book and tells you rather than letting you find out at 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 line saying why. Those are Amazon's rules and nobody else's.

Nothing about your exports changes. The print PDF, the EPUB, the Word file and the submission package all still work, because your book still has IngramSpark, Kobo, Apple Books, a local printer and a publisher, and none of them asked Amazon. Read the list yourself before you commit to a route: it moves, and this one was read on 29 August 2026.

The copyright page writes itself

Nobody enjoys writing the copyright page, that dense block of legalese at the front of every book. So Galley does it. 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 built from stacked blocks you can edit, reorder, add to, or remove, keep the defaults, or drop in your own imprint, a rights notice, or a printing line. The parts that come from your metadata, title, author, year, are live fields: change the book's title and the copyright page follows, so it can never quietly go stale.

Where your book can go

Because Galley makes standard, portable files, you're never locked to one shop:

Amazon KDP
The print PDF for the paperback, the EPUB for Kindle. This is the path Galley's trims and preflight are tuned for. 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.
✅ The whole loop is short: preview it, run the check, export, upload. That's the formatting week and the freelancer, gone. See Preview & export for the files themselves.