What Are Amazon'S Guidelines For Formatting Kindle Book Text?

2025-07-12 20:37:15 94

2 Answers

Ursula
Ursula
2025-07-17 23:58:22
I've spent way too much time formatting books for Kindle, so here's the lowdown from my trial-and-error experience. Amazon's guidelines are strict but logical once you get the hang of them. They want clean, reflowable text—no fancy fonts or wild formatting. Stick to basic fonts like Times New Roman or Arial, and keep your font size between 10-12pt. Paragraphs should be indented with the tab key or set to 0.5 inches, but never use spaces. Headings need to be styled with proper heading tags (H1, H2) so Kindle can recognize them for navigation.

Images are tricky but doable. They must be in JPEG or PNG format, centered, and wrapped in text so they resize properly on different devices. Tables? Forget about it unless you’re okay with them breaking on smaller screens. Amazon’s Kindle Previewer tool is a lifesaver—it shows how your book will look across devices before publishing. The biggest rookie mistake? Using Word’s default styles. They create hidden formatting gremlins that wreck your ebook. Always strip formatting and rebuild it manually or use Kindle’s templates.
David
David
2025-07-14 00:34:44
Formatting for Kindle is like baking—follow the recipe or your book collapses. Amazon demands simplicity: no hard returns between paragraphs, no manual page breaks, and absolutely no footnotes (use endnotes instead). Hyperlinks must be full URLs, not shortened. Poetry needs special care—use soft returns within stanzas and hard returns between them. If you ignore these rules, your book might look fine on your laptop but turn into a disaster on a Kindle Paperwhite. I learned this the hard way when my first ebook’s chapters merged into one endless block.
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