Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, KDP, is where most self-published authors sell their first book, and for good reason: it is free to use, it reaches the largest book-buying audience in the world, and it prints paperbacks on demand so you never buy stock. This guide walks the whole process as it works in 2026, in order, and is honest about the two or three steps where people actually get stuck.
What KDP is, and what it is not
KDP is a storefront and a print shop. You give Amazon your finished files and your book details, Amazon lists the book and, for paperbacks and hardcovers, prints a copy each time someone orders one. What KDP is not is an editor, a designer, or a formatter. It will happily publish a manuscript with the wrong margins or a cover with the title spelled wrong. Everything that makes a book look professional happens before you ever open the KDP dashboard, which is why the real work is in the preparation, not the upload.
You keep your rights. KDP is non-exclusive unless you opt into Kindle Select, and even then the exclusivity applies only to the ebook. Your name is the author and, unless you choose otherwise, the publisher of record too.
Before you start: what you need
Have these four things ready before you create a title, because KDP asks for all of them in one sitting and a half-finished draft cannot be saved as a live listing:
- A finished, proofread manuscript. Not a good-enough draft. The store copy is the copy readers review.
- An interior file formatted for your format. For paperback that means a print-ready PDF with correct trim size and margins. For Kindle it means a reflowable file such as EPUB.
- A cover. Kindle needs a front cover image; paperback needs a full wraparound cover (front, spine and back) sized to your exact page count.
- Your book details: title, subtitle, author name, description, categories and keywords.
If any of that sounds like a lot, it is, and later in this guide is a short section on how Pressborn produces the interior file, the cover and the store-ready package for you so the KDP steps become mostly clicking.
Step 1: Create your KDP account
Go to kdp.amazon.com and sign in with an Amazon account, or make one. The part people skip and later regret is the tax and banking section. KDP will not pay you until your tax interview is complete and a bank account is on file, so do it now while you are thinking about it, not the week your book goes live.
Step 2: Start a new title and enter your book details
From the Bookshelf, choose to create a Kindle ebook or a paperback. You can do both for the same book, and most authors do, but each is set up as its own listing. KDP then asks for your metadata, and this is worth slowing down for because it is what makes your book findable:
- Title and subtitle: exactly as they appear on the cover. A mismatch can hold up review.
- Author name: the name you publish under. Once the book is live this is hard to change, so decide on your pen name now.
- Description: the back-cover blurb. This is sales copy, not a summary. It is the second thing a browsing reader reads after the cover.
- Categories and keywords: how readers and Amazon's search find your book. Choose categories that genuinely fit and keyword phrases a real reader would type.
Getting the description and keywords right is its own craft. Pressborn can draft a blurb and suggest categories and keyword phrases from an analysis of your actual manuscript rather than from guesswork, which is a better starting point than a blank box.
Step 3: Upload your manuscript file
This is the step that bounces most first-timers, and the reason is almost always formatting. A Kindle ebook is reflowable: the reader can change the font and text size, so there are no fixed pages, and you upload a file such as EPUB. A paperback is fixed: every page is a precise size with precise margins, and you upload a print-ready PDF. Use the wrong kind of file for the format and KDP either rejects it or, worse, accepts something that looks wrong in the printed proof.
Trim size, margins, the inside gutter margin that grows with page count, and bleed are all real rules with real numbers, and getting one wrong is the difference between a clean proof and text running into the spine. We cover every one of them in our guide to formatting a manuscript for KDP and print . Upload your file, then always use the online previewer to check every page before moving on.
Step 4: Add your cover
KDP gives you two options: upload a finished cover, or build one in its Cover Creator tool. Cover Creator is fine for a placeholder and obvious for a real book, because the templates are recognisable and a recognisable template signals self-published to a browsing reader. A custom cover is the single highest-leverage thing you can do for sales, because the cover is what a reader sees first and at thumbnail size.
One trap specific to AI-generated covers: image models draw letter-shapes, not text, so an AI cover often arrives with the title subtly or badly misspelled. There is a clean way around that, which is to keep the model to the artwork and set the title as real type on top. We explain the whole approach in our piece on AI cover design and correctly spelled titles .
Step 5: Choose your formats and handle the ISBN
For a Kindle ebook you do not need an ISBN at all; Amazon identifies it with an ASIN. For a paperback KDP will assign a free KDP-branded ISBN, or you can supply your own. If you plan to sell the same print book through other stores as well, the ISBN question gets more involved, and buying the wrong thing wastes real money. Our ISBN guide lays out exactly when an ISBN is free, when you must buy one, and what the free option quietly costs you.
Step 6: Set your price, and understand the two royalty options
KDP pays you a percentage of your list price, and the percentage depends on how you price. For Kindle ebooks there are two bands, and the numbers changed in 2026:
- 70 percent, if you price the ebook between $2.99 and $12.99 on Amazon.com. Amazon raised the top of that band from $9.99 to $12.99 on 7 July 2026, the first change to it since KDP launched. A small per-megabyte delivery fee is subtracted from each 70 percent sale.
- 35 percent, if you price below $2.99 or above $12.99.
For print, Amazon pays 60 percent of the list price minus the printing cost when a paperback is priced at $9.99 or above on Amazon.com, and 50 percent minus printing below that. The printing cost depends on page count and ink, so a longer book has a higher floor price. Amazon shows you the printing cost and your earnings as you set the price, so you are never guessing. These bands move from time to time, so confirm the current figures on KDP's own pricing page before you commit.
Step 7: Preview, publish, and what happens next
Run the online previewer one more time, front to back. Check the copyright page, the chapter breaks, and the very first and very last pages, which are where formatting problems hide. When you publish, KDP reviews the book, usually within 72 hours. The ebook typically goes live first; the paperback follows once its files pass review. Order a printed proof of the paperback and hold it in your hands before you tell anyone the book is out, because a proof shows you things a screen never will.
Where Pressborn fits into this
Every hard step above is a file problem. The manuscript has to be formatted to KDP's exact print rules or a reflowable ebook file. The cover has to be sized to the page count with a correctly typeset title. The description, categories and keywords have to be written. Pressborn is built to do exactly that part:
- It runs three AI editing passes on your manuscript, developmental, line and copy, and lets you accept, edit or dismiss each suggestion one at a time so nothing changes without your say-so.
- It generates cover concepts where the artwork comes from an image model and the title and author name are set as real type by us, so the spelling is always right.
- It builds a store-ready package for KDP: the interior PDF, the cover, the metadata and an EPUB, made to KDP's requirements. It builds the same for IngramSpark, Draft2Digital, Apple Books, Kobo and Google Play Books.
One thing Pressborn deliberately does not do is upload the book to Amazon for you. It builds the files and tells you where each one goes; you upload them through your own KDP account. That is on purpose, so the account holding your book, your bank details and your sales is yours and never ours.
The KDP dashboard is not the hard part. Arriving at it with clean files is. If you want to see how much of that Pressborn can take off your plate, start with how it works or read the honest cost breakdown first.