Amazon Ebook Creator Checklist: What KDP Actually Requires

Most of what gets written about publishing an ebook on Amazon is either outdated, imprecise, or quietly wrong about a specific number — a cover-dimension figure copied from a five-year-old blog post, a royalty price band that changed and nobody updated, a keyword count that's been repeated so often nobody checked it against Amazon's own page. That's a real problem, because Kindle Direct Publishing enforces its requirements mechanically: a cover that's a few hundred pixels short of spec gets flagged at upload, a description with an unsupported HTML tag gets stripped or rejected, a price outside the eligible band for 70% royalty quietly defaults you to 35% without necessarily telling you why. None of this is arbitrary gatekeeping — it's a checklist, and every item on it is checkable in advance. This is that checklist, drawn directly from KDP's own current help pages rather than secondhand summaries, for anyone using an AI ebook creator or any other tool to get a manuscript from finished draft to a KDP-ready upload.

One thing worth saying plainly before the checklist itself: nothing here replaces KDP's own upload flow, and nothing on this list is optional because a tool "handles it for you." Formatting, metadata, and pricing decisions still have to pass through Amazon's own dashboard, at the time you actually publish, against whatever KDP's requirements are on that day. This is what to have ready before you get there.

The file format KDP will actually accept

Start here, because it's the one requirement that can quietly invalidate everything else if it's wrong. As of March 18, 2025, Amazon stopped accepting MOBI files for new uploads and revisions entirely — a format change some older guides still don't reflect. For a reflowable ebook (the normal case for most fiction and nonfiction), KDP currently accepts EPUB (2.0 or 3.0), DOCX (Microsoft Word), or KPF, the Kindle Package Format produced by Amazon's own free Kindle Create tool. For a fixed-layout ebook — picture books, heavily designed nonfiction, comics — the accepted formats narrow to EPUB or KPF only.

Kindle Create is worth naming specifically because it's the path KDP itself recommends for most authors: it imports a Word document or existing manuscript, lets you set up a table of contents, chapter breaks, and basic styling, and exports directly to KPF or EPUB in a shape KDP already knows how to process cleanly. A manuscript that already exists as a clean DOCX file doesn't strictly need conversion — DOCX uploads directly — but running it through Kindle Create first tends to catch formatting problems (stray page breaks, inconsistent heading styles, orphaned images) before they turn into a rejected upload rather than after.

If you've already published under the old MOBI-based workflow, nothing about your existing catalog needs to change — KDP is explicit that the requirement applies to new uploads and revisions, not retroactively to books already live. But the moment you touch that file again for an update, it needs to go up in one of the currently accepted formats.

Metadata: title, subtitle, series, and author info

Metadata is the least glamorous part of publishing and the part most likely to get a listing quietly suppressed or corrected by Amazon after the fact, because it's the part KDP checks against its own content guidelines rather than against a technical spec. Getting it right the first time avoids a support ticket later.

Title and subtitle

Your title field should contain exactly what's printed on your actual cover — nothing added, nothing promotional. KDP's own metadata guidelines for books explicitly prohibit stuffing the title or subtitle field with generic search terms unrelated to the book itself, promotional language like "free" or "bestselling," unauthorized trademark references, placeholder text, or HTML tags of any kind. Title and subtitle combined need to stay under 200 characters. This isn't a suggestion enforced by embarrassment alone — Amazon reserves the right to edit or reject metadata that violates it, and a corrected title you didn't choose is a worse outcome than a shorter one you did.

A hypothetical example: an author publishing a 60,000-word guide to freelance contract negotiation might be tempted to title it "Freelance Contracts: The #1 Bestselling Guide (FREE Bonus Templates!)." Every bracketed claim in that title is exactly the kind of thing KDP's guidelines target — the promotional language, the unverifiable "#1 bestselling" claim, and the pricing reference ("FREE") all need to come out, leaving something like "Freelance Contracts: A Practical Guide to Negotiating Better Terms" as the actual title, with anything about bonus templates moved into the description instead.

Series information

If the book is part of a series, the series name follows the same title rules — no promotional stuffing — and the series number needs to be a plain digit rather than spelled out or embedded in the title itself ("3," not "Book Three" baked into the title field). Getting series metadata right is what lets Amazon group your books together on a series page instead of scattering them as unrelated standalone listings.

Author name and bio

You're allowed to publish under a pen name rather than your legal name, and plenty of authors do. The one constraint is that it can't be constructed in a way that impairs a reader's purchasing decision — using a name identical or confusingly close to an established, unrelated author's name is the kind of thing that gets flagged. HTML tags aren't permitted in the author name field, and for translated or adapted works, both the original author and the translator need to be credited in the correct contributor fields rather than folded together into one name.

Categories: the three shelves your book gets placed on

Every KDP book gets placed into up to three browse categories — Amazon's own category tree, the digital equivalent of which physical shelf a bookstore would put your title on. The goal isn't to grab the three biggest categories you can technically qualify for; it's to land on shelves where the readers browsing them are actually the readers your book is for. A category that's technically accurate but too broad (general "Nonfiction") buries your book in noise it can't compete in; a category that's too narrow may not have enough active browsers to matter.

The requirement that actually gets enforced, though, isn't about strategy — it's about accuracy. KDP's own categories help page is explicit that it does not tolerate categorization that misleads readers, and that an inaccurate category selection can be corrected by Amazon on its own, without your input, "to ensure a positive customer experience." If your book contains sexually explicit content, it's automatically excluded from children's categories regardless of what you select. Practically, that means the categorization exercise is really a research exercise: look at what real, comparable books are actually shelved under before picking, rather than guessing at what sounds impressive.

Keywords: seven chances to be found, not seven ways to repeat yourself

Separate from categories, KDP's own help page on adding keywords confirms you can enter up to seven search keywords per book — short phrases meant to surface your book when a reader searches for something specific that your chosen categories don't already cover. Amazon's own guidance on this is more useful than it sounds at first: the example it gives is a book called "America's National Parks," where a keyword like "Yellowstone" or "Grand Teton" does real work, while a keyword like "Parks" — a word already effectively covered by the title and category — wastes a slot on something too generic to differentiate the search.

The practical takeaway is that seven slots are seven distinct opportunities, not seven variations on the same idea. A keyword that repeats a word already in your title or category tells Amazon's search index nothing new. A keyword specific enough to describe a subgenre, an audience, a setting, or a real search behavior a reader would actually type — not a marketing phrase — is what earns its slot. This is also one of the places an AI book writer tool with a real publishing-prep feature can save meaningful research time: generating a first pass of keyword candidates grounded in your actual manuscript content, rather than staring at seven empty boxes and guessing.

The book description: what you can say and how you can format it

Your book's description field is capped at 4,000 characters, and KDP supports a specific, limited set of HTML tags for formatting it — not a free-for-all. The currently supported tags are bold and italic tags, an underline tag, header tags for a few heading sizes, a line-break tag, a paragraph tag, and numbered- and bulleted-list tags. Formatting outside that set generally won't render the way you intend, and can trigger an error on upload.

More important than the formatting tags are the content restrictions, because these are the ones that get a description rejected rather than just poorly rendered. KDP's guidelines prohibit including phone numbers, physical mailing addresses, email addresses, or website URLs in the description field; reviews, quotes, or testimonials (even genuine ones); advertisements; spoilers; time-sensitive information (a launch-week promotion date, for instance); requests for customer reviews; and Unicode emoji characters. Amazon's own writing guidance also nudges toward brevity over exhaustiveness — a tight, scannable description that gives a reader a clear reason to buy tends to outperform one that tries to summarize the entire book. A hypothetical description that opens with "★★★★★ 'Life-changing!' — a reader" and closes with "Visit www.example.com and please leave a review!" breaks two separate rules in two sentences; both would need to come out before the listing would pass review.

Cover requirements: dimensions, resolution, and the content rules that actually get enforced

The cover is the one part of this checklist most authors already know has technical requirements — but the specific numbers matter, and they're stricter than "big enough to look fine on a phone screen."

Pixel dimensions and resolution

KDP's own cover image guidelines recommend a cover size of 2,560 pixels on the height side by 1,600 pixels on the width side — an aspect ratio of 1.6:1. If your uploaded image falls short of that recommendation, KDP shows a reminder at upload time rather than blocking it outright, but there's a harder floor beneath that: a cover with fewer than 500 pixels on its shortest side won't display properly on Amazon's site at all. Beyond pixel count, KDP asks for a minimum resolution of 300 DPI, a file size of 5MB or under, JPEG as the preferred file format, and RGB rather than CMYK as the color profile — a common mismatch for anyone whose cover was originally designed for print. If your source image is smaller than the recommended size, Amazon's own guidance is to create a new image at the correct dimensions rather than stretch the existing one, since stretching visibly degrades quality at the sizes Amazon displays covers.

What can't be on the cover art itself

Beyond the technical spec, the content rules apply directly to the pixels of the cover image, not just the metadata around it. KDP's guidelines are explicit that cover art must not mention pricing or other temporary promotional offers — a "FREE" banner or a limited-time discount baked into the cover art itself is against the rules, separate from and in addition to the same restriction already covered under title metadata above. The cover also can't infringe another publisher's or artist's copyright, needs to include your actual title and author name legibly, and shouldn't include spine, barcode, or back-cover elements meant for a print edition bleeding into what's supposed to be a standalone digital cover.

Pricing and royalties: the 35% vs. 70% decision

KDP offers two royalty structures for ebooks, and which one applies to a given sale depends on price, territory, and content type together — not a single toggle you set once and forget.

The 35% option

The 35% royalty option is the broadest one: it's available at essentially any list price and in every KDP marketplace, with no delivery cost deducted from your royalty. Amazon does still enforce marketplace-specific minimum list prices tied to file size — on Amazon.com, that floor is $0.99 for files under 3MB, $1.99 for files between 3 and 10MB, and $2.99 for anything 10MB or larger. Public domain works, or books that consist primarily of public domain content, are only eligible for the 35% option, regardless of price — the 70% tier is reserved for works that are substantially original or add meaningful original value to a public-domain base.

The 70% option and its price band

The 70% royalty option pays more per sale but comes with real constraints: your book needs to be priced within a specific band, sold to a customer in one of the territories Amazon designates as 70%-eligible on its eBook Royalties help page (you don't need to reside there yourself — it's about where the buyer is), and be an in-copyright, non-public-domain work. As of a July 7, 2026 update, the eligible price band on Amazon.com widened to $2.99–$12.99 — up from the $2.99–$9.99 ceiling that had been in place since 2007 — giving authors real room to price above $9.99 without dropping to the lower royalty tier for the first time in nearly two decades. Outside the eligible territories, a sale at any price defaults to the 35% rate even if the book is otherwise 70%-eligible. At 70%, Amazon also deducts a delivery cost from your royalty based on the book's file size — averaging around $0.06 per unit sold on typical text-only files, though it scales up for image-heavy books and varies somewhat by marketplace.

The practical decision usually comes down to where your price actually falls: a $4.99 novel sold mostly in eligible territories almost always nets more at 70% even after the delivery deduction, while a $0.99 short work or a public-domain-based title has no 70% option available regardless of preference.

Content policy: what actually gets a book rejected or removed

Beyond format, metadata, and pricing, KDP's content guidelines are the layer that determines whether a technically valid upload is allowed to stay published at all. The prohibited categories are broad and mostly what you'd expect — content that constitutes hate speech, sexually exploits children, contains pornography, glorifies terrorism, or is otherwise determined to be illegal or clearly inappropriate for a general retail catalog. Two narrower rules are worth knowing specifically because they're easier to violate by accident than the obvious ones:

Copyright and rights: you need to actually hold the publishing rights to everything in the manuscript, cover, and any included material. Reproducing substantial portions of someone else's copyrighted work without authorization — including using it as the near-entirety of a "study guide" or "companion" book without permission — is grounds for rejection or removal regardless of how it's framed. Content in the public domain is publishable, but Amazon expects genuinely added value beyond a plain reproduction of a text that's already freely available elsewhere in its own store.

Duplicate content: publishing the same content across multiple listings — the same manuscript reissued under a new title and cover with no meaningful change — isn't allowed. KDP defines this as excessive content reuse that would create a poor shopping or reading experience for anyone who bought one and encounters the other. Legitimate collections and numbered series are the explicit exception, since a boxed set genuinely built from books you've already published is a different product from republishing the same book twice under different names.

One more content-policy item worth knowing if you're using any AI tool for part of the writing process: KDP requires publishers to disclose AI-generated content — text, images, or translations produced by an AI tool, including AI output that was then edited — through a dedicated disclosure at the point of publishing. The distinction Amazon draws is between AI-generated content and AI-assisted content: a book you wrote yourself and used an AI tool to help edit, research, or refine doesn't require the same disclosure as a book where the AI tool produced the underlying text. Where your manuscript actually falls on that line is a judgment call worth making honestly before you publish, not something to guess at during the upload flow itself.

A pre-submission checklist

Everything above compressed into a single pass, in the order KDP's own upload flow tends to ask for it:

• Manuscript file is EPUB, DOCX, or KPF (from Kindle Create) — not MOBI, which KDP stopped accepting for uploads and revisions as of March 18, 2025.
• Title and subtitle match your actual cover exactly, contain no promotional language or unrelated keywords, and stay under 200 combined characters.
• Series name and number (if applicable) follow the same rules, with the number entered as a plain digit.
• Author name field uses either your real name or a pen name that doesn't resemble an established author's name closely enough to mislead a buyer.
• Up to three browse categories selected based on where comparable books actually sit, not the broadest or most impressive-sounding option available.
• All seven keyword slots used, each one a distinct, specific phrase — none duplicating a word already in your title or a category, none a single generic term.
• Description is under 4,000 characters, uses only supported HTML tags, and contains no contact information, quotes, reviews, ads, emojis, or time-sensitive claims.
• Cover image is at or above 2,560 × 1,600 pixels, at least 300 DPI, under 5MB, JPEG, RGB — and carries no pricing, "free," or promotional text anywhere in the art itself.
• Royalty option chosen deliberately: 35% for anything outside the 70% price band or eligible territories, or for public-domain-based work; 70% only where price, territory, and content type all qualify.
• Rights confirmed for every piece of content in the manuscript and cover, no excessive reuse of content already published elsewhere in your own catalog, and an honest answer settled on the AI-content disclosure question before you upload.

What an AI ebook creator can (and can't) do with this checklist

This is a genuinely reasonable place for an AI ebook generator to help, and worth being precise about exactly how far that help goes. On eBookable, the Amazon KDP assistant — available on the Elite and Ultra plans — can generate a first draft of your book's KDP-facing metadata and keyword candidates grounded in what your manuscript actually says: a description shaped to fit KDP's character limit and supported formatting, and a set of keyword suggestions built from your book's real content and genre rather than generic guesses. That's a genuine head start on two of the more tedious items in the checklist above, not a gimmick — turning a blank description box and seven empty keyword fields into an informed starting point you edit rather than write from nothing.

What it doesn't do is publish anything on your behalf. Every item on this checklist still has to be reviewed, adjusted where your judgment differs from the draft, and submitted through KDP's own dashboard by you — the account holder, with the rights and the responsibility that requires. No AI tool, eBookable included, uploads a file to Amazon, selects your categories, sets your price, or clicks publish for you, and no honest one would claim to. What a good tool can do is make sure that by the time you sit down at that dashboard, the parts of the process that are genuinely mechanical — matching a description to a character limit, drafting keyword candidates worth considering, formatting a cover to spec — are already mostly done, so the time you spend in KDP's own flow is spent on the judgment calls that actually need a human, not on rediscovering requirements a checklist like this one already answers.