Basic HTML Formatting Guidelines

This help page is a basic introduction to modifying your title in HTML. Once you've converted your
content and uploaded your book using Kindle Direct Publishing, you may want to make changes. If
you have basic HTML knowledge, you can modify the converted HTML file to refine your formatting
and layout. We recommend that you proceed only if familiar with using HTML tags.

KDP compresses your converted content into a .zip file which contains an HTML file of your text
content, as well as any included images. You can download the .zip file, edit the HTML file, then re-
zip and re-upload the content. Make sure all your content (including images) is in a single folder in the
zip file, without any sub-folders.

Steps to export HTML from KDP

1. From the Bookshelf, click the "Actions" drop-down menu next to the title you wish to modify.
2. Select 'Edit book details' in the menu.
3. Scroll down to the Book Content section and click 'Preview Book.'
4. Click 'Download HTML.'
5. Choose a location on your hard drive to which to save the .zip file, then click 'Save.'
6. Unzip the .ZIP file
7. Navigate to the location where you saved the downloaded .zip file above.
8. Open the .zip file and save your HTML file to your hard drive.
9. Open and edit the HTML file with the HTML editor of your choice (e.g., Notepad).
10. Continue to Text Guidelines.

Text Guidelines
Text guideline #1: normal text The “normal” text in a Kindle book must be “all defaults”. We
encourage content creators to use creative styles for headings, special paragraphs, footnotes, tables
of contents and so on but not “normal” text. The reason is that any styling on “normal” text in the
HTML would override the user‟s preferred default reading settings. Users tend to report such behavior
as a poor experience. Here are the most important points:
“Normal” text must not have a forced alignment (left aligned or justified). “Normal” text must use the
default font family. The font face=”…” tag is ignored on the Kindle platform but even so, make sure it
is not used on “normal” text. The same applies to the CSSfont-family style. “Normal” text must use the
default font size. The 'font size=”…”' tag or its equivalent in CSS should not be used in “normal” text.
“Normal” text should not be bold or italicized. Selected parts can of course use such styling. This
guidelines only prohibits book that would be entirely bold for example.
“Normal” text should not have an imposed font color or background color.

Text guideline #2: page breaks

Blank lines of text should not be inserted to create empty pages. Use the page break tag
'mbp:pagebreak/'. This is especially true for documents generated from Microsoft Word; you should
use the "Page Break" feature of Word.
Text guideline #3:paragraph formatting

The First line of every paragraph is automatically indented. This behavior can be changed using
thetext-indent style on the 'p' tag. For example:
o p style=”text-indent:0" - no indentation of the first line
o p style=”text-indent:10%" - positive indent, 10% of the width of the page
o p style=”text-indent:5em" - positive indent, 5 em
o p style=”text-indent:-10pt" - negative indent, 10 pt
o p style=”text-indent:-10" - negative indent, 10 pixels ; The space before each paragraph can be
changed using the “margin-top” style on tag p.
Background color cannot be set on text.
Borders cannot be added to paragraphs.

Raised Initial
To make the first letter in a paragraph larger than the text that follows, use the font tag with the "size"
attribute and specify a larger font size for the first letter.
For example: Once upon a time...
Margins
At this time, Amazon KDP doesn't support margins set inside CSS/HTML (such as topmargin,
leftmargin etc. set in px values). You can use the CSS margin attribute, but depending on your text
format, this might not translate properly. Note: You can set only the left, top, and bottom margins this
way, never the right margin.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) must be contained in a dedicated CSS file, which is separate from
your HTML content. Use a tag to link the CSS file to an HTML file.
For example:
head
link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="theme.css"
head
All HTML and CSS files must be compressed into a single .zip file before uploading.

Text guideline #4: no page numbers

Kindle books are reflowable and can be viewed with different font sizes, so page numbers do not
apply.
There should not be any reference to page numbers in the book. The cross references should not
have page numbers, nor should there be any plain text index with page numbers.

Image guidelines
Image guideline #1: supported input formats
The Kindle platform supports GIF, BMP, JPEG, PNG images in your content. Kindle does not support
vector graphics. You will have to convert your vector graphics into raster graphics using one of the
supported image formats.

If you are using images for schemas, charts, tables, maps or anything that includes text, you must pay
special attention to the legibility of the final image.
Images are added to the source using standard HTML
example code: < img src="image name.gif" />

Please visit our Image and Placement Guidelines for more information.

Image guideline #2: automatic image conversions

The Kindle file format internally supports JPEG and GIF images of up to 127KB in size. This is double
the previously-supported maximum of 63KB, and provides for richer nuances in images, particularly
for large images, or content with gradient patterns.

Image guideline #3: color

Use color images whenever possible and relevant. The Kindle reading device has a black & white
screen today but Kindle applications for other devices, such as iPhone or PC, take advantage of
colors.

Image guideline #4: photographs

Photographs should use the JPEG format with a quality factor of 40 or higher. Photographs should be
provided with the highest resolution available to you.

Photographs should not be too small. Please make sure your input photos are at least 600x800 pixels
in size, unless you optimize them yourself according to the previous guideline. Photographs of less
than 300x400 pixels are much too small and can be rejected.

If your photographs are in GIF format or are too small, simply converting them to JPEG or artificially
increasing their size will not improve their quality. You should go back to the original source to create
a JPEG image with sufficient resolution.

Steps to re-upload your HTML Book Content to KDP

1. Copy your edited HTML file back into the .zip file you downloaded above. Make sure all the images
and HTML files are in a single folder, without any content in sub-folders.
2. From the 'Bookshelf', select the 'Actions' drop-down menu next to the title you modified.
3. Select 'Edit book details' in the menu.
4. Scroll down to the Book Content section and click 'Browse for Book.'
5. Browse to the downloaded .zip file, which now contains your modified HTML file.
6. Click 'Upload Book.'
7. Click 'Save and Continue.'