From Canva or an art PDF to press
If you already paginated the book in Canva, do not pour it into Word. Path B keeps the design and fits trim, bleed, and spine.
Many authors design the interior in Canva (or export a PDF from InDesign, Illustrator, Procreate). Each page is already a drawing. Amazon then trims the edge, rejects the size, or Kindle Create does not know what to do with bleed art. Internet advice is often “export again at 6×9 with bleed in Canva.” Sometimes that works. Sometimes spine, colour, and embedded fonts are still wrong. I do not redraw the art: I take it to Path B.
Path B wants an interior PDF, without the jacket mixed in. Upload a short test PDF first; the site answers faster while you set trim and paper. Under Specifications you pick the same trim you will set on KDP or Ingram, the paper, and whether there is bleed. The site re-frames each page to the mold: it does not invent a chapter, it does not change the illustration. If the art already lived in the PDF, it stays. If the Canva pages were blank so images could be added later, you can upload JPG or PNG at 300 DPI and the workshop places them (sharper than a Canva file squeezed on purpose).
Kindle Create, Amazon says, is not meant for paperbacks with images that hit the trim. If even one page needs bleed, the whole interior is treated with bleed. The extra is 0.125 inches. Path B is that road: picture book, coloring book, already-paginated comic, a cookbook drawn page by page.
Colour: on screen everything is RGB. Amazon KDP often wants the interior that way. Ingram and many offset plants name a CMYK (GRACoL, FOGRA, SWOP, Japan Color). In the paid session you download RGB and the code they asked for, without closing the tab. Fonts are embedded in the Path B PDF; an operating-system “print to PDF” sometimes leaves them out, and Ingram rejects that.
The cover does not ride along as extra Canva pages. Interior and jacket are two files. When the page count is real (with a signature of 4, or 16 if that applies), Path D builds one PDF: back, spine, front. Spine width comes from those pages and that paper, not from Canva’s “Book cover” template.
Do it in the factory
