How to prepare your book for print-on-demand
Two PDFs: pages inside, jacket outside. Same trim. Colour and bleed are on each plant’s spec; this site builds the file.
Print-on-demand means you do not throw a thousand copies into a warehouse: each time someone buys, one copy prints. Amazon KDP, IngramSpark, and a local shop agree on the core: an interior PDF at trim size, fonts embedded, sharp images (about 300 DPI at print size), and a cover PDF that includes the spine. The detail — RGB or CMYK, bleed or not, signature of 4 or 16 — is written on each spec sheet. Do not guess it from a Facebook thread.
What you bring picks the path. Word manuscript: Path A. Already-paginated design (Canva, comic, coloring book): Path B. Album or photobook from loose images: Path C. Jacket only: Path D, once you know the interior’s pages, paper, and trim. Interior and cover are not one file. Mixing them is the mistake of designing “the whole book” as one long poster.
In specifications you pick trim and paper. You tick bleed if art hits the edge (the PDF then carries an extra 0.125 inches). You generate a preview. The inside margin grows with page count, as Amazon asks, and respects Ingram’s safety. Spine width is pages × paper. If the signature must close, you see that after preview, not before. Those extra pages can stay blank or carry images on the odd sides.
You pay 19 USD per interior download session (or for the jacket, on D). RGB for Amazon if that is your case; the CMYK they named if it is Ingram or offset. Do not close the tab. The free sample is about 5 watermarked pages, to decide fonts and trim, not to upload to KDP.
Read your plant’s spec sheet slowly (size, colour, bleed). Then do exactly that on the matching path. You do not need a typesetter’s trade. You need the file they know how to print.
