Source manuscript
Freeze the edited manuscript and preserve a dated source copy. Confirm title, subtitle, author, contributors, publisher, copyright year, edition, ISBNs, and language. Apply real heading styles to chapters and subsections; replace fake indents, repeated spaces, and stacks of blank paragraphs with structural formatting.
Inventory every non-body element: scene breaks, block quotations, verse, lists, footnotes, endnotes, tables, figures, captions, and images. Confirm permissions and alternative text. If an import report inferred chapter boundaries or simplified an unsupported feature, review each decision before designing pages.
Print design
Lock trim, paper, binding, and bleed behavior. Choose body type for extended reading, then judge type size, leading, line length, paragraph treatment, and margins together. Apply a repeatable system for title pages, chapter openings, subheads, extracts, notes, figures, and closing pages.
Inspect spreads for widows, orphans, stranded headings, short last lines, excessive hyphenation, rivers, and visibly loose or tight pages. Remove running heads from display pages, verify odd/even placement, and make sure visible folios agree with contents and references.
Print PDF
Export single pages at the exact trim size, not reader spreads. Confirm fonts are embedded, black text reproduces cleanly, and each image has adequate effective resolution. Bleed pages need the correct enlarged page dimensions and artwork extending beyond trim; non-bleed pages should not acquire accidental crop marks or surrounding white space.
Open the final PDF independently. Check the reported page size and total page count, scan thumbnails for unexpected blanks or jumps, search for replacement glyphs, and inspect the first and last page of every section. Use the final page count for the cover spine and repeat the cover preflight after any interior change.
EPUB
Confirm logical reading order, semantic headings, language, title and author metadata, navigation, cover image, and useful image descriptions. Remove print-only headers, folios, crop behavior, and hard-coded line breaks. Test contents links, footnote links and back links, external links, lists, verse, and images.
Validate with EPUBCheck and resolve errors. Preview in at least two reading environments, with small and large text, light and dark themes, and a narrow mobile screen. A technically valid EPUB can still be difficult to read, so validation and human reading are separate checks.
Final proof and release
Read a physical print proof in normal conditions. Check gutter comfort, show-through, type size, contrast, image quality, line breaks, chapter rhythm, and the relationship between left and right pages. Correct the source, regenerate every affected file, and record the final versions rather than patching an exported PDF in isolation.
Archive the source manuscript, formatting settings, fonts and licenses, PDF, EPUB, validation report, cover, platform templates, and proof date. Recheck the retailer's live rules at upload because file specifications can change after a guide was published.
Sources: Amazon KDP: Format Your eBook · Amazon KDP: Paperback submission guidelines · W3C EPUBCheck. Reviewed ; recheck current platform requirements before production.