Choose useful head content
Fiction commonly alternates author name and book title, or book title and chapter title. Nonfiction may alternate book or part title with the current chapter. Short heads should orient rather than repeat a long marketing subtitle. Keep type quieter than the body and consistent with the book's overall system.
An automatically generated head must update when the chapter changes. Proof the first ordinary page after every opener, plus pages around parts, appendices, notes, and back matter where the previous chapter title can leak into the wrong section.
Suppress furniture by page role
Title pages, copyright pages, chapter-opening pages, part openers, intentional blanks, and full-page images normally do not carry a running head. Visible folios may also be suppressed, although the page still counts in the PDF sequence. Encode the page role instead of deleting individual headers by hand.
A blank left page before a recto chapter should remain truly blank. A stray header or number makes the production decision look like an error and can expose an automated template that was not proofed.
Place and proof page numbers
Folios can sit at the outer top, outer bottom, or centered foot. Choose a position compatible with the margins, running heads, and chapter style. Front matter may use roman numerals and the main text arabic numerals, but every visible number must agree with the contents, index, notes, and cross-references.
KDP expects pagination to run in sequential order and treats even numbers as left pages and odd numbers as right pages. Inspect the actual exported PDF and do not confuse the reader-visible folio with a PDF viewer's zero-based or file-page label.
Remove print furniture from EPUB
A reflowable ebook has no stable physical page, so printed folios and running heads become noise. Preserve chapter headings and navigation landmarks, and let the reading system display its own location or page information.
If a scholarly ebook maps to a print edition, EPUB can encode page-list navigation, but visible repeated headers are still not the solution. Standard trade books usually need clean reflow and a reliable contents document rather than simulated pages.
Sources: Amazon KDP: Paperback submission guidelines · Amazon KDP: Format Your eBook · W3C: EPUB 3.3. Reviewed ; recheck current platform requirements before production.