When you’re all done formatting to your manuscript to be uploaded at Kindle Direct Publishing, save the document as a PDF. As a PDF essentially is a series of “pictures” of how the designed pages look, this marks the best way to ensure that KindleDP doesn’t mess up your formatting as processing what you’ve uploaded.

Before saving the document, you’ll want to delete the first blank page that you inserted before the title page. That page was a placeholder so while formatting the page numbers you could ensure the even numbers went on the left side of the book and that the odd on the right. Once you remove the blank page, the odd numbered pages suddenly will appear on the left. Don’t worry about this, however, as KindleDP will consider the inside front cover of your book as your uploaded document’s first page and restore the page numbers to their correct order.

One problem to check for is the insertion of a blank page after every section break. You’ll recall that we used section breaks to automate page numbering. Some apps make this error when converting a Microsoft Word document to a PDF. The result is that after the section break, you’ll have an extra page so odd numbered pages will wrongly appear on the left side of the manuscript and even numbered pages on the the right side when uploaded to KindleDP. The simple solution is to delete this blank page by modifying the PDF in an advanced version of Adobe Acrobat. Of course, Adobe Acrobat requires a subscription, but usually you can get a free trial so you can take care of the extra blank page, cancel, and move on.

Once the document is saved as a PDF and the section breaks are removed, you’re ready to upload it to KindleDP.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 300 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.