Free KDP Tools

KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) is Amazon’s self-publishing service. You upload your book and set the price, and Amazon sells it as a Kindle ebook, and prints paperbacks and hardcovers on demand and ships them to customers. You keep the rights to your book.

Yes. There’s no fee to join or to publish. Amazon is paid from each sale instead: you earn up to 70% on ebooks and up to 60% on print books, and the printing cost comes out of print royalties. Proof and author copies cost the print cost plus shipping.

Not for a Kindle ebook: KDP says an ISBN is optional for ebooks. Each paperback and hardcover needs its own. You can use a free ISBN from KDP, which only works on KDP and lists “Independently published” as the imprint, or buy your own.

Monthly. Once you reach the payment threshold, KDP pays about 60 days after the end of the month the sale was reported (about 90 days for Expanded Distribution). Ebooks earn a 35% or 70% royalty, print books 50% or 60% of the list price minus printing, and Kindle Unlimited page reads are paid from a monthly fund.

For Kindle ebooks, KDP recommends Word (DOC or DOCX), Kindle Create (KPF) and EPUB, and also accepts HTML, RTF, plain text and PDF (PDF in some languages only).

For paperbacks, upload a PDF interior. If the book has no bleed you can also upload DOC, DOCX, RTF, HTML or TXT, which KDP turns into a PDF. The cover is a PDF, or you can make one with KDP’s Cover Creator.

Yes, if any content is AI-generated. KDP asks you to tell it about AI-generated text, images or translations when you publish or republish a book, even if you edited them a lot afterwards. If you wrote it yourself and used AI only to edit, refine or check it, that’s AI-assisted and you don’t have to say so. A book written with Koobe counts as AI-generated.