Two-column ingredient lists. Full-bleed food photography at 300 DPI. Metric and imperial side-by-side. Recipe-card layouts that look like a real cookbook — not a Word document with photos pasted in.
Drop your manuscript and we run the same 30+ checks Amazon does, line by line, in under a minute. You get a clear /100 score, every failure point flagged, and the exact fix for each one. Whether you book us, do it yourself, or hire someone else — running this first means you don't pay for a service you didn't need.
"Will my cookbook pass KDP review?"
Accepts .docx, .pdf, .epub · up to 200 MB · files never stored, deleted after 24h
Run the KDP Readiness Score →The format choice that matters most. We can deviate if your project needs it — but here's the working benchmark.
Acceptable alternatives: 8×10 in or 7×10 in · all are KDP-approved trim sizes
Square 8.5×8.5 is the modern cookbook trim — Nigel Slater, Ottolenghi, Half Baked Harvest all use a square or near-square format. It gives a 4:3 photo a generous home, makes two-column ingredient lists readable, and shelves alongside trad cookbooks without looking self-published.
Cookbooks are image-heavy — every photo is checked at 300 DPI, sRGB-for-EPUB, CMYK-soft-proofed for print. This is the £179 Complete Package work.
The six things that make cookbook formatting different from generic novel formatting.
Metric left, imperial right (or US cups left, metric right). Aligned to the baseline grid so quantities line up cleanly. Reflowable variants for Kindle that don't break in mid-recipe.
300 DPI minimum, CMYK-aware soft proof, 0.125-inch bleed on every full-page image. We pre-flight every photo against KDP's print profile — not just "is it 300 DPI".
Title, sub-title, yield, prep time, cook time, difficulty, ingredients, method, notes — every recipe consistent. Either a fixed grid or a flexible card master, your call.
Step 1, 2, 3 — set as semantic ordered lists, not manual numbers. Survives every Kindle reflow, accessibility-checks clean, and CTRL+F still finds "step 4".
Section openers (Breakfasts, Mains, Puddings) get a full-bleed photo plate. Print uses the photo at full saturation, EPUB uses a compressed sRGB version.
Hyperlinked index by ingredient and by recipe name. Print version uses real page numbers; EPUB version uses anchor links. Both built from the same source list.
Whatever the book type, this is what every order includes.
KDP-compliant margins, mirrored gutters scaled to your page count, 0.125-inch bleed where needed, embedded fonts, 300 DPI image pre-flight, semantic page-break logic.
Optimised for every Kindle device including phone reading. Clean chapter recognition, working drop caps, scene-break ornaments, properly-linked TOC, semantic ordered/unordered lists.
Spine width auto-calculated from your final page count. Cover supplied to KDP-template spec for paperback, hardback or both. Full-bleed art tested against KDP's print profile.
Side-by-side viewer to comment on specific pages. Most books need none; complex non-fiction sometimes needs both. Additional rounds £19 each.
If KDP rejects your file for a formatting reason, we fix it free. We've never had a rejection — but the guarantee is the principle.
You send a Word file (or PDF, Google Docs, RTF, ODT, EPUB, plain text). We send back finished files. No software to install, no learning curve.
From £69 for print-ready PDF. £119 for print + Kindle. Picture-book and complete packages from £179.
Order your formatting → ← All book types