Line breaks the poet wrote, not the layout engine's reflow. Generous white space. Sectional dividers. Concrete poetry handled as image plates where it has to be. We format poetry the way Faber and Bloodaxe do — not the way Word defaults.
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 poetry collection 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: 5.5×8.5 in or 5×8 in · all are KDP-approved trim sizes
5.25×8 is the modern poetry trim — slim, tall-feeling, gives long lines room to breathe before wrapping. Matches the shelf-look of Faber, Picador and Penguin Modern Poets. If your lines run very long we'll move you up to 5.5×8.5.
Poetry is text-led but concrete / shaped pieces are treated as 300 DPI plates.
The six things that make poetry collection formatting different from generic novel formatting.
Every line break is the poet's, not Kindle's. We use non-breaking line-end markers so a 7-syllable line never wraps onto two visual lines on a Paperwhite — and we test on the smallest screen.
When a line MUST wrap (Kindle on a phone), the continuation gets a deeper indent so the reader can see it's the same line. Trad poetry-press convention.
Generous leading, ample top-and-bottom margin, single-poem-per-page where the poem demands it. White space treated as part of the work.
Roman-numeral or named sections separated by a half-title page and a recto-opening section page. The bone-structure of a real collection.
Visual or shaped poems set as 300 DPI image plates where reflow would destroy the work. Kindle gets a fixed-layout fallback for those specific pages.
Magazine-credits page, permissions log for any quoted or epigraph material, copyright phrasing that matches trad poetry-press style.
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