Your exact paperback wrap size, spine width and a cover template cut to them — generated for your book, at all 16 standard KDP trim sizes. Free, no account.
The inch size is what you upload: KDP reads the PDF’s physical page size, and 12.9256 × 9.2500 in is the number that must match. The pixel canvas is only how large to make a raster document so it lands at 300 PPI — a PDF at the right physical size is correct whether or not it contains a 3878-pixel image.
Cut to the size above and marked with bleed, trim, the two spine folds, front, back, text-safe, spine-safe and the barcode reserve. Free, no account.
Guide only — remove or hide the guide layer before you export your final cover. KDP rejects covers with visible template marks.
A KDP cover template is one page at your book’s exact wrap size with the print geometry drawn on it. The one above is generated from the book you just described — the fold lines sit at your spine width, not at a stock guess — so what you lay out inside it is already the right shape.
The marks do not all ask the same thing. Artwork must run OUT past the trim, into the 0.125" bleed band on all four outer edges, or the cut leaves a white sliver. Text must stay IN: inside the 0.125" text-safe rectangle on each panel, and inside the spine band that keeps it 0.0625" clear of both folds — the cut wanders and the fold drifts, so anything closer risks being trimmed off or bent round the corner. Amazon’s 2 × 1.2" barcode reserve is the one area to keep text OFF; let your background run under it. The trim line and the two spine folds ask nothing — they mark where the book is cut and folded, so the rest makes sense. Below 80 pages the spine band is left off entirely, because Amazon does not print spine text on a book that thin.
The PDF places into InDesign, Affinity Publisher or Acrobat at the right physical size with no scaling step. The PNG is a 300 PPI raster for Photoshop and GIMP, or a background layer to trace over in a Canva design set to the inch figure above. The SVG stays vector in Illustrator, Inkscape and Figma, so the guides hold their hairline weight at any zoom. Same geometry in all three.
The template is a guide layer, not artwork — a white page with the guides stroked on it. Hide or delete it before you export the cover you upload — KDP rejects files with template marks, crop marks or colour bars still visible on the page. What you send them is your design at that page size, and nothing else.
Dimensions are one condition of many. These are the rest of the ones you can verify yourself, in the order you will hit them.
Amazon publishes the formulas and this tool implements them unchanged: full cover width = 0.125" bleed + back trim width + spine width + front trim width + 0.125" bleed; full cover height = 0.125" bleed + trim height + 0.125" bleed. Spine width is the effective page count multiplied by the caliper of the stock you print on.
Caliper per page, from KDP's cover guidelines: white 0.002252", cream 0.0025", groundwood 0.00235", standard color 0.002252" (the same stock as white paper), premium color 0.002347". Cream is about 11% thicker than white, so the same 300-page novel gets a 0.6756" spine on white and a 0.75" spine on cream.
Page counts round up to the next even number before anything else happens, because interiors print on sheets. The legal range then depends on BOTH the trim and the stock — cream reaches 776 pages at 6 × 9 but stops at 550 at 8.5 × 8.5, and A4 has no standard-color option at all. All 16 trims and their per-stock ranges are transcribed from Amazon's own specification table.
The pixel figure is a 300 PPI design-canvas reference, not the publication dimension. KDP reads the physical page size of the PDF you upload; a vector cover at the correct inch size is correct whatever pixel dimensions it does or does not contain.
Transcribed from Amazon KDP’s published paperback cover and trim-size guidelines, US store (kdp.amazon.com). Last verified 27 August 2026.
Almost always the export, not the design. Design apps let the canvas and the exported PDF page size disagree — the artboard is 12.9256 × 9.25 in and the PDF comes out as US Letter, because that is the export preset's default. Open the PDF, check its page size in the document properties, and compare it against the inch figure above before you upload. If they differ, set the page size explicitly in the export dialog rather than trusting the preset.
Yes, if the spine moved. Every page adds its caliper to the spine — 0.002252" on white — so 20 extra pages widen the wrap by about 0.045" and shift the front panel by the same amount. Recalculate, re-export at the new size, and re-upload. The front artwork itself does not need regenerating; only the wrap geometry changes.
KDP accepts RGB and its print guidance recommends CMYK for print images. The practical risk with RGB is colour shift: saturated colours can print noticeably duller than they look on screen. Whichever you send, order a physical proof before a launch — that is the only way to see what the press actually does with your particular palette. Do not mix colour spaces inside one file.
No — these numbers are paperback only. Hardcover uses a different trim list, a 75-page minimum, a 550-page maximum, and a case-bound spine whose width is not page count × caliper, so applying paperback math to a hardcover produces a wrap that is wrong by a wide margin. Use Amazon's own calculator for hardcover.
KDP does allow custom paperback trims — the width has to fall between 4" and 8.5" and the height between 6" and 11.69" — but this calculator covers only the 16 standard sizes for now. The arithmetic is identical at a custom size (spine = pages × caliper, then bleed + back + spine + front + bleed), so you can work it out by hand from the numbers above; what we cannot yet give you is the per-page limit for a size Amazon does not publish a row for. Note that custom trims are priced differently from standard ones, so check the printing cost before you commit to one.
Both, at any of the 16 standard trims. The calculator gives you the dimensions and a marked template; the wrap builder composes a back cover, spine and bleed around front artwork you already have and exports one print-ready PDF. Neither needs an account, and the wrap builder never uploads your artwork — it runs in your browser.
One page at your book's exact full-wrap size with the print geometry drawn on it — the bleed band, the trim line, the two spine folds, the front and back panels, the text-safe areas and the area Amazon keeps for its barcode. It is a guide layer rather than artwork, and physically it is a white page with those guides stroked on it, so put it on its own layer above your cover and set that layer to Multiply — white drops out, the guides stay — or keep it underneath and trace. Either way, hide or delete it before you export. Because the spine width comes from your page count and paper, a template is specific to one book: a generic pack cannot know where your folds go.
PDF if you lay out in InDesign, Affinity Publisher or Acrobat — it places at the right physical size with no scaling step. PNG if you work in Photoshop, GIMP or Canva; it is rasterised at 300 PPI, so in Canva you create a custom-size design at the inch figure above and drop the PNG in as a background layer to trace. SVG if you use Illustrator, Inkscape or Figma and want the guides to stay vector. All three are drawn from the same geometry, so they are the same template in three wrappers.
No. The template is for laying the cover out yourself in your own design tool. The wrap builder composes the back, spine and bleed around front artwork you bring and exports the finished single-page PDF, with the same geometry applied for you and no guide layer to remove. Download the template if you are designing the wrap by hand; skip it if you are letting the builder assemble it.