About how many formatted pages might your manuscript become? Enter a word count and the trim you are planning at, and this brackets a text-led interior with a planning range — before anything is laid out. Free, no signup, no upload.
Three things answer that, and none of them is guessed for you. What comes back is a planning range for a book that has not been laid out yet — not the extent it will turn out to have.
Compare the standard US KDP paperback trims — physical size, print options and the page counts each option accepts. Nothing is chosen for you there either.
KDP Trim Size PickerInterior page size and the minimum inside, outside, top and bottom margins, from the page count your finished layout reports.
KDP Margin CalculatorRead the finished file back: its real extent, page size, fonts and artwork resolution, in your own browser.
KDP Interior PDF PreflightAccepts up to 5,000,000 words and a front/back matter allowance of up to 10,000 pages. Runs entirely in your browser, with no signup and nothing uploaded.
Amazon publishes no words-per-page conversion, and it does not calculate a page count from a word count. Its paperback guidance describes the opposite order: you format the manuscript, your formatting settles trim, margins and type, and KDP then reads the extent out of the file you upload. So no tool can know the extent of a book that has not been laid out yet. What this page does instead is bracket it, and say out loud what the bracket assumed.
The bracket is three text-layout assumptions. At the 6 × 9 in reference trim they are about 325 words per page for a compact setting, about 275 for a standard one and about 225 for a more open one. They are MakeMyBookCover planning assumptions written for English-language prose. They are not KDP rules, Amazon recommendations, font-size presets, readability guidance or measured typography, and no manuscript is read to produce them — your average word length is not measured, and neither is your language.
For any other trim each assumption is scaled by one ratio: the full area of the trim you picked divided by the full area of 6 × 9 in. That is deliberately a proxy and not a typography model. Using a hypothetical margin would smuggle a design decision into a tool that runs before design, and using Amazon’s minimum margins would make the estimate depend on the page-count band it is trying to estimate. The proxy models the one obvious relationship — a bigger page generally has room for more text — and models nothing else: not your margins, font metrics, font size, leading, line length, paragraph spacing, chapter starts, blank pages, widow and orphan control, or your layout software.
Each scenario divides the word count by its own assumption and rounds up to a whole page, and your own front/back matter allowance is added on top if you supply one. Amazon’s even-page handling is deliberately not applied, because that rule belongs to the finished manuscript file rather than to a plan. Nothing on this page is carried into another one: a planning range cannot become a spine width, a cover size or a margin, and the number those calculations need is the extent your finished layout reports.
Honestly: a range, not a number — and the range is wide enough to matter. The same 80,000 words set compactly at 6 × 9 in plan out near 250 pages and set openly at the same trim plan out past 350, before a single page of front matter. Change the trim and both ends move again. That is why this page returns two ends and the assumption behind each one rather than one confident figure: the figure would look settled, and the decisions that settle it — type size, leading, margins, how chapters open — are ones you have not made yet.
No. Amazon publishes no words-per-page figure at all, for any trim. It is a MakeMyBookCover planning assumption, chosen as the middle of a sensitivity bracket for English-language prose, and it is printed next to every scenario so you can check the arithmetic yourself and see exactly which figure the estimate used. Any tool presenting a words-per-page number as an Amazon specification is presenting an opinion as a rule.
No, and this page will not hand it to those tools. Spine width, full cover geometry and the minimum inside margin are all calculated from the extent of your finished interior — the number your formatted manuscript or exported PDF actually reports. A planning estimate is not that number, and a cover printed against a page count the book turns out not to have is a cover that does not fit. Lay the interior out first, then bring the count it reports to the margin, spine and cover calculators.
Not unless you say so. Front and back matter are excluded by default and the result says so in as many words, because the tool has no way to know whether your book opens with two pages or fourteen. If you already know roughly how many non-body pages you are planning, there is an optional allowance you can add — it is a number you supply, added to every scenario, not something estimated for you.
Nothing here needs one. Amazon says it calculates the page count from the uploaded manuscript and rounds an odd total up to an even number if necessary — that is a rule about a finished file, applied later, by KDP. Applying it to a planning estimate would dress an assumption up as a manuscript fact, so an odd estimate is shown exactly as the arithmetic produced it.
In this model, directionally yes: each scenario’s words-per-page assumption is scaled by the trim’s full area against 6 × 9 in, so a bigger page is assumed to hold more text. Real books do not have to follow that. A larger trim is often given larger type and wider margins, which gives back much of the space it gained, and this estimate cannot see any of that — it measures paper, not a text block.
No, and it will say so rather than produce a number. Picture books, comics, workbooks, journals, photo books and interiors driven by tables or a fixed layout do not get their extent from a word count — an illustration that occupies a spread costs the same two pages whether the caption runs to six words or sixty. Estimating those from words would not be less accurate; it would be measuring the wrong thing.
The assumptions are written for English-language prose and have not been validated for anything else. Average word length varies enough between languages to move a words-per-page figure meaningfully, and nothing here measures your text, so the tool cannot tell what language it is being asked about. That is why the scope is a confirmation you give rather than something inferred from what you type.
Up to 5,000,000 words, and an optional front/back matter allowance of up to 10,000 pages. Both are planning limits rather than printing limits: whether a book of a given extent can actually be printed depends on the trim and the print option together, which the trim comparison shows for all 16 standard US trims. The trim dimensions here come from the same catalogue, last compared against Amazon’s published table on 2026-08-27.