Why Book Dimensions Matter

Understanding Trim Size, Bleed, and Margin for Self-Publishing (Amazon KDP)

AI-generated summary and notes. Check quotations, numbers, and important claims against the source video. Captions may contain errors.

Watch the source video on YouTube

Estimated reading time: 17 minutes for the text on this page.

Summary

In Sean Dollwet's video, he dives into the critical yet often overlooked facet of self-publishing on Amazon KDP: choosing the correct trim size, bleed, and margins for your book. He explains how different types of books, whether children's, fiction, non-fiction, or low-content books, have standard sizes that authors should adhere to for optimal customer experience and profitability. Sean emphasizes the importance of considering these aspects to avoid unnecessary printing costs and to maintain a professional presentation. Moreover, he shares his own experience with making size mistakes and provides practical advice on designing covers and interiors using tools like Canva, while also tackling aspects like bleed and margin settings. By following these guidelines, authors can enhance their book's market appeal and boost sales.

Highlights

Sean shares his journey to seven figures with Amazon KDP and the importance of book dimensions 💰.
Understand the standard sizes for various book genres and how they affect customer experience 📏.
Learn how larger trim sizes can reduce your page count and printing costs 🚀.
Discover tips for designing book covers with the correct dimensions on platforms like Canva 🎨.
Avoid common pitfalls in book sizing and improve your sales potential with Sean's advice 📈.

Key Takeaways

Choosing the right trim size, bleed, and margins can significantly impact your book's success 📚.
Different book types have standard sizes—follow these for better customer experience and profit 🎯.
Larger pages mean fewer pages and lower printing costs, enhancing profit margins 🛠️.
For fiction, keep it cozy with smaller sizes; for activity books, go big or go home! 🤓.
Always design with bleed and margins in mind to maintain a professional look ✂️.

Overview

When entering the self-publishing world, selecting the right trim size, bleed, and margins might seem secondary, but Sean Dollwet highlights how they are pivotal to your book's success on Amazon KDP. Different book genres have standard sizes, and adhering to these not only elevates reader satisfaction but also optimizes profit margins. Sean, an experienced KDP publisher, shares his insights to ensure you avoid rookie mistakes.

Children's books, low-content books, and activity books, for instance, typically benefit from larger sizes, making them easier and more enjoyable for readers. On the contrary, fiction and non-fiction works usually thrive in smaller, more manageable dimensions. Sean demystifies these industry standards, encouraging authors to study bestsellers in their niche and learn from what's proven to work.

To wrap up, Sean takes us through the nitty-gritty of bleed and margin settings necessary for a polished book presentation. He warns against the temptation to cut corners on these details, as they play a crucial role in how your book appears to customers. With tools like Canva, he illustrates how to properly format covers and interiors, ensuring your self-published work stands proudly on the digital shelf.

Understanding Trim Size, Bleed, and Margin for Self-Publishing (Amazon KDP) Transcription

00:00 - 00:30 in this video I'll be talking about something that may seem simple but it can determine the success of your book and that is choosing the right trim size bleed and margins so if you're new to the channel my name is Sean and I've made well over seven figures for my own Amazon KDP business and my goal with these videos is to help you start making money on Amazon kdps and hopefully when you're ready to scale your business you come back and join my KDP courses and mentorship programs which if you want to learn more you can check out the first link in the description below all right so with that being said let's talk about the trim size of your books first so as an example I looked up word search books
00:30 - 01:00 for Del there are a lot of books on here on the market but if you check out each one they all pretty much follow the same size this one right here as you can see the dimensions are 8.5 by 11 this one right here 8.5 by 11 this one right here is also 8.5 by 11 now it's not 100% of the time the same size like this one as an example is different it's 6X 9 which is a little smaller but typically they all kind of follow the same trim size but why is that well that's because each types of book has a standard size
01:00 - 01:30 depending on the type of book the standard size could be bigger or smaller but they all kind of have a standard size let me give you another example so this one is a coloring book for children search results and we have this book at 8.5 by 11 this book at 8.5 by1 this one is the same 8.5 by1 and same as this one that's because word searches and coloring books typically with these activity books where you actually fill out the pages you want it in a bigger size so it's easier to actually work with the pages if if the book is too
01:30 - 02:00 small and you're trying to color it in obviously it's not a good experience so depending on what kind of books you're publishing there are tried and tested sizes that you should consider so let's talk about a few major ones so first off is children's books right so examples are once again coling books alphabet learning books bedtime story books or any kind of story books in general tracing letter books and many other activity books typically fall under this category so for these books the recommended size for the small one and if you want a square look then iom Rec commend you do 8.5 by 8.5 if you want a
02:00 - 02:30 large size which are more standard I would say 8.5 x 11 in is typically the size everyone go with just to show you some examples once again we got this book 50 animals coloring book uh and fun facts for kids uh it is 8.5 by 11 so this is how you can analyze your competitor's uh trim size just by looking at the product page right here and with book beam which is a pay tool that I have if you guys want to check it out the link is in the description below it actually tells me the actual roties
02:30 - 03:00 this book is making so this book is doing $50 to $60 every single day that is $1,500 a month this is another example here mermaid coloring book it is 8.5 by1 doing $30 to $40 a day 8.5 by1 once again is a big you know book and the benefit of this is that your overall page count lowers because obviously if the page is bigger you can put a lot more text and images on one page so that you need less Pages if you have a smaller trim size typically your page
03:00 - 03:30 count goes up and the Amazon printing cost is calculated based on the page numbers right so if you have less Pages then the printing cost is lower which means you will have a higher profit margin so it's actually a good strategy to try and have your page count as low as possible while obviously providing a good experience for your customer of course so 8.5x 11 is a great size for these activity books next is fiction books so fiction books uh we're talking Comics manga or any kind of novel could
03:30 - 04:00 be romance mystery anything right and also sci-fi stories as well now for these ones unfortunately 8.5x 11 would be way too big you know it'll be really weird to have a 8.5x 11 a huge book that is a basically a novel right so the standard size for these books are typically smaller so we are talking 5 by 8 or if you want to go a little bigger you know 5.25 by 8 in or even 6x9 but typically people stay within the 5x8 range like this book right here once mind a dark stalker romance right this
04:00 - 04:30 is a kind of a typical fiction book that you see and you can see that it's 5 by 8 in making hundred of dollars a day so once again with these smaller trim sizes uh your page count will go up but you know it's better to prioritize customer experience and when customers buy these books they are obviously expecting your book to be around the 5 by8 size and you should prioritize that then to try and make your book 8.5x 11 lower the page count and you have a little higher profit margin less printing cost you
04:30 - 05:00 don't want to do that if it sacrifices customer experience so the next one is non-fiction books so these are cookbooks travel guys self-help guys academic books pretty much any how-to books in general uh recommend the size if you want to go small 5x8 is a good one uh I use 5x8 a lot for my non-fiction books if you want to go a little bigger 6x9 is actually a good size as well so between 5x 8 to 6x9 any of those trim sizes will work these are some examples all they non-fiction book so this is a super easy
05:00 - 05:30 and quick Mediterranean diet cookbook for beginners 6x9 in as you can see making $35 a day and this is a what not to do in Paris travel guide once again 6x9 in and doing $7 to $15 a day next are low content books so these are journals planners sketchbooks even coloring books we kind of talked about it earlier but you know kind of falls into this category there are many different types of books so the the size ranges but if you're doing journals planners typically these are 6x9 people prefer a smaller size for these ones
05:30 - 06:00 nobody really want to carry around a huge 8.5x 11 Journal right but if you're doing sketchbooks or coling book something that you actually you know draw in right obviously you want a bigger page for that so you can enjoy the pages more so it really depends on the type of book but for those ones we recommend 8.5x 11 once again those are the standard size next are coffee table books so these are architectural design books photography collections travel photo books art books and for these ones 10x 10 or some kind of you know Square size is good typically people like a
06:00 - 06:30 bigger size and 10 by 10 once again is a square size so those are the standard size we see like this one right here history as they saw it this is a little bigger than 10 x 10 it's 10x 11.25 but it's within the range doing $92 a day next is specific Niche books something like poetry books right so if you're doing poetry same thing you know people don't really want to carry around a huge book on poetry right typically these are pocket sizes so something smaller like 5x8 if not 6x9 but I would recommend 5x8
06:30 - 07:00 it's more a standard size for this so something like this learning to love myself it is a poetry book doing extremely well it's a 5x 8 in size and it's doing $400 to $600 every single day so this one book is making between 122 to $118,000 every single month so when you're making a book it's good to follow the standard size of the market when I was publishing my first book on Amazon KDP I made the mistake of choosing the wrong size for my book I chose a size that was way too big for my genre and it
07:00 - 07:30 ended up looking like a textbook and it didn't really resonate with my audience and after doing more research and changing to a standard size my sales picked up significantly so my advice is don't reinvent the wheel study what's working for best sellers in your Niche and let that guide you so now that you've settled on a size you got your book interior the next step is to go and create your book cover now KDP does offer an option to create your book cover as you can see here they do have a built-in cover creator but it's extreme extremely limited so if you want to
07:30 - 08:00 actually create a book cover that stands out then you either have to hire a professional book cover designer if you don't want to learn the skills yourself or you want to learn how to design it on Photoshop Adobe Illustrator or even Cana now I do have a step-by-step tutorial on how to create a book cover on ca for those beginners out there if you guys want to check it out I'll leave a link to this YouTube video in the description below now in the process of creating your book cover there are a few more important things that you have to understand so the first thing is to go and figure out your actual dimensions
08:00 - 08:30 for your full book cover so what you want to do is go to this website kp. amazon.com cover calculator I'll leave a link uh below this video once again and let's just say that we want to create a paperback book black and white interior white paper left to right reading Direction measurement in inches and we're doing a 8.5 by 11 in size and a 100 page book now these settings such as black and white interior white paper these are typically what we recommend for beginners because the printing cost
08:30 - 09:00 is a lot lower than colored interior pages so it's just a lot easier to make profit so anyways once you calculate the dimensions you'll see this full cover uh width and height this is the information you need when you're plugging this into canva or any kind of Designing tool so even though your front cover is 8.5 by 11 right this is the size that we chose the full cover is actually not 8.5 by 11 because the front cover right here this page right here is 8.5 by 11 but you
09:00 - 09:30 have to go and design the front the spine and the back cover all of it together which means that the dimension the width and height will actually be this so when you're going to canva you want to click on custom size changes to inches and for the width and height you're not putting 8.5x 11 uh when you're creating your paperback cover you're actually putting this right here so just keep that in mind hopefully this makes sense once again if you need a step-by-step tutorial check out the video link in the description below now the next thing you have to understand is the bleed and margins so we talked about
09:30 - 10:00 trim size now we want to talk about bleed and margins again I'll leave a link to this page that is from KDP support but essentially a bleed is when your text or image goes all the way to the end of the page so you can see on the left side it is no bleed meaning the image does not go all the way to the end of the page there are some space in between on the right it is bleed right so it's going all the way to the end and so this section will be cut off once it's printed the thing is even if you have one page in your entire book that bleed then you will have to select bleed
10:00 - 10:30 for the entire book so when you're creating your book interior you want to make sure you click on here and you see the page size uh with and without bleed so if we are designing our Interiors with bleed and since we have a book that is 8.5 by 11 you want to come all the way down here and find your size here in our case is this one 8.5 by1 and we want to look at here because it's page size with bleed so instead of Designing a page size with 8.5 by 11 it's actually
10:30 - 11:00 going to be 8.625 by 11.25 because these extra point you know something inches is accounting for the bleed but what if your book doesn't have a bleed right if that's the case then you just design it as 8.5x 11 which is very easy so aside from the trim size and bleed or no bleed margins is the next thing you have to understand so imagine having a book where the text or the image goes all the way to the end of the book right that'll look very weird so in order to avoid this you need to set margins so that the text and the
11:00 - 11:30 image stays well within the boundaries which brings us back to this page right here you want to scroll down a little bit where it says margins and now we have this information right here so we basically have to just apply our books here so in our case we have a 100 page book so it falls under the 24 to 150 Pages section which means that our inside margin is 0.375 in and then we have the option of if our book has no bleed or if our book has bleed right so in our case we selected a book that has
11:30 - 12:00 bleed so we're going to be using this number right here of the outside margin of at least 0.375 so when you're designing your interior on canva as an example you want to make sure you add a 0.375 in uh margin you know on top of it so if you're doing canva the easy way is simply to drag your ruler down here and give at least 0.375 like this right so if you don't have this ruler showing up all you have to do is shift plus r and it should show
12:00 - 12:30 up same as the left side here we just drag it over to at least 0.375 and we just want to do the same thing for the right side and the bottom so those are the basics on trim size margins and bleed or no bleed a little confusing in the beginning but once you practice it it gets easier over time especially if you start designing the book covers yourself so once again the best way to learn it is to just practice it so check out the links in the description below on some other tutorials that I've done where you can follow along and create a book int as well as a book cover on canva and if you
12:30 - 13:00 want to join my complete Amazon KDP program where I've helped over 1,200 people make money with Amazon KDP some are even doing four five or even six figures a month then you can check out the first link in the description below with that being said if you enjoyed the video leave a like subscribe thanks for watching and I'll see you guys in the next one