Write and format a nonfiction book for KDP as an indie author

“Amazon and AI.”

This is the first thing to settle, so here are KDP’s terms, not ours. KDP’s Content Guidelines ask you to declare AI-generated text, images and translations, even if you edited them heavily afterwards. They don’t ask you to disclose AI-assisted content that you created yourself and improved with a tool. The free disclosure helper walks through those definitions, last checked on 29 October 2026. It isn’t legal advice.

Inside the app, the KDP listing shows what your book’s history records: about how much of the final text you wrote or rewrote by hand, with the count behind it. Pasted and imported text is counted apart, because Chapbook can’t tell who wrote it. The figure doesn’t answer the question for you, and it doesn’t try to. It gives you something more honest to go on than memory.

There’s also a limit on how fast you can publish. Since 21 September 2026, KDP allows 2 new titles per format per week, as this guide explains. For one careful book, that limit won’t be what holds you back.

“I want to write it myself.”

Good. Then you can use Chapbook only for what comes after. I have a draft takes your Word, Markdown or text files, splits them into chapters at the main headings and keeps your words, footnotes and a Word file’s pictures. The history then shows the text as imported, not as written by the assistant or by you in the editor. You can also choose I’ll write it myself at the outline, or draft one chapter and write the rest. Nobody has to use the AI part, and nothing will rewrite a line unless you ask. Any change you ask for arrives as a suggestion to accept or reject.

If you do let it draft, your voice has to come from somewhere. Up to 5 pieces of your own writing make up a voice profile, and your real stories and costs go in as sources, because a book like the one in the brief is only as good as those. A draft can state a wrong fact with confidence, so check every claim. The read-through points to exact places, but it doesn’t replace your own check.

From manuscript to KDP files

Once the text is right, Chapbook makes the files:

• Ebook: an EPUB 3 and a cover at 1,600 × 2,560 pixels.
• Paperback: an interior at a KDP trim with mirrored margins and chapters on right-hand pages, and a wrap cover whose spine follows the page count and paper. Each gets a preflight report naming any problem by page. The spine only carries text above 79 pages, and the free spine calculator works out the same sizes.
• Editor: a Word document with the book’s fonts and page size, for someone who wants tracked changes.
• Listing: a description, keywords and categories laid out in the order of KDP’s form, with a royalty calculation you can check yourself. It tells you what each sale would earn at a price you set, not how many you will sell.

All of it is KDP-sized, not KDP-approved. KDP reviews every book, so open the files in its previewer and order a printed proof.

The sample on this page

Slow Money is first-person narrative nonfiction: twenty years of a fictional family bakery’s decisions about price, debt and hours, with its illustrative numbers and a closing word to a friend in each chapter. It was generated from one brief and exported without editing, so read it as a first draft rather than as a finished book. At 5,000 to 40,000 words, the kind is built for short books: this one is near the low end, and the default is 25,000.

What it does not do

Chapbook has no hardcover, no fiction and no store accounts of its own. It doesn’t upload to KDP, assign an ISBN or promise acceptance, rank or sales, and it doesn’t proofread as a person would. It writes in English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese (Brazil), Italian and Dutch, in left-to-right Latin script only.