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Interior paper

Printing & file preparation

Also called: paper type, paper colour, paper color

The stock your pages print on — white, cream, or groundwood for black ink, and colour stock for colour interiors. It changes both the printing cost and the spine width.

KDP offers white and cream paper for black-ink interiors, plus a cheaper groundwood option on some marketplaces, and colour stock for colour interiors. Cream is slightly warmer and is conventional for novels; white is the usual choice for workbooks, puzzle books, and anything with images.

The choice has two measurable consequences. Cream stock is marginally thicker per sheet than white, so the same page count produces a slightly thicker spine — which changes your cover file. And the ink and paper combination selects which printing-cost table applies, with colour interiors costing substantially more per page than black ink.

There is also a page-count ceiling that varies by stock. KDP's black-ink limit is higher on white than on cream, and the largest trims are tighter still, so a very long book may only be printable on one of the options.

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SmartKDP is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Amazon. Amazon, Kindle, and Kindle Direct Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.

Related terms

  • Printing cost

    What Amazon charges to manufacture one copy, deducted from every sale before your royalty. It is a fixed amount plus a per-page amount, set by marketplace, ink type, and trim category.

  • Spine width

    How thick the book's spine is — page count multiplied by a per-page paper thickness, plus a fixed board offset on hardcovers. It determines where the fold lines sit on your cover file.

  • Trim size

    The finished width and height of a printed book after the pages are cut. KDP publishes a catalog of standard trim sizes, and the one you pick affects both layout and printing cost.

  • Low-content book

    A book made mostly of repeating or generated page structures rather than prose — journals, planners, logbooks, and similar fill-in interiors.