The brief decides the book
Everything downstream is only as good as five decisions: who the reader is, what they can do after reading, which format the book takes (a guide, a workbook, a lead magnet, a report, a novel), what voice it speaks in, and how long it is. Spend real time here. A brief that says "freelance designers in their first year; price a project without guessing; practical guide; direct and concise; about 6,000 words" produces a coherent outline. "A book about freelancing" produces the average of the internet. The studio's onboarding quiz exists to force these five decisions before the first prompt.
Draft in the shape of a book
Approve the outline before drafting — rename, reorder, cut. Then draft chapter by chapter, each prompt carrying the whole outline so every chapter knows where it sits and does not repeat its neighbours. Read each chapter as it arrives and mark what is weak. Rewrite by section, not by chapter: regenerating a whole chapter throws away the parts that worked. Keep the chapter text clean — real headings, plain paragraphs, no stray markdown — so the exports carry structure rather than asterisks. The result should have a table of contents that reads like a book's, because it was designed like one.
Check, declare, export
Before export, list every factual claim, number, name and quotation the draft contains and check each against something you can cite — or cut it. Then decide the KDP declaration honestly: if the AI created the text, it is AI-generated and must be declared when you publish, even if you edited it heavily; if you wrote it and used AI to edit, it is AI-assisted and needs no declaration. Either way you are responsible for it meeting the content guidelines. Set the cover, export EPUB for the Kindle upload, PDF for direct sales and PDF-first channels, DOCX for the editor or the print typesetter.
Common questions
Straight answers
Which format should I upload to KDP?+
EPUB or DOCX; KDP recommends KPF from its own tool but converts both well. See the Kindle formatting guide for the current list.
Can I use AI for the cover too?+
For the artwork, yes — with the title and author set in type on top, never painted into the picture. AI-generated images are declared the same way AI text is.
Sources
Platform figures on this page are quoted from the pages below, read on the date shown. Rules change; check the current page before you publish.
Amazon KDP — Content Guidelines (AI-generated vs AI-assisted) · read 2026-09-11
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