How to Format a Book with Scrivener for KDP & Print (2026)

Scrivener is the writing tool of choice for novelists, memoirists, and nonfiction authors who think in scenes and chapters rather than pages — and it is also a formatting tool, though one beginners find intimidating. Instead of a document that looks like the printed page, you get a binder full of fragments and a Compile window with dozens of panels. Yet once you understand how the parts fit together, scrivener book formatting is remarkably powerful: one project can compile to a print-ready 6×9 PDF for a KDP paperback and a clean EPUB for Kindle, without ever pasting your manuscript into Word.

The key idea: in Scrivener, writing and formatting are separate stages — you write in the editor, structure the book in the binder, and let Compile apply the design at the end. This guide covers the complete scrivener book formatting workflow for 2026: binder, section types and layouts, compile formats, 6×9 trim and margins, styles, front and back matter, images, replacements, troubleshooting, and the straight-compile vs DOCX decision.

Setting Up Your Binder: The Foundation of Scrivener Book Formatting

Good scrivener book formatting starts in the binder, not in Compile. The binder is the outline on the left: folders for parts and chapters, text documents for scenes. Compile reads this structure and assigns each item a design based on its section type, so a clean binder gives you a clean book.

Use folders for chapters and parts, text documents for scenes. Most compile formats expect this: chapter-heading layouts for level-one folders, body-text layouts for the documents inside them. If everything lives at one level, Compile cannot tell a chapter from a scene.

Assign a section type to every binder item — Chapter, Scene, Front Matter. Verify in Compile’s contents column that every row shows the expected type: a scene typed as a chapter compiles with a chapter heading, the most common beginner error in Scrivener.

Keep front matter (title page, copyright, dedication) and back matter (about the author, acknowledgments) as separate documents at the top and bottom of the Draft folder with their own section types, so you can include, exclude, or reorder them per format without touching chapters.

Section Types and Section Layouts: The Core Concept

Section types describe what a binder item IS; section layouts describe how it LOOKS in the output. The compile format contains a set of layouts — Chapter Title, Scene, Title Page — and in Compile you map each section type to one layout. That mapping is the single most important screen in scrivener book formatting.

Open Compile, choose a format, and look at the middle column listing your project’s section types. Assigning “Chapter” to the “Chapter Title” layout tells Compile to render every chapter folder with that design — font, size, spacing, page break, and automatic numbering.

Layouts control more than fonts. Each layout decides whether the section starts on a new page, whether the binder title is inserted as a heading (with “Chapter One” auto-numbering or not), what separator appears between sections, and whether the section appears in the table of contents. A Scene layout typically means no new page, no title, and a centered # # # between scenes. A Chapter layout means a page break before and the title rendered large.

You need not master every option on day one: built-in formats ship with sensible mappings for a standard novel. Assign the mappings, compile a test PDF of three chapters, read it, and fix the layouts that look wrong — on a small sample, not the whole book.

Choosing a Compile Format: Paperback PDF vs eBook EPUB

A compile format is a reusable package of every formatting decision — section layouts, styles, page settings, separators — saved under a name like “Paperback” or “EBook”. Scrivener ships formats for common outputs; duplicate and customize them rather than building from zero.

A KDP paperback needs PDF output with fixed page geometry: trim size, margins, headers, footers, page numbers, embedded fonts. A Kindle eBook needs EPUB: reflowable text, no fixed pages, no headers or footers, a navigable table of contents, cover metadata. These differ enough that you should maintain two separate compile formats for the same manuscript. One format serving both is how authors end up with page numbers in their eBooks and missing page breaks in their paperbacks.

Name duplicated formats descriptively — “Paperback 6×9 KDP”, “EBook Kindle” — so you compile with the right one months later. Store formats in the project for unusual books, or share them across projects for a series.

Page Settings: 6×9 Trim, Margins, Headers, and Footers

For the paperback format, the page settings panel encodes KDP’s print requirements. The trim size is the finished size of the printed page: 6 x 9 inches is the standard default for novels and most nonfiction. Set the page size to the exact trim — not letter, not A4 — because Compile lays out every page to this size, and KDP’s checks compare your PDF’s dimensions against the trim in your title setup.

The inside (gutter) margin must exceed the outside margin because perfect binding curves pages into the spine. For a typical novel, set the inside margin to at least 0.75 inches and outside, top, and bottom to 0.5 inches — above KDP’s minimums. Mirror margins so the wide gutter falls on the binding side, keep headers and page numbers 0.25 inches from the trim edge, and suppress them on each chapter’s first page. Our print-ready PDF guide explains the full file spec these settings must satisfy.

Standard novel arrangement: book title in the header on left pages, author name on right pages, page numbers centered in the footer. Scrivener’s header fields accept placeholder tags that fill in automatically — define them once. For EPUB, leave headers and footers empty: eBook readers generate their own chrome, and hard-coded elements look broken on a phone.

Fonts, Styles, and Why Styles Beat Direct Formatting

Scrivener distinguishes named styles from direct formatting applied in the editor (selecting a paragraph and making it bold). For scrivener book formatting, named styles are the professional route: a compile format can redefine what each style looks like in the output, or strip it entirely.

Define styles for every recurring element: body text, block quotes, epigraphs, section breaks, in-chapter headings. Keep body text simple — a serif face at a comfortable size — and let the compile format decide the final font. Direct formatting carries through Compile, but you cannot restyle all such instances at once; with a named style you can.

For print, the output font is embedded in the PDF — choose licensed fonts with full character sets and embed them at compile time. For EPUB, be conservative: many e-readers override your fonts, so test in Kindle Previewer. Standard serif or sans-serif body text is the safe eBook default; save display fonts for print chapter headings.

Front Matter and Back Matter in the Compile List

Front and back matter are handled in Compile’s contents column, where each binder document can be included or excluded per format: include the title page, copyright, and dedication in both formats; a print-only map in the paperback; an eBook-only review-request page with a hyperlink in the EPUB.

Each front or back matter document gets a section layout — typically one that starts on a new page, carries no chapter numbering, and renders the binder title or not. Title pages usually suppress the binder title; copyright pages want a small centered style; dedications want generous top margin and italics.

Watch page-break behavior in print: trade convention puts the title page on a right-hand page with the copyright on the reverse, enforceable in the print format’s layout settings. In the EPUB format these settings are irrelevant — reflowable text has no left or right pages — another reason the two formats stay separate.

Images, Tables, and Embedding Fonts

Scrivener compiles images placed inline in the editor at their placed size. For print, every image should be 300 DPI at its final printed dimensions — check before compiling, because Scrivener will not warn you about a 72 DPI web graphic. Line art, maps, and fine diagrams want 600 DPI. For eBooks, keep images modest in size; oversized images bloat the EPUB and can trigger Kindle delivery fees.

Tables are the weak point of Scrivener’s Compile, especially for EPUB: simple tables survive, but complex ones with merged cells can distort. If your book is table-heavy, plan to polish tables in the DOCX round-trip below.

Font embedding is a compile-time decision: in the PDF compile settings, confirm fonts are embedded and subset. KDP’s checks flag unembedded fonts, and a substituted font shifts line breaks across the book. Compile a test PDF and check its font list — every font should read “embedded” or “embedded subset”.

Footnotes, Endnotes, and Compile Replacements

Scrivener supports inspector and inline footnotes. At compile time you choose how they render: as footnotes at the bottom of the page (print only), as endnotes at the end of the book, or as endnotes grouped by chapter. For print, true footnotes work well; for EPUB, endnotes are the reliable choice — reflowable pages have no fixed bottom.

Compile replacements are find-and-replace rules that run automatically during every compile — straight quotes to curly quotes, double hyphens to em dashes, an ISBN placeholder on the copyright page. Define them in the compile format so they travel with the project, and keep the list short: a forgotten replacement will surprise you months later.

The transformations panel can also smarten quotes, collapse multiple spaces, and normalize dashes across the whole output. Enable the transformations you want in the format — the editor is for writing, Compile is for presentation.

Compiling Straight to PDF and EPUB vs Compiling to DOCX First

Two honest workflows exist. Compiling straight to PDF and EPUB keeps everything in one project: refine the compile format, compile, review, adjust, recompile. For novels and narrative nonfiction — mostly body text with chapter headings — this is the cleanest path, and Scrivener’s output is genuinely good enough for KDP without leaving the app.

The DOCX round-trip exists for books needing tools Scrivener lacks: complex tables, widow and orphan control, drop caps, section-specific running heads, or a proofreader in Word’s track changes. Compile to DOCX with clean styles, polish in Word, then export from there. If you take this route, our Microsoft Word book formatting guide for KDP walks through the Word-side polish step by step — and if your proofreader prefers the cloud, our Google Docs formatting guide covers the collaborative alternative. The cost of the round-trip is a second source of truth — once you edit the DOCX, the Scrivener project is no longer final.

Whichever route you choose, proofread on the compiled output, not in the editor. Compile changes line breaks, hyphenation, and page breaks; only the output shows what readers will see. Export a PDF, read it on a tablet or print the first chapters, mark it up, and fix issues in the project. This compile-review-fix loop is the real work of scrivener book formatting — the settings are just the setup.

Troubleshooting Common Compile Artifacts

Even careful setups produce artifacts on the first compile. The most common, with fixes:

Chapter headings appearing on scenes. A binder item has the wrong section type, or the mapping assigns the chapter layout to the wrong type. Fix: check the section type in the inspector and the type-to-layout mapping in Compile’s middle column.

Missing chapter titles, or “Chapter One” numbering that will not go away. The layout controls title insertion independently of your binder titles. Fix: edit the layout’s title settings in the duplicated format — toggle title insertion and auto-numbering to match your intent.

Blank pages at chapter starts in the EPUB. A layout set to start sections on a new or right-hand page has no meaning in reflowable text and can emit empty pages. Fix: in the eBook format, set layouts to no forced page breaks except where truly wanted.

Fonts changing between editor and output. The compile format overrides editor formatting by design — that is the feature, not a bug. Fix: stop fighting it in the editor; define the final look in the format’s styles and section layouts.

Table of contents missing entries or including junk. The TOC is built from the layouts’ TOC flags. Fix: confirm chapter layouts are flagged for TOC inclusion and unwanted front-matter documents are not.

Before you compile the full book, run this checklist:

• Every binder item has the correct section type
• Each section type is mapped to the intended section layout
• Paperback format: 6×9 page size, mirrored margins, embedded fonts
• eBook format: no headers, no footers, no forced page breaks
• Images at 300 DPI for print, modest file sizes for eBook
• A three-chapter test compile reviewed before the full book

Conclusion: One Manuscript, Two Finished Books

Scrivener book formatting rewards the patient: structure the binder cleanly, assign section types honestly, map them to section layouts deliberately, and maintain separate compile formats for your paperback PDF and eBook EPUB. Set the 6×9 trim and margins once, define styles instead of direct formatting, place front and back matter with intention, embed your fonts, and proofread the compiled output — never the editor.