KDP Bleed vs No Bleed

Bleed and no bleed, side by side

KDP prints every paperback on bigger sheets and then trims each page to size, cutting 0.125 in (3.2 mm) off the top, bottom and outside edges. Bleed is how you make a picture survive that cut. These three 6 × 9 in right-hand pages are drawn to scale; the red band is what gets cut off.

• No bleed

  Fine. Text and pictures stay inside the margins. The page is exactly 6 × 9 in and nothing gets near the edge, so nothing can be cut.

• Picture stops at the edge

  White line risk. The photo is meant to fill the page but stops at the trim line. The cut can land a hair outside it and leave a thin white edge.

• Picture runs into the bleed

  Fine. The page is 6.125 × 9.25 in and the photo covers all of it. KDP cuts 0.125 in off the top, bottom and outside, and the photo reaches the edge.

When to choose no bleed

Choose no bleed when every page has white space all round: novels, memoirs, poetry, most non-fiction and workbooks with boxed exercises. Pictures are fine too, as long as they sit inside the margins. The page size is simply your trim size, for example 6 × 9 in, and the top, bottom and outside margins must be at least 0.25 in. You can upload a Word file or a PDF.

When to choose bleed

Choose bleed if anything is meant to touch the page edge: a full-page photo, a coloured background, a border that runs off the page, or a picture book spread. KDP’s rule is strict: if even one page needs it, the whole file is set up with bleed. The page grows by 0.125 in in width and 0.25 in in height, so 6 × 9 in becomes 6.125 × 9.25 in, and the top, bottom and outside margins go up to 0.375 in. Bleed only works with a print-ready PDF.

What doesn’t change

• The trim size: a 6 × 9 in book is 6 × 9 in on the shelf either way.
• The gutter: still set by page count, from 0.375 in (24–150 pages) to 0.875 in (701–828 pages).
• The cover: it always has bleed, on all four edges, whatever you pick for the inside.

Common mistakes

1. Adding bleed to both sides of an inside page. The bound edge isn’t trimmed, so the width grows by 0.125 in, not 0.25 in.
2. Making the page bigger but not the picture. The picture has to stretch into the bleed, or the extra size does nothing.
3. Keeping 0.25 in margins with bleed. With bleed, text must sit at least 0.375 in from the top, bottom and outside edges.