Setting 1: A custom page size — Pages starts at Letter
File → Page Setup → Paper Size → Manage Custom Sizes, and create your trim size (6″ × 9″, or your chosen trim; for bleed books, width + 0.125″ and height + 0.25″). Name it after the book so you reuse it. Do this first: Pages repaginates when the paper changes, and everything you format afterward assumes this size. A Letter document exported as-is is a guaranteed page-size mismatch.
Setting 2: Facing pages, so the gutter exists
In the Document sidebar → Document tab, enable Facing Pages. Margins then become Inside and Outside instead of Left and Right. Set Inside to at least KDP's gutter for your page count (0.375″ at 24–150 pages, rising to 0.875″ for the thickest books — full table in the margin guide), and Top/Bottom/Outside to at least 0.25″ (0.375″ for bleed books; 0.5″ everywhere if the same file is headed to IngramSpark). Header and footer distances live in the Section tab — keep headers inside the safe area, not in the trim zone.
Setting 3: Export at Best quality
- File → Export To → PDF.
- Image Quality: Best. The “Good” and “Better” options downsample images — the fast lane to the below-300-DPI rejection. Best passes your images through at full quality.
- Leave “Require password” off (an encrypted PDF is rejected outright), and export the whole document.
Fonts: Pages embeds the fonts it uses in its PDF export, so the fonts error is uncommon from Pages. Verify anyway (Acrobat > Properties > Fonts) — a font you brought in via a placed PDF element is the usual exception.
Pages-specific traps
- Sections carry their own settings. Like Word, Pages sections can differ; if chapter 9 was pasted from another document, check its margins and page setup individually.
- No real bleed workflow. Pages has no bleed guides. The workaround is the one in Setting 1: build the document at bleed size and keep content inside margins measured from the trim edge. Workable for simple books; fragile for full-bleed photo books.
- Page numbers that won't quit. For an IngramSpark file, the final page must be utterly blank — Pages headers/footers apply per section, so put the closing pages in their own section with headers and footers off, then add the blank. See the blank-final-page rule.
- Covers: don't. Pages can't construct a wraparound cover to spec (no spine math, no bleed control). Interior in Pages; cover from a template or tool — the spine calculator gives you the dimensions any cover tool will ask for.
Set it all and still rejected? Send us your interior and cover PDFs and we'll run the full 13-point check and tell you in plain English what Pages actually exported. The check is free. Get the free check →
Verify the exported file
- Page size (Acrobat > Properties > Description): uniform, at your trim or bleed size — points = inches × 72.
- Fonts (Properties > Fonts): all Embedded / Embedded Subset.
- A middle spread at 200%: text clear of the gutter, images crisp.
The honest limit
Pages is a genuinely pleasant writing app and a minimal layout tool. For a text-first novel, memoir, or poetry collection, the settings above produce a file KDP accepts — thousands of books prove it. The ceiling shows up with bleed, image-heavy layouts, and covers, where Pages offers no controls at all. Past that ceiling, the writing can stay in Pages; the production shouldn't.
Or send us the files — the check is free
Email your interior and cover PDFs and we'll tell you exactly what's wrong — in plain English, free, within 48 hours. If it does need fixing, the by-hand fix is $19 and we redo it free if KDP rejects it for a formatting issue we were hired to fix. We rebuild files to be compliant with KDP's published spec — that's the promise we can keep.