Aloha, and welcome to the Little Kea Journal.

Little Kea is a family-made brand from the Thomas ʻOhana, designed for keiki ages 2–4 and rooted in the islands Sade grew up in. The first thing we put on a shelf was a picture book: Little Kea's Big Trucks. Most of its imagery was designed on an iPhone, often with Kea in one arm and the design in the other. So when we finally sat down to turn it into a print-ready file for Amazon's KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), the last thing we could afford was for the layout step to eat a weekend. It ate a weekend anyway — until we found the Apple Pages KDP book template from Post Nautical, which solved most of what we'd been fighting in about ten minutes.

This post is the story of everything we tried first.

Where Amazon's KDP-in-Apple-Pages guide falls short

We chose Apple Pages because it runs on what we already had, and Amazon officially supports it with a how-to guide. That guide gives you the rough shape of what to do. What it doesn't give you is anything that survives contact with a real book. A few of the places we lost hours:

  • Trim sizes aren't built into Pages. Amazon's guide tells you what dimensions KDP expects, but Apple Pages has no preset for 8.5\" × 8.5\" (or any of the other common picture-book sizes). You build a custom document by hand. One wrong decimal in \"Custom Size\" and the whole interior is off.
  • Bleed is barely mentioned. If any art runs to the edge of the page — and in a picture book, all of it does — you need 0.125\" of bleed on the outer three sides. Apple Pages has no native concept of bleed. The guide hand-waves past it. KDP's uploader will reject the file without explaining why.
  • Interior margins change with page count. KDP's inner margin (\"gutter\") requirement scales with how thick the book is. The guide lists the table. It does not tell you how to set an asymmetric inside-vs-outside margin in Apple Pages, which requires turning on facing pages and touching every master page.
  • Exporting to PDF silently changes things. Pages flattens some elements on export in ways that look fine on screen and cause KDP to reject the file. The guide is silent on export settings.

None of this is catastrophic on its own. It's the accumulation — you fix one thing, upload, get rejected, read a forum thread, fix the next thing, upload again. When you're already designing in stolen moments around naps and bath time, that loop is brutal.

What KDP actually checks when you upload a book interior

It helps to know what the uploader is looking at. KDP's interior review, in rough order of how often it trips people up:

  • Trim size match. The PDF's page dimensions must match the trim size you declared in the book setup, exactly. Off by 0.01\" and it bounces.
  • Bleed, if you declared it. If you chose \"bleed\" during setup, the PDF must extend 0.125\" past the trim on all outer edges. If you didn't declare bleed, the PDF must not have any.
  • Interior gutter. Inner margins have to meet the minimum for your page count. Picture books are usually thin enough that you're at the lower end of the table, but it still has to be right.
  • Embedded fonts. Every font in the PDF has to be embedded. Apple Pages usually handles this on export, but not always — especially with system fonts that have odd licensing.
  • Image resolution. Raster images should be at least 300 DPI at their final print size. Apple Pages doesn't warn you when an image is being scaled up past its native resolution.
  • Color mode. KDP's presses print CMYK but accept RGB PDFs and convert. Your colors will shift. Proofing a physical copy before you publish is not optional.

Most rejections we ran into were trim and bleed — the two things Apple Pages doesn't make easy.

The Apple Pages KDP template that actually worked

Somewhere in that spiral we found Post Nautical's KDP templates — a pack of Apple Pages documents built specifically for KDP. What's in the pack, and why it saves a weekend:

  • Common KDP trim sizes pre-configured as custom document sizes, so you don't have to key in dimensions yourself.
  • Bleed built into the page geometry (the 0.125\" is already there on the outer edges — you just design into it).
  • Inner/outer margin asymmetry set correctly for the page count ranges most picture books and short nonfiction titles land in, with facing pages turned on so left and right look right.
  • Master pages structured so drop-in content doesn't drift as you add or remove pages.
  • Clean export defaults — the PDF you get out of it is one KDP accepts on the first try.

You open the template, drop your content in, export, upload. It works. That was our experience, and it's the reason Big Trucks exists as a physical book instead of a PDF still being kicked back by the uploader.

A note on context: Little Kea is part of Post Nautical — a collective of independent brands built on authentic stories, real culture, and purposeful design. We'd recommend the templates either way, but it helps that we used them on an actual book that's now sitting on actual shelves, including, kindly, the shelves at Hāpuʻu Designs.

What's next in the Journal

Going forward, expect product intros when something new lands in the shop, honest notes on how we use AI in our process (we're an AI-first studio and we'd rather say so than tuck it away), and more build logs like this one. The goal is to share the work in progress, not just the finished thing.

If there's a piece of this you'd like us to go deeper on — the AI workflow, the KDP cover wrap math, how we chose the trim size — tell us and we'll write it.

Mahalo for reading.

— Sade