2026-11-10 · all guides

Black Bars or White Margins Around Your Kindle Picture Book? What Can Be Fixed and What Can't

Why a picture book doesn't fill the screen

A novel on Kindle is reflowable. The text pours into whatever screen it is on, so there are never empty bars.

A picture book can't work that way, because the words sit on top of the art in exact positions. It is published as fixed layout: every page is a picture of the whole page, shown complete, scaled to fit, and never stretched or cut off.

That last part is where the bars come from. If the page and the screen are different shapes, something has to be left empty.

First, find out where the empty space is

Open the book in Kindle Previewer or in the preview on the KDP Content page and look closely at the border.

• The space is inside the page. The page has a white frame around the picture, and it stays the same on every device. This comes from your file.
• The space is outside the page. The art runs to the page edge, and the bars change when you switch between phone, tablet and landscape. This comes from the screen.

Many books have both at once.

Space inside the page: fix the PDF

This usually happens when the paperback PDF is reused for the ebook. A print file is built for a printer, so it may have white margins around the art, crop marks, or pages of different sizes.

For the ebook, make a separate export:

1. Export each page so the art fills the entire page. No margins, no crop marks, no printer's marks.
2. Keep every page exactly the same size.
3. Put the text on the art before you export. Kindle Create does not add or format text for illustrated books, so the words have to be part of the page image already.
4. Save as a PDF, or as numbered JPG or PNG files (page-001, page-002, and so on) so they import in the right order.

If a little border is left over, Kindle Create can trim it. Under Edit there are Crop and Resize options for a page, and KDP's help notes that facing pages must be the same size, so crop them all the same way.

Space outside the page: the screen shape

No file fixes this part. A square page on a tall phone will always have empty space above and below it. A tall portrait page on a wide tablet held sideways will have space on both sides. The same thing happens when a square photo is shown on a phone.

Readers of picture books on Kindle see this in every book, including the ones from large publishers. What you can control is how well your pages suit the way people hold the device.

Use facing pages for square and portrait books

Two square pages side by side make a wide rectangle, which is close to the shape of a tablet held sideways. That is why facing pages are the best setting for most picture books.

In Kindle Create:

1. Choose Create New, then the Comics option. This is the path for illustrated and kids' books as well as comics.
2. On the book properties screen, set the reading direction and turn on Facing Pages.
3. Import your PDF or image files.
4. Check the Page Type of each page in the Page Attributes panel, or use Edit, then Page Type, to set all pages at once.

According to KDP's help, facing pages appear side by side when the device is in landscape, and individually when it is in portrait. Single pages are always shown one at a time. Kindle Create marks pages that are much wider than they are tall as single pages automatically, which is right for a landscape book.

A good pattern is the one a printed book has: the title page alone, then each left and right pair together, then a single last page if the story ends on one.

When you finish, export the KPF file and upload that on the Content page of your Kindle eBook.

KDP's children's book page also still offers the older Kindle Kids' Book Creator, which imports PDF and image files too. Either tool produces a fixed layout book. Kindle Create is the one KDP's current help pages describe.

If your art was made as full spreads

If one illustration runs across both pages, facing pages show it joined in landscape. In portrait the reader sees half at a time. That is normal, and it is one more reason to keep important text and faces away from the center line.

Publishing the paperback too

The print edition has the opposite needs: bleed on three sides, safe margins for text, and a page count of at least 24. The free KDP margin calculator gives the page size and margins for your trim size, and our post on Canva and the insufficient bleed message covers the most common print error for picture books. If you would like both editions built from your art, see manuscript formatting.

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