Style templates determine how your finished book looks in the reader's hands — chapter openers, body type, running heads, scene breaks; every aspect of typesetting is controlled. Once a template is set, your manuscript exports with the proper formatting, whether for paperback or ebook.
Templates
Start from one of 62 built-in templates organized into 9 genre / era categories — Modern Literary Fiction, Commercial Thriller, Contemporary Romance, Epic Fantasy, Cozy Mystery, YA / Crossover, Victorian Classic Reprint, Mid-Century Pulp / Noir, and Memoir & Narrative Nonfiction — plus submission and accessibility formats (Shunn-style manuscript, Large Print, ARC). Browse with the side-by-side comparison preview, clone any template to customize, or build your own from scratch. Preview in real time for both print and ebook formats.
Formatting editor
Customize the visual presentation of your book using dozens of style targets across front matter, body, back matter, page layout, and inline elements. Control fonts, sizes, spacing, margins, running headers, ornamental decorations, and hyperlink appearance.
Your fonts
Upload your own TTF or OTF fonts from the Book Fonts panel in the Formatting editor. After a quick license confirmation, uploaded fonts appear in every font picker, render in previews, and are embedded in your exported EPUB, PDF, and DOCX. Web-packaged formats (WOFF/WOFF2) need converting to TTF/OTF first.
Design My Interior (AI art direction)
Click Design My Interior in the Formatting editor toolbar and Bookshaper art-directs a coherent interior for you: a genre-aware template, a scene-break ornament, a body/display font pairing, and a recommended trim size — each with a short rationale for why it fits your book, and kept consistent with your Cover Studio cover when one exists. It needs your book's genre set first (Bookshaper asks if it isn't). It spends AI credits, or none when you're using your own AI key (BYOK). A trim-size change resizes the page, so Bookshaper always asks before applying that part — you can take the template, ornament, and fonts while keeping your current trim. Every recommendation is a starting point: everything stays fully editable after you apply it, and you can undo the whole thing.
Ornaments
Part titles, chapter titles and scene breaks can carry ornaments. In the Format editor, pick one of those styles and open Ornamentation. For headings you can place an ornament Above, Left, Right or Below, each with its own size and spacing, and flip it. Quick Presets (Minimal, Classic, Fantasy, Romance) fill these in at once. Front- and back-matter pages take a Corner ornament instead.
The picker holds more than 1,900 built-in ornaments. Filter them by category or genre, or search. Import Ornament... adds your own image, and the star saves an ornament to your global library for other projects. To drop an ornament into the text itself, right-click and choose Insert › Ornament.
Page decoration
Page Decoration, under Page Layout in the Format editor, adds a border or background to printed pages. A border can be None, Single rule or Double rule, with its width (0.25–3 pt), inset from the page edge (6–72 pt) and color. A background is either a texture from the Cover Studio catalog or an image of your own, not both. Apply to sets whether the decoration goes on Every page or Chapter openers only.
This is print only; ebooks are unaffected. A background runs to the page edges, so the PDF switches to bleed-sized pages automatically (0.125" per KDP's spec). A border alone keeps exact-trim pages.
Content blocks
Some text needs its own look: a text-message exchange, a letter, a sidebar. Right-click in the editor and use Insert for a Text Message Thread (⌘⌥M), Callout Box (⌘⌥C) or Written Note (⌘⌥W). Use Format for a Blockquote or Preserved Lines (⌘⌥L), which keeps your line breaks and indentation for poetry, lyrics or addresses. ⌘Enter leaves a block, and Shift+Enter makes a line break inside one.
Each block type has its own style in the Format editor under Body Matter, so you set its look once for the whole book. In a blockquote, a closing paragraph that starts with a dash (— Author) or with "by" is set as a right-aligned attribution, which suits an epigraph.
Read the guide: Text Messages, Callouts, and Written Notes · Read the guide: Preserved Lines
Footnotes
Insert a footnote with right-click › Insert › Footnote (⌘⌥N). Its style in the Format editor sets the marker (numbers, lower- or upper-case Roman numerals, lower- or upper-case letters, or symbols * † ‡) and the numbering, either Restart each chapter or Continuous.
Under Notes Placement, Convert all to endnotes moves every note to the end, and Convert all to footnotes moves them back. Both ask you to confirm first.
Trim size and margins
Trim size and margins live in Project Settings › Print, not in the Format editor, which links there. You can choose from 17 trim sizes in US and International groups; the default is 5.5 x 8.5. Each size is labelled KDP + IngramSpark, KDP only or IngramSpark only, and large-print sizes are marked. These labels are advisory and never block an export.
Bookshaper estimates your page count from the word count and warns if the binding (inside) margin is below KDP's or IngramSpark's minimum for that length, or if the book runs past KDP's maximum page count. The warning doesn't stop you exporting.