Pages are the skeleton of your book. Before you write a word or generate a single illustration, it helps to know how pages are added, reordered and dressed — because everything else sits on top of them. This guide covers the page strip, page actions, templates, backgrounds, layers and book format.

The page strip

Along the bottom of the Editor, the page strip shows your whole book at a glance: the Cover first, then every page as a thumbnail, in the order a reader will see them.

Click any thumbnail to jump straight to that page.
The page you are editing is highlighted, so you always know where you are.
Press + at the end of the strip to add a new page.

Think of the strip as your table of contents while you work. If a book feels lopsided — three dense pages then a bare one — you will usually spot it here before you spot it on the canvas.

Adding, duplicating and reordering pages

Select a page and a small row of page actions appears above the canvas:

Action	What it does
Reorder	Move the page up or down, changing where it falls in the story.
Duplicate	Copy the whole page — layout, text boxes and images included.
Copy	Copy the page so you can reuse its contents elsewhere.
Lock	Protect a finished page from accidental edits.
Delete	Remove the page from the book.

Duplicate is the one most people underuse. If you have spent time getting a page just right — text placed, character posed, background chosen — duplicating it and swapping the content is much faster than building the next page from scratch. It also keeps your book visually consistent, which matters more in a picture book than in most other formats.

The cover

The cover is the first item in the page strip and behaves a little differently from the rest: it is what a reader sees first, and it is what shows on your dashboard and in the finished PDF.

Give it the title, the author name and one strong illustration. Resist the urge to crowd it — a cover with one clear image and a readable title almost always beats a busy one, especially at thumbnail size.

Starting from a template

If a blank page is intimidating, open the Templates tool on the left toolbar. Templates are ready-made page layouts — text and image placeholders already arranged — that you apply to the current page and then fill with your own content.

They are a good way to keep a rhythm across the book: pick two or three layouts and alternate them, rather than designing every page differently.

Coming soon: print-ready templates for Amazon KDP

In development. We are building a set of templates sized for Amazon KDP paperbacks, so a book you make in AnyTale can go straight to print without reformatting.

Each template will show guide lines right on the page — one marking where the paper is cut, one marking how far in your text and characters need to stay. You will be able to see the safe area while you work, instead of finding out something was cropped after you upload.

The templates are designed around the three things Amazon checks:

What Amazon checks	What it means
Trim size	The finished width and height of the printed book. The templates will cover KDP's standard sizes, including the square formats picture books usually use, 8.25″ × 8.25″ and 8.5″ × 8.5″.
Bleed	When a book is printed, 0.125″ (3.2 mm) is trimmed off the top, bottom and outside edge. For an illustration to run right to the edge, it has to extend past that line — a 6″ × 9″ book needs a 6.125″ × 9.25″ page. Get this wrong and a thin white sliver appears along the edge.
Margins	Outside margins must be at least 0.25″ without bleed, or 0.375″ (9.6 mm) with bleed. The inside margin, the gutter, grows with page count: 0.375″ up to 150 pages, more beyond that, so text does not disappear into the spine.

Because nearly every children's picture book has illustrations running to the edge, these books almost always need bleed — and if even one page in your book bleeds, the whole file has to be set up for it. That is why the templates handle it for you rather than leaving it as a setting.

Your export is already print-ready. In Export to PDF you can choose CMYK instead of RGB, and set the resolution to 100, 300 or 500 DPI. KDP requires every image to be at least 300 DPI and recommends staying at or below 600, so both 300 and 500 are safe choices. Keep an eye on the finished file size — Amazon's limit is 650 MB, and a long full-colour book exported at 500 DPI can get close to it.

Minimum page count depends on your ink choice: 24 pages with premium colour, but 72 with standard colour — which catches out a lot of short picture books. Full details are in Amazon's guides to trim size, bleed and margins and paperback submission.

Setting the background

The Background tool sets what sits behind everything else on the page. You can choose a plain colour or an image.

A few things worth knowing:

The background is the bottom layer — text, characters and pictures always sit on top of it.
A soft or low-contrast background keeps your story text readable. Busy backgrounds fight with text.
If you want an illustration to act as a full-page scene, setting it as the background stops you from nudging it out of place by accident.

Layers

The Layers panel shows everything stacked on the current page and lets you reorder it. Whatever is highest in the list sits in front.

This is also your first stop when something goes wrong. If an element seems to have vanished, it has almost certainly not been deleted — it is behind something else. Open Layers, find it in the list, and move it forward.

Book format and page size

The top bar has a Book / Resize switch:

Book is the normal editing mode, where you work on your pages.
Resize is where you change the book's format or page size.

You choose the format when you first create the book, and you can see the current page size in the Book menu in the top-left corner — alongside the book type and author — shown as dimensions, for example 960 × 540 px.

Before you resize a finished book: changing the page size changes the shape of every page, so elements positioned near an edge may need nudging back into place. If your book is nearly done, duplicate it first or resize early rather than late.

Rulers and zoom

Two small tools make precise layout easier:

Page rulers — open the Book menu in the top-left and toggle them on to show measurement rulers around the canvas. A checkmark means they are on. Useful when you want consistent margins across pages.
Zoom — the slider at the bottom-right scales the canvas. Zoom in for detail work on a single element, zoom out to judge the page as a whole.

Keeping your assets tidy

The Folders tool organises your saved assets and uploads. On a short book you may never need it, but once you have generated a few dozen images and characters, it is the difference between reusing something in five seconds and hunting for it for five minutes.

Tip: Everything you add lives on a page, and every page is a thumbnail in the strip. If something seems to disappear, check Layers before you regenerate it — nine times out of ten it is simply behind another element.