KDP error messages? Books getting rejected?
It can drive you absolutely crazy. And what's worse,
you often have no idea why or how to correct it.
It can be both confusing and extremely frustrating.
So we're gonna get rid of all this confusion by looking at the top five reasons
for getting your KDP no content and low content books rejected or
getting those error messages when you preview your book on the Amazon KDP
platform. And more importantly,
I'm going to tell you what to do when you get these messages and hopefully how
to prevent them. Now,
if you've not been this channel before then welcome my name's Paul Marles,
and I do videos on how to make it, keep it and grow it.
And that's your money I'm talking about.
So you've uploaded your KDP book and hit the preview button or publish button
only to be faced with an error message or your book being rejected or
no message at all.
It just goes back into draft and you have no idea what's happened or what's
going on.
And the reason you get the messages can often look cryptic and difficult to
understand.
So I've tried to replicate these errors for you so that we can look at them in
more detail, more closely, and I can tell you hopefully how to solve them.
So let's look at problem number one, author names.
You hit the published button,
wait for your book to be published only to notice it's gone back into draft.
And to make things worse you often don't know why,
because you don't get any message at all. Well,
I can help you because the most common reason is your author name,
namely using keywords in the author name,
often trying to get an advantage in the Amazon searches, which is fair enough.
Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't like this.
An example would be using something like mileage logbooks as your
author name, which seems, I know, pretty obvious in terms of using keywords,
but they've also clamped down so that even putting the word notebook in
your author name can stop your book getting published.
Now you might say you see these types of author names already on Amazon. Well,
that could be because they were published before Amazon really started
to clamp down on this.
Before KDP books were published on a platform called CreateSpace.
And I remember back then, keyword author names were all the rage.
Unfortunately, not anymore.
So if your book goes straight to draft, after trying to publish it,
the first place to look is at your author name.
Try changing it and also just do a search on Amazon and make sure your
author name or pen name is not the name of some famous author or brand.
Now next on our errors list is bleed.
And the most common issue is publishing an interior that has bleed,
but not ticking the.
Bleed box. A quick reminder,
a page has bleed if the content goes right to the edge of the page.
This is an example of bleed and this is an example of no bleed.
See the difference? And this is the error you'll get.
You will see this red warning triangle, and you'll get this message.
Now this message is not clear. It doesn't say, you know, fool,
you should have clicked the bleed box. Instead,
it tells you that it's expecting a no bleed sized interior of six
by nine inches,
but you've uploaded a bleed sized interior of 6.125 by 9.25
inches. And this would be a similar message.
If you uploaded interior of size 8.5 by 11 inches,
for example. So the solution? Select the bleed button.
And remember if only one of your pages in the whole book has bleed the whole
document should be sized to have bleed,
and you need to tick the bleed box. Now fortunately,
if you do it the other way around, upload an interior with no bleed,
but select bleed, then that doesn't cause an issue.
Now we come onto the third common error and this is around the issue of margins.
And this one creates a lot of headaches.
The margin is that invisible border around the edge of the page,
that the main content of your page must stay within. Here.
We can see an example where the text has crossed over into the
dotted border and into the margin on the right.
Again, we get the little red warning triangle and in the error box,
it's a bit more clear. It simply says the text is outside the margins.
And this will apply whether your book has bleed or no bleed.
And the solution to this is edit the interior so that all the main content is
within the margins. And you just have to re-upload your interior.
Now I have done a video on margins and bleed,
which I'll leave a link to in the description below and also in my Gumroad shop,
I do have margin templates that you can use to also
help prevent this issue by keeping all your main content within the margin
borders. Now,
what happens if you venture into the margin closest to the spine of the
book. You get a different error. Still the same red triangle,
but this time the error reads your book has insufficient gutter.
Now what the hell is that?
It all sounds like you have to do or redo your whole interior.
And you know, you're confused what you actually need to do to correct this.
Well,
the gutter is just the name for the margin closest to the spine of the
book.
So all you need to do is move your main content over and away from the
inside margin and also check all your other pages in your book.
Don't just correct one page, assume it's.
All going to be okay and then re-upload it.
So now before we go into number four,
if you're getting value from this video so far,
please click the thumbs up button.
It does help get this video to other viewers and it does help the channel out
immensely. So if you do thank you very much. Now onto number four,
and that is the book cover size.
This time you click on launch previewer and it looks like this,
or it can look the opposite and look huge and magnified like
this. So you go back to your software. Quite often,
it curves in Canva and it all looks fine. Looks good.
So what's happened? Well,
the most common reason is you've chosen the wrong units for your dimensions when
creating your document. So to correct this, unfortunately,
you're going to need to create a document in the correct dimensions,
which would be inches or millimeters, which can mean unfortunately,
starting your cover creation all over again. Okay.
Now we're onto the last one, which is embedded fonts,
which for some reason, this has been particularly common of late.
And the error message says that your fonts are not embedded. Now unfortunately,
I couldn't replicate this particular error,
even with the same font that I'd seen causing these issues
in other viewers books. I have no idea why, but I just couldn't replicate it.
So this is what I understand.
It appears that some fonts can be embedded within a PDF and some
not, which may be a licensing issue. They may not be licensed to be embedded,
but are still okay to be used commercially. However,
I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Now,
if you have the license to use a font commercially,
I can't actually see a problem of you using that font. But again,
this is not legal advice. But here's the thing.
The notice you get from Amazon is not actually a warning.
It's just advice that there is an issue with the font that it's not embedded,
and that they've actually corrected the issue for you.
They wrote to a viewer of this channel who inquired about this message.
And that was what they basically said. And so if it looks okay,
you're good to go and you can continue with publishing it. Otherwise,
just consider changing the font. Now,
if you want to know more about preventing these errors,
then here is a video I mentioned earlier about getting your bleed and
margins set up correctly. Thank you much for your time.
It is very much appreciated.
Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and until next time goodbye.