Oh Amazon, how you do love to change things on us writers. Just as I was getting the hang of Createspace, learning the process, mastering the behind-the-scenes, they scrapped it and moved us all over to KDP.
Thaaaaanks.
Fortunately, if you haven’t gone through it yet, it’s quite a simple process. You click “okay,” and KDP kind of does the rest for you. I can’t complain.
I did, however, run into some issues with the formatting of the new paperback I made, so figured I would share my experience with you in case you run into something similar.
I used inDesign for the first time to format my paperback interior (that was a whole lot of joy that I’ll share in a separate posts once I make sure it all worked out). My book is a lengthy 610 pages, so I made sure that my gutter was .75 inches. I triple checked. Yet I kept getting an error message that KDP wouldn’t accept a gutter of less than 0.75 inches.
You can imagine my frustration.
And I confess it took me longer than it should have to realise why I was getting that error message even after I checked my dimensions: it was only flagging three pages. On three pages that had italics at the front of the line, the descender on some “f”s and “y”s had sneaked out past that 0.75 gutter.
Are you freaking kidding me?
And unlike Createspace, KDP does not allow you to push these little things through.
I managed to fix it fairly easily—more of a pain in the butt than anything else—but it did teach me how particular KDP will be with things like this.
Have you learned any helpful tips and tricks with the new KDP paperback platform? Share in the comments below!
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