You know how sometimes it’s said that writing and self-publishing a book is like giving birth? Well, I had an interesting experience bringing a book to press recently. We were using Amazon’s KDP. Now I must say that previously, before they changed their name from CreateSpace, I’d found them fairly reliable and both my clients and myself always found their printing satisfactory. 

Well, this most recent book proved to be a challenge, getting it through KDP’s approval process and printed.

Initially, on their first, little review they put PDFs through when you first upload, both the PDF of the book’s interior pages and the PDF for the back cover/spine front cover were approved. There was much joy.

Then we got our first error message. The problem, it seemed, is that I wasn’t handling bleed they way they did.

See, what I do is I put a bleed amount—9 points on each pages top, bottom, and outside. This allows full-page art to spill over—“bleed” off—±the page, so that when the large sheets that 8 or 16 pages (usually) are printed on gets cut into individual pages and bound, there’s no white space showing on the edges of pages that are supposed to have full-page images on them.

And the book I was working on—Proof or Consequences! A Humorous Look at Typos, Misspellings, Wrong Words, and Misplaced Punctuation—had a fair number of full-page figures. It’s a book that consists of a clipping from some publications, often a newspaper, with a typos, misspelling, wrong word, or misplaced punctuation in it. These by themselves are kind of funny to “wordie” types—authors, editors, book designers, proofreaders, and like that. Additionally my author-client would have a clever, sometimes wisecrack-y comment accompanying the clipping. Sometimes there’d be a cartoon illustrating the silliness. And yet again sometimes the cartoon would be full page bleeding off the page. 

Well, instead of using the bleed as I’d set it in my InDesign files, KDP wanted no mention or selection of “Bleed.” They simply wanted the trim (page) size expanded on the top, bottom, and outside of my pages to include what would have been that 9 point bleed amount.

Additionally, they insisted that on pages where there wasn’t full-page art bleeding off the page I needed to move all text and the clippings inward, away from where I’d placed them. I should say here that I was very careful, I thought to keep things in a safety zone that would allow printing.

We want back and forth like this with each revised set of PDFs I uploaded. For weeks it lasted. It didn’t help that a couple of times I had to revise for last-minute “catches” by my client.

It was infuriating because it was impossible to understand what the issue was after that initial time. I mean, I made the changes they demanded. Additionally, it seemed to me that, since each revision would be done to the latest “corrected” page size, that I was increasing by that 9 points over and over again.

I really never did figure out what was happening. I just kept doing what they wanted done.

Then one morning I woke to an email from my client that the PDFs had been approved and the book would be available for print and up on Amazon.com.

And so it is.

I don’t know what happened, because the last I knew was they were again suggesting it wouldn’t be approved. But just like that it changed. Overnight.

It is a fun book.

https://www.amazon.com/Consequences-Humorous-Misspellings-Misplaced-Punctuation/dp/0578817446/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=proof+of+consequences&qid=1616182627&s=books&sr=1-1