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I want to start with the thing that took me longest to work out, because if you only read one paragraph of this it should be this one.
The requirements are published. All of them. Anybody can read them. The rejection just does not tell you which one you missed.
So the information is public and the diagnosis is private. That is the whole problem, and once you see it that way the situation stops feeling like a locked door and starts feeling like what it actually is: a checklist you are being asked to run blindfolded.
I was helping publish my father’s books. Twenty-one attempts. I am not exaggerating the number for a headline — I counted, because by about attempt nine I had started keeping notes out of sheer stubbornness.
What I remember most is that it was never the writing. The book was finished. The book was good. I was being stopped by a gutter measurement.
There are twenty-six print requirements. In practice, five of them account for most of the rejections I have seen, mine included.
Your PDF page has to be the exact physical size of the book you chose. Not close — exact. This one catches people who set the manuscript up in one size, changed their mind about the book format later, and never went back to the page setup.
Text has to sit inside the printable area, and the inside margin has to be wider than the outside one because part of it disappears into the spine. The longer your book, the more gutter it needs — which surprises people, since nothing about the file changed.
This is the cruel one, because your file looks perfect on your own screen. It looks perfect because the font is installed on your computer. The printer does not have your computer. If the font is not embedded in the PDF itself, it does not exist.
If an image runs all the way to the edge of the page, it needs to extend slightly past it, because the paper gets trimmed and no trim is perfect. No bleed means a thin white line where you wanted a full-page image — or a rejection before you ever see it.
Screens are forgiving and print is not. An image that looks sharp in your document can be nowhere near enough pixels once it is ink on paper. This one catches people who pulled a picture off a website.
Open your last rejection email and read it next to this list. Then check the five in that order — trim size first, because if that is wrong then your margins are being measured against the wrong page and you will “fix” things that were never broken.
Fix one thing at a time and note what you changed. The reason attempt twelve feels so hopeless is usually that by then you have changed six settings at once and have no idea which of them helped.
I am not going to promise you an approval. Nobody outside Amazon can, and anybody who does is telling you something they cannot know.
What I will say is the honest version: checking your PDF against the published formatting requirements before you upload is what turns a blind resubmission into an informed one. Amazon still runs their own review and makes their own decision. You are just no longer guessing at what they are looking at.
The five above are the ones that catch most people. The full KDP Rejection Decoder walks the rest of them, explains what each rejection phrase actually means, and gives you the order to work in. It is free and it teaches you to do this by hand.
And if you are stuck right now — post your rejection email in the group with what you have already tried. That is what the room is for. It was never the writing.
Caro Viljoen — self-publishing and manuscript formatting · manu2print.com
Manu2Print checks your PDF against Amazon KDP’s published formatting requirements. Amazon runs its own review and makes its own decision. This tool is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by Amazon.
