KDP rejected your book? Paste the message here and find out what it actually means
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R. S. Breed Founder
Rejection emails from KDP and IngramSpark are short, and they assume you already know what "insufficient gutter" or "Color space used" means.
So I made a decoder: https://bervet.com/tools/why-was-my-book-rejected
Paste the email or the message you got from KDP, IngramSpark, Lulu or Barnes & Noble Press. It tells you, in plain English, what's wrong, then links the guide that walks you through the fix and the free tool that checks your file before you upload it again. If the message mentions more than one problem, you get each one, in the order the message gives them.
The ones I see most often:
- Text outside the margins / insufficient gutter: the inside margin has to grow as the book gets longer, so a book that gained pages in editing trips it
- Cover the wrong size: almost always the spine width, because the page count or paper changed after the cover was made
- Insufficient bleed: pictures that should run off the edge stop short of it
- Fonts not embedded: usually fixed by exporting the PDF again with the right setting
It's all done in your browser, and nothing you paste is sent anywhere. If it doesn't recognise your message, post it in this thread and someone will have seen it before.