Catch page layout mistakes before you order a proof
-
R. S. Breed Founder
The upload checks at KDP and IngramSpark look at page size, fonts and margins. They don't look at whether the book is laid out the way a printed book should be, which is the kind of thing you normally only find on a proof copy.
Drop your interior PDF into the print file checker and, as well as the platform checks, it tells you about:
- Chapters opening on the wrong side. If most of your chapters start on a right-hand page and one starts on the left, a blank page has gone missing (or there's one too many).
- Running heads or page numbers at the top of a chapter's first page. Books usually leave that space empty.
- A chapter's first page showing the previous chapter's running head.
- Pages that are blank apart from a page number, and runs of blank pages in the middle of the book.
- Text under 6 pt.
- Margins that move: pages where the text sits in a different place from the pages around it, usually a stray section or page setting in Word.
- Inside margins narrower than the outside ones, which is the wrong way round.
Here: https://bervet.com/tools/spine-width-calculator (add your interior PDF under "Your interior").
These are things worth a look, not failures. A book can break any of them on purpose. The page layout part is the same whichever printer you use, so it's shown once, under the platform cards, and goes in the copied report for your formatter.
Your PDF is read in your browser and isn't uploaded anywhere.