“Beginning on February 3rd, in a sweeping effort to ensure better quality eBooks for their customers, Amazon will be placing error messages on content with reported issues, and blocking them from sale. These error messages will remain until a new version of the eBook is updated with all mistakes corrected. The messages are the first penalty in Amazon’s quality control efforts; they may also chose to remove a book entirely…
Amazon makes its decisions based on reports from its customers, i.e. readers. To ensure the best experience in reading your work, we have five areas of key importance you should be looking at … when publishing/revisiting your eBook with Amazon:
• Text
Typos happen. Give yourself time to look over every page, paragraph, sentence, word, and punctuation. The most reported issues are typos, missing letters, letter and number mix ups, incorrect punctuation, and junk characters. You may also run into the issue of unsupported characters, a figure or accent that the Kindle Previewer doesn’t recognize. If you don’t remove these issues your book may be flagged, or removed. To avoid this we recommend getting it in front of other eyes. You’ve read it a thousand times, so you may not catch everything. Try sharing your book with your friends and family, or, as some established authors have done, grow a list of beta readers that get the book ahead of time for free in exchange for a good proof read.
• Format
KDP accepts six document types: Word documents, HTML, TXT, MOBI, EPUB, and PDF. Each one has its own bag of issues, but sticking to the source document and staying away from extraneous add ins (tables, frames, Track Changes, etc) is a good way to avoid mistakes in the final product. To avoid formatting issues after upload, we recommend uploading your document as HTML, EPUB, or MOBI as these file types convert into eBook format with the fewest errors. It never hurts to flip through your book again once it’s available on an eReader, so you can experience the book as a reader and catch any egregious errors.”
Read more: 5 Ways to Avoid Getting Your Book Suspended on Amazon [Written Word Media]
