InDesign printing for KDP book cover and manuscript etc

[Matthew298838430uos]

I've been trying to print my book to Kindle - KDP for several weeks one of the most frustrating things I've ever had to do. I thought this program would make life easy. There are so many variations when you try to print. Despite having the correct measurments InDesign doesn't stick to the measurements.

How do you print a cover for example when its 3 pages it only gives you the measurementes for one and not combines. Why hasn't Adobe made things easier for doing books on Kindle??

[Matthew298838430uos]

Hi Eugene

This is my file with settings

[Matthew298838430uos]

Description Width (in) Height (in)
1 Full Cover 17.302 11.94
2 Front Cover 8.27 11.69
3 Safe Area 8.145 11.44
4 Bleed 0.125 0.125
5 Margin 0.125 0.125
# Description Width (in) Height (in)
6 Spine 0.512 11.69
7 Spine Safe Area 0.387 11.44
8 Spine Margin 0.062 0.062
9 Barcode Margin 0.25 0.25

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

This —

— is wrong in several ways.

A correct cover PDF would be cover art corner to corner on a layout the size KDP is telling you to use, no blank margins, no crops, no line of text below (whatever that is — can't read it).

Traditional printers can work with any physical layout and impose and cut it down as needed. Automated systems like KDP need an *EXACT* printing master, as described.

[Matthew298838430uos]

Im following the kindle requirments and youtube videos on how to creat a front cover. Since updating to the new InDesign I haven't been able to get my margins etc to line up. Something is wrong. When I spoke with Kindle they told me over 500,000 publications are being done a day. It's a major publishing house and Adobe software should be able to handle this. Why is the not working? It must be a setting!

How else can I get you to check my setting?

This shouldn't be rocket science

[Matthew298838430uos]

Is Eugene here today?

[Matthew298838430uos]

can anyone assist with this?

 Or do I have to go else where ?

[Peter Spier · Accepted solution]

I downloaded your file and your spine seems to be too narrow -- .387 instead of .512. Looks like youve set the spine width to its safe area rather than full width.

[Matthew298838430uos]

Hi Peter

Thanks I thought I'd fixed that. I've been printing it out as a JPG image then creating a new document with the cover page diamensions and printing it as a PDF. i'm trying that now to see how I go. Thanks for your help

[Peter Spier]

You'll kill the quality of the type by exporting to .jpg.

If you fix the spine, exporting to PDF from InDesign including the bleed and no marks should give you your correct dimensions.

As an alternate, set up a new single page file at 17.552 x 11.94 and copy all the content from the existing file and paste into the new one.

[Matthew298838430uos]

I stilll can't get it to fit on kindle this turing into three weeks now I think theres something wrong with  adobe indesign there are several options to print to pdf which one is it

Is there a youtube video withh all the setting one by one on this?

Matthew

[Matthew298838430uos]

Does anyone have the proper setting to export to pdf that work for Kindle?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Matt, I am on a limited keyboard at the moment so can only manage short answers. I will try to give a more substantive answer later today if one is still needed. 

All politeness intended, you're simply not following KDP's very precise instructions in managing the InDesign layout - I point to the spine width issue as one example. No, this is not rocket science, but it does demand a fairly high level of ID skill and the ability to put all the pieces together to KDP's precise needs... and somewhere, there's a gap in your knowledge that's keeping these two elements from connecting. 

It's not Adobe's fault, or Amazon's.

One or more of us here can walk you through to success, but I think we're past where one fix or another will do that. 

Do-over time. 🙂

[Matthew298838430uos]

Thanks James I know your trying to help but two here and still no further down the track.

You have what I've uploaded let me know what else you need something is wrong in the export settings

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

The problems begin with the layout. There are no settings that can change those.

Basically, the whole layout needs to be the KDP size, with the correct full-width spine. Anything else won't work.

[ash37199307fwox]

Ok guys, here's one for you, and I'm starting to wonder if there actually is a solution for this!

So I'm working on a reasonably high quality book (as good as it can be within KDP limitations) and it's 8.5" square... so obviously when you add a spine, that means that KDP needs it slightly wider than it's height (to fit the extra width for the spine obviously). Trouble is, Indesign automatically decides that the longer size means that it has to change width to height, so no matter how I set it up, it will always be 'portrait' (if I set it to landscape' it automatically reverses dimensions)... this means, no matter how I lay it out, it always looks wrong to KDP's 'bot' - ie it always has the longer edge upright, to effectively make it portrait - and so get's rejected; have you guys ever struck anything like this?

Any solutions?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

First off, KDP quality is... if not excellent, then very good, if you choose your options well. I was long an adamant opponent of PoD, but that was in the days when it looked like a Kinko's employee in a hurry to get home turned them out, with stiff paper, crooked cover trim and lousy printing. I have to look closely to tell my current KDP editions from earlier trade-printing ones. (No, it's not really up to coffee-table art book quality, but that's what Chinese print services are for. 🙂 )

I am not following your chain of logic here at all. If the book is 8.5 inches square, set up the pages to be 8.5 by 8.5. Period. You don't need to allow for or accommodate spine requirements; KDP does that as part of the imposition, printing and binding process. The ONLY things you should have to do are —

• Set up the pages to exact trim size (8.5 inch square, in this case).
• Add 1/8 inch bleed to the three outer sides if you have any bleed content.
• Keep all 'live' content — mainly text in any form, including graphical — within KDP's boundary of about 3/8 inch. Your margins should be wider — one inch inside, half inch outside, half inch or more top/bottom.

Nothing else should be needed.

I am also not 100% sure KDP supports landscape printing; in my tortured days wasted on the KDP forum I seem to recall many who wanted that layout and were told it can't be done. Or that it's limited to one trim size (6x9?) and has special submission requirements. You might want to check the available trim size page and other formatting guidelines to make sure (1) you can do the book landscape and (2) to follow KDP's relatively simple, if limited layout options precisely.

[ash37199307fwox]

HI James, thanks for getting back... actually I'm a reasonably experieinced Indesign user - printed a magazine for a number of years.

"If the book is 8.5 inches square, set up the pages to be 8.5 by 8.5. Period. You don't need to allow for or accommodate spine requirements";  unfortunately think you might be wrong on this one: the book is set up for 8.5" x 8.5" but KDP wants the spine width to be included in the cover itself [as it needs the width to 'wrap around' the cover (including spine).

The error message says width 'not expected' - needs to be 17,447" (8.7235" x2) - which is obviously wider than the standard 8.5 (plus bleed etc) - that's the problem....

And as I said, Indesign simply can't accommodate this, as it wants to make the longer edge 'portrait'.  Obviously I've also tried simply extending the width of the content wider than the width of the document set-up, but unfortunately the KDP bot simply goes by the underlying Indesign set-up, which like I said, automatically 'turns it' so the longer edge is the 'depth'!

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Okay, roll back here — you're talking about the cover layout. I still don't grasp the problems you're encountering but it's probably from trying to overthink the process. General design experience is good, but when it comes to book layout, there are all kinds of oddities, and when you push that further to "so E-Z your dog can do it!" KDP, the hurdles multiply.

The solution is quite simple. Go to the spine width calculation page. Enter your book data. Download the generated template. Place it as a background layer in InDesign (and lock the layer). Now make everything from the net page size to the margins and bleed and so forth match the template. Don't try to outguess or outhink or clever-up the process from there; it's not needed and you end up in a dead end that the KDP system won't accept.

There is absolutely no reason ID shouldn't manage and export a 17x9 page. Those of us who do books and cover layout do it all the time.

Actually, I'd strongly recommend the 3-page layout method if you aren't using it/haven't used it. I used to be adamant about single-page layout until some wiser heads here beat sense into me. You can find a fully annotated template here, if you're interested.

Happy to answer further questions, but I think you're a ways down a wrong approach and should consider backing up to a simpler one.

[ash37199307fwox]

Ok thanks James, and I must admit I've always worked in portrait before; thought a couple of screenshots might clarify:

1: you can see in set-up - document is in landscape and width is 8.724 in; 

2. in this one you can see the effect - Indesign seems to have automatically converted it to portrait and the depth is now higher BUT not the width!

... or am I missing something here?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I can't make any sense out of your information; none of it matches with how a KDP page and cover should be laid out. I think the portrait-v-landscape issue is irrelevant and ID may just be assigning the landscape tag to a page wider than tall.

In any case, your page size should be 8.500 by 8.500, with appropriate outside bleed assigned if you are using bleed. Every other aspect here is... off-track. You don't need to give your pages odd sizes or try to pre-calculate some spine or gutter value. It's all really simple, actually — but the KDP instructions are poorly written and it's easy to get tangled up in "fixing" things that don't need fixing. (Many of of the submission errors, for example, have nothing to do with the actual problem; having live content too close to the edge, for example, will generate confusing and pointless errors about adding more bleed.)

Just work to 8.5 square pages and start over with the generated KDP template. You're overthinking the whole process. 🙂

[ash37199307fwox]

yep been there James (that's where I was at 3 or 4 days ago) - this is the screenshot of the error msg KDP gave when I did that - definitely wants the width to be great than the height!

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Um, okay. I'm going to bypass a lot of editorial comment and just ask if you read any of the KDP guideline or tutorial materials — which are not very good as a whole, but do cover the basics — such as this page:

• https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201953020

But I'll pass on even asking.

Put simply, a cover is not a single page. It's not formatted or submitted as a single page, just the "front cover." It has to be a wrap layout that produces the sheet of stock you see on any paper/trade book at hand, including front cover, spine and back cover (as well as some horizontal trim space). These elements are not designed and uploaded separately, but as one wide layout.

So your cover submission should be [twice the book trim width]+[spine width, taken from the spine calculation page]+[about a quarter inch bleed/trim space on each side].... which for a slim 8.5 inch book would be about 8.5+8.5+0.375+0.5 or... 17.875 inches. KDP prefers that you exactly match the requested width, set mostly by the spine calculation. And presented for your guidance in the cover template I suggested you download. (The cover needs to be book trim height plus that same half inch, or about 9.5 inches.)

I don't have KDP's help pages memorized, and haven't needed them except for esoteric details for quite a while, but the above page came up with a search for "KDP book cover layout." And KDP's error message was, somewhat unusually, specific and accurate.

Let me know if you have any further questions... but you might read through the relevant basic KDP pages first. 🙂

[ash37199307fwox]

So your cover submission should be [twice the book trim width]+[spine width, taken from the spine calculation page]+[about a quarter inch bleed/trim space on each side].... which for a slim 8.5 inch book would be about 8.5+8.5+0.375+0.5 or... 17.875 inches."

Yep, know all that, which goes back to the original question - why Indesign keeps turning the page around to 'portrait' automatically (as per yesterday's screenshot) when I try to enter slightly wider dimensions (for width), than height - to suit KDP exact requirements?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I have no idea. It's not something I've ever encountered. If I create a 17-wide 9-high page, it stays that way.

I suggest you might have a corrupted or misconfigured file that started from the smaller page size, and some setting got setted that is causing the strange behavior. Start with a new file, defined for the page size and layout of a cover (no, you should not ever include it as a modified page in the interior-pages file). Starting with the 3-page template I noted would be a good method. Downloading the KDP template would be good as well.

[ash37199307fwox]

yep, that might be it James; must admit since it's already designed (to exactly 8.5 square) I have been 'dropping' the cover onto a new 'untitled' document but maybe it is bringing some embedded settings across... don't have access to studio today, but will try re-creating from scratch on the new doc.

cheers