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Debugging Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing - Internal Error

I’ve been setting up my next book in Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP.) This is the second book I have published through KDP, and it’s a reasonably straightforward process. 

 I first uploaded a draft of the book and cover months ago to check that I had the formatting right. This is something I recommend doing; if your text layout goes into the trim area, or has some other problem, the upload will be rejected. You want to make sure your design is right before you finish the layout of your whole book.  

  Anyway, I just finished the manuscript and went to upload it and the updated cover. When I did, I got an Internal Error for both the cover and the book. That confused me, as I hadn't made significant changes to the formatting. I tried uploading the previous version of the text and cover—the ones that had uploaded successfully some months ago—and got errors on those too!  

  I tried some different things uploading different versions and managed at one point to get the original cover to upload successfully, but that was as far as I got.  

  At that point, frustrated—and since the Kindle interface wasn’t giving me any hints—I tried googling. I found a support thread where someone suggested printing to PDF rather than exporting to PDF, but I couldn’t do that from InDesign on my Mac. I then tried removing a graphic element from the book text to see if that made a difference; my theory being, keep removing things until the upload works.  

  Meanwhile, thinking that the small increase in page count (6 pages longer!) might have meant that the cover's dimensions needed to be changed, I downloaded a new cover template. Opening that template, I discovered that the new template they now provided had the same dimensions as mine, but was at 400 dpi. The original cover I had uploaded—which had worked—was at 300dpi.  

  I created a new version of the cover at 400dpi and then tried uploading that, and lo and behold, both the book AND the text was now accepted.  

  Weird.

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