It seems like just yesterday- my first Amazon KDP failed manuscript experience. I thought my book was NEVER going to get published, and the frustration made me want to cry! (Between you and me - I did cry! It was that painful). So I get it!

I understand how many aspiring authors feel when they encounter this part of the KDP publishing process. There are a few guidelines that your manuscript will need to meet in order for your upload to be successful, and it can be tricky to make sure everything is in order.

There are five main reasons why an Amazon KDP manuscript upload can fail; Let's take a closer look at each of these and how you can avoid or correct them.

I know this doesn't seem like a likely reason, but if you opt to use tables in your manuscript, there are a few guidelines you will need to follow to ensure that your KDP upload does not fail.

The general guidelines to bear in mind when using tables are:

Another major reason manuscript uploads fail on Kdp is faulty images. To ensure that the images in your book are suitable for upload on Amazon, be sure to follow the following guidelines:

The third main reason for failed manuscript uploads is inaccurate metadata. The metadata of a book includes things like its title, author name, and so on.

Inaccurate information or information contrary to the details filled in on the details page will be flagged during upload and cause it to fail. 

Faulty metadata can result in inaccurate searches and hamper readers' ability to make informed purchasing decisions which is the last thing Amazon or you, as the author, needs. Here are a few common metadata issues you should be sure to avoid:

As a self-published author, it's important to make sure your manuscript is free of typos and other errors before you upload it for publication on KDP. Not only will this ensure that your readers have a positive experience, but it will also help to avoid any problems during the upload process.

Clear and concise writing is essential in order not to lose any content or meaning in your work. Therefore, editing your manuscript thoroughly before you upload it is essential to ensuring the underwriters at KDP find no glaring faults in it.

The most common missing content issues to look out for before uploading is: 

Upon conversion, if your book contains text that appears as strings of question marks in boxes or unreadable jumbled characters it will typically result in a failed upload. 

Usually, this is because your book contains an accent mark or character that is not supported. Kindle Previewer will help you determine if your book contains unsupported characters. A few common things to look out for are: 

As a general rule of thumb, always have a fluent speaker carefully review the results of an automatic translation tool to ensure they are acceptable. Most auto-translation tools, through easy to use, are often inaccurate or may even ad unwanted characters. 

Here's an automatic translation example of a quality issue:

का चयन करें… colTwo colun1,

तालिका Truncate विवरण

It's easy to see why someone might be tempted to use scanned pages from a physical book instead of typing out the text themselves. After all, it can be time-consuming to transcribe a book, and it's not always easy to format the text in a way that looks good on an eBook reader.

However, this approach is almost always a recipe for disaster. Scanned pages are often of poor quality, and they generally don't meet Amazon's standards for Kindle eBooks. As a result, your manuscript may be rejected if you try to upload it with images instead of text.

To fix this, follow the above steps to create a new Word document in the correct format. Then try to re-upload your new file.

References

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G202124410

KDP Support Runaround: Upload Failing (kdpcommunity.com)

Paperback manuscript file size limit? (kdpcommunity.com)

Review of Amazon KDP Self Publishing - Writing Tips Oasis

https://ogungbireadedolapo.medium.com/problems-uploading-my-book-cover-on-amazon-kdp-c1541317ebbb