Content published through Kindle Direct Publishing is held to the high standards customers have come to expect from Amazon. If readers tell us about a problem they've found in your book, we'll make sure you know about it and point you in the right direction to get the problem fixed. The information listed here will help you understand the types of quality issues we see most frequently and will give you an idea of what you should be paying close attention to when building your eBook. For details on making books available for Kindle devices and apps, see Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines.

Note: Since Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) aims to provide the best possible tools for independent publishers and the best experience for readers, we have a zero-tolerance policy for any book content meant to advertise, promote, mislead, or that doesn't accurately represent the contents of the book.

Authors, publishers, and selling partners are responsible for adhering to our content quality guidelines. We’ll remove content that does not adhere to these guidelines and investigate any book with potential poor customer experience or content inaccuracy. We may also request additional information relating to your book before it's available for sale.

Please follow the guidelines below to ensure your book's content, including cover art, metadata, and product description do not result in inaccurate or overwhelming search results, or impair readers' ability to make good buying decisions.

Contents

• Identifying errors
• Reviewing your eBook
• Typos
• Metadata issues
• Unsupported characters
• Cover issues
• Image quality
• Formatting issues
• Links
• Tables
• Duplicated content
• Missing content
• Wrong content
• Content unsuited for reading on Kindle
• Disappointing content
• Companion guides
• Multi-work books

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Identifying errors

It's very important to search your eBook for errors before uploading the original file or prior to uploading a new file after fixing problems post-publication. Some errors may cause a book to be considered incomplete or unusable. We refer to these as Critical Issues. Because Critical Issues significantly impact the reading experience, any Critical Issue will result in the book being removed from sale until corrections are made.

Other errors can prevent the reader from understanding the author's intended meaning. We refer to these as Destructive issues. The most common type of error is Distracting Issues, which briefly remove the reader from the author's world.

The combined impact on the reading experience of a book with excessive Distracting or Destructive Issues can lead to the book being removed from sale until the corrections are made. A moderate amount of Distracting or Destructive Issues can result in the book remaining available for sale, but with a temporary quality warning displayed on the detail page until corrections are made.

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Reviewing your eBook

When you review your eBook for quality issues, we highly recommend that you use Kindle Previewer. This free program allows you to see how your file will look on various Kindle devices and apps. If you're using Microsoft Word to format your eBook, check out our step-by-step formatting guide.

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Typos

Typos are among the most common quality issues customers report. To produce a high-quality eBook, please ensure your book is free of typos. Typos may be caused by a variety of issues: mistyped words, poor optical character recognition for scanned texts, copy/pasting across source documents, or multiple conversions of a source file. Here are some examples of common typos to look for:

Type	Example	Should be
Numbers in place of letters	5arasota	Sarasota
Letters in place of numbers	1o66	1066
Incorrect punctuation	The dog ran,	The dog ran
Soft hyphens	re-peat	repeat
Missing letters	Nothi g	Nothing
HTML tags in place of characters	< sup >®	; ®
Junk characters	•"gainst	Against

Preventing and fixing typos

If there's typo in your eBook, it's important to search for the term throughout the text to ensure all occurrences are corrected. It's also important to review your text for errors of a similar nature. You can fix spelling issues by using the Spell Check in Online Previewer. The search function of Kindle Previewer can also help locate all instances of a repeated typo that need to be fixed. Sometimes improper or dialectic spellings are intentionally used by the author. These are not considered errors. Common examples would include character dialogue. Spelling differences between US and British English aren't considered errors.

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Metadata issues

Make sure your book's metadata doesn't result in inaccurate search results or impair readers' ability to make good buying decisions. Here are common issues with metadata:

• The title, series name, edition, subtitle, volume, or contributor in your file don't match the metadata you entered.
• The title, series name, edition, subtitle, or volume in the metadata contain a URL, keywords, genre descriptions, promotions, references to other books within the category, or spelling errors.
• The keywords and/or the categories do not match the nature of the book content.

See our metadata guidelines.

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Unsupported characters

If your text appears in Kindle Previewer as strings of jumbled characters or boxed question marks, this usually means your book contains an unsupported accent mark or character. To ensure your book doesn't contain unsupported characters, review your book in Kindle Previewer and look for square boxes or jumbled characters like these:

Preventing and fixing unsupported characters

If an unsupported character is present in your book, it's important to look for this issue throughout the text, as one unsupported character usually indicates others. Use the search function of Kindle Previewer to locate all instances of an unsupported character. Learn more about supported characters. 

Critical issues

Content uploaded in unsupported languages won't display properly on Kindle devices and will be removed from sale. See the languages we support.

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Cover issues

A high-quality cover image may have an impact on a reader's decision to purchase an eBook. Here are some of the most common issues with covers:

• The cover either has extra space in the margins or is too large and doesn't fully display
• The cover image is blurry
• The cover is missing
• The cover image is inserted into the manuscript file, causing an error
• The cover includes references to advertisements or promotions (e.g., "free")

Creating and adding a cover

Check out our guidelines for creating eBook covers. 

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Image quality

Having clear, readable images in your book is an important part of the reader experience. Images with text can be a problem if the source quality is poor, so make sure the text is readable on Kindle by previewing it in Kindle Previewer. Also make sure that the images in your book aren't blurry. It could be annoying for the reader and may impact their understanding of your content for images that require high levels of detail.

Critical issues

 Books that are entire scans may be rejected upon submission or removed from sale, as they become unreadable in print and on Kindle devices, where readers won't be able to change text size.

Manga, comics, children's picture books, etc. are excluded from this requirement. A small amount of scanned or image captured text is allowed as long as it is legible, and pertains to the overall content. For example, small excerpts such as image captions, complex mathematical formulas, and/or handwritten letters. 

To publish your book, you'll need to update your interior file to replace scanned or image-captured text with reflowable text, and resubmit the book for publishing.

Other quality issues include blurry images and images with illegible text.

Ensuring high-quality images

The best way to ensure your book has clear images is to choose the highest possible quality in your source images. Learn about guidelines and best practices for image formatting.

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Formatting issues

Formatting issues may affect the visual or layout level of an eBook and can include problems like extra spacing between paragraphs or forced text justification. Formatting errors in your eBook may prevent readers from customizing their reading experience to their preferences, and also may include issues that cause text flow to be unintelligible or confusing. To produce a high quality book, please ensure your book has proper formatting. For the best reader experience, we recommend uploading your book content in a reflowable file format such as DOC, DOCX, or HTML.

Ensuring correct formatting

An effective way to view your eBook's formatting is to preview it with Kindle Previewer. This tool can help you identify formatting errors before you make it your available for sale. Please see our step-by-step formatting guide for tips on formatting in Microsoft Word. Check your whole manuscript for similar issues because formatting errors tend to occur throughout the book. For example, incorrectly set left or right margins would appear on each page.

Critical Issues

• Body text rendered as bold, italicized, underlined or hyperlinked text
• Extra body text margin padding that is more than 1/4 of a screen wide
• Primary content is oriented in landscape mode without any detail page disclaimer
• Body text not set to default color
• Forced white text or forced black background that causes text to be unreadable. For example, forcing a code such as Font = white will cause text to be unreadable while reading on a white background mode or on an e-ink device.
• In-line page numbering is present

Page numbers entered within the book file break the flow of the reading experience and must be removed.

Here are some examples of other formatting issues:

• Forced alignment of body text
• The size of the body text is forced, causing it to be larger or smaller than standard text sizes
• Body text incorrectly changes size
  
• Bullet points missing from a bulleted list
• A list has bullets which appear on a different line that the list contents
• Missing list formatting

A best practice is to preserve the reader's customizable reading experience by not forcing formatting for text.

Lists without proper formatting can be unintelligible to the reader.

• Incorrectly added line break
• Missing indication of paragraph separation (indentation or single line spacing between paragraphs)
• Missing line break that indicates a section or scene change
• A hard page break in the middle of a section or chapter
• Extract or block quote not differentiated from body text

Additional or missing breaks may confuse the reader and break narrative flow.

• Sidebar text interrupts a sentence, paragraph, or section
• A footnote interrupts a sentence, paragraph, or section
• An image interrupts a sentence or paragraph.

Improperly inserted sidebars, footnotes, or images can fragment the reading experience, leading to confusion.

• Extra body text margin padding that is less than 1/4 of a screen wide
• Double spacing between each paragraph
• Consistent incorrectly added line padding between section/chapter headings and first paragraphs

Readers should set their own reading preferences and not have to page forward more than needed.

• Split monograms; the first letter of each chapter in your book should appear on the same line as the rest of the word.
• Individual paragraph incorrectly rendered as bold, italicized, underlined or hyperlinked text
• Forced black text or forced white background that causes text to be unreadable. For example, forcing a code such as Font = black will cause text to be unreadable while reading on a black background mode on color devices.

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Links

All links in your book should navigate correctly to the place where the reader would expect them to go. The reader should also be able to navigate to the locations listed in your book's Go To menu (such as cover image, beginning, and Table of Contents). Please test links, including Go To items, on your Kindle device to ensure the links in your book navigate to their intended places before making your book available for sale. If you don't have access to a device, Kindle Previewer is a helpful tool that will reproduce how content will appear on a device.

Preventing Linking Issues

Broken or incorrect links usually occur when a mistake has been made in the link URL or an incorrect link location has been pasted in. Check the HTML or inserted links in your text to correct this problem. Below are some examples of linking issues we see in books.

• A Go To item link that does not work
• A link in the Table of Contents (TOC) that does not work
• A link at the beginning that takes readers to a TOC at the end of the book
• A link outside the TOC that takes readers to unrelated content at the end of the book
• A link in the TOC that does not follow the chronological order of content appearing in the book
• An unlinked footnote
• A prohibited external link
• An external link that does not work
• An internal link (TOC, Navigational Control File from XML (NCX), or other) that does not link to the correct location
• Reference to an unlinked page number
• Missing Logical Table of Contents (NCX)

Warning: Unnecessary or confusing hyperlinks, misplaced Tables of Contents (TOCs), or the addition of disruptive content that takes readers away from the main content of your book can result in a poor customer experience. If the formatting of a book results in a poor experience or genuine reader confusion, or is designed to unnaturally inflate sales or pages read, we will take action to remove titles and protect readers. This also includes disruptive or unnecessary enticement to click on elements within TOCs. Continued addition of these types of elements in your titles could affect your account status, up to and including termination.

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