Like myself, you might be a self-publishing author on Amazon.

I’ve published all 3 of my action & adventure novels on the Amazon platform in Paperback, e-book & Kindle Unlimited versions.

Admittedly, there’s been times when I’ve quite literally pulled my hair out, trying to get a manuscript to upload to Amazon.

Most of the issues come at the ‘Preview’ stage, when Amazon usually says it doesn’t like a font you’ve used. The fix is to replace it and re-save and re-upload the document.

So it was with todays uploads.. that I’ve spent most of the day on.

A good friend has been helping me with a more thorough ‘2nd pair of eyes’ on proof-reading, and spotted one or two grammatical errors that had previously sneaked through.

Shouldn’t be a problem to update the live manuscript – cover will still fit – same number of pages etc…

I write in Apple ‘Pages’, but Amazon doesn’t accept that file type so you have to either save to DOC (word) or PDF.

Now strange things happen to your formatting.. chapter titles suddenly appear on LH pages and some paragraphs break / split apart. Plus the contents section goes out of sync with the page numbers.

I uploaded the ‘word’ doc version no problem, but the Amazon previewer found a font (Lucida Sans) it doesn’t support.

Because I’m not used to the intricacies of Word, I had to Google how to replace all occasions of the font for something else. In this case Arial.

Successfully completed, re-saved and uploaded to get the same error.

So I spent the last two hours searching for a hidden return or space that is in the Lucida font.. no joy!

I’ve tried saving the document I know to be corrected as a PDF, back to Word etc. Still the same propblem.

I’ve tried deleting history for today.. no change!

Finally, I tried another upload of the Word. doc version and it mysteriously worked.

So perhaps there was nothing wrong with the files and the uploaded was being ‘flaky’ or over-subscribed at the time.

Anyway, all sorted now.

The moral is to keep trying your manuscript upload, if you’re sure you’ve attended to all the previewer errors.

Good luck.