I thought I was ready to upload a book to Amazon KDP, but they rejected it. My file has 1020 pages, and the maximum for KDP is 828 pages. I looked at Barnes & Noble as an alternate, and their limit is 800 pages. To get the book down to those limits is possible, but it would involve making some compromises on content that I'm not happy with, and a couple of people I have asked about it are even less happy with the necessary compromises than I am. There is a point at which I could break the book into two volumes, but I don't see any way to submit and organize it as a single, two-volume set. Neither volume would make much sense without the other, so I don't mind printing it in two volumes but, if I have to do that, I really want to sell it as a set. Does anyone know if this is possible with KDP or Barnes and Noble? If not, is is possible with any other print-on-demand service? Or ... are there any P-O-D services that will accommodate a single book of 1020 pages? Thanks.
Just out of curiosity, is the page limit a quality control/customer expectation thing or is there really a technical limit with their digital format? This brought back a memory of Gary Carson, poker author (R.I.P.) who used a similar discussion to try and humiliate a Usenet user inquiring about buying his book. Don't know if he made that sale...
I don't know. I uploaded the file to KDP, and a bit later I got a message that the file exceeded their page limit. When I then looked it up, I fount that they publish that on their submissions criteria page. That's for white paper -- if you use the cream paper option, the page count is even lower. https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GVBQ3CMEQW3W2VL6#trimsize So then I looked at the B&N site, and they have a limit of 800 pages. Since the B&N limit changes if you choose cream paper, and the cream paper is infinitesimally heavier, it may be a mechanical problem relating to gluing that many pages together.
Oh, I forgot this was for paperback versions too. Too bad there isn't some premium option for larger books with better glue. It's possible books that large just tend to fall apart after repeated opening and closing with the standard printing methods. At least that's my experience with some large non-fiction books, but I also have a habit of leaving them in the car on a hot day.
The issue with a book that large is that, with the binding styles most POD companies use, a paperback that size would start to literally fall apart. Longer books can be printed, but it involves some special tricks that aren't available through any of the big POD companies for self-published authors. Could you choose a larger page size? This, possibly combined with smaller font size and/or micro-content cuts (cut a line here, condensing those three lines into one there) if necessary, would reduce your number of pages to something printable. However, it may also be prohibitively expensive. An 800 page 7.44 by 9.69-inch book comes out to $18 through Barnes and noble. Trad published books use offset printing (which is much cheaper but also requires you to purchase in bulk) to get around that. On the upside, most self-published book sales tend to be ebooks, so going ebook only is always an option.
I was going to say the same thing, since this is non fiction its likely to be used at a desk rather than someone trying to read itin bed, so you could make it bigger and thus reduce the page count
I resolved it by deleting the non-binding appendices from s couple of large sections that are reproductions of official U.S. gummint documents. And then my PDF didn't pass KDP's formatting test -- books that fat apparently require a larger inside margin and a larger gutter. So I changed up the page layout, which messed with my pagination. And since some of the reference docs are free-standing PDFs that get spliced in after "printing" the basic file to PDF, that meant going through the entire book to repaginate the PDF. After which I found a misplaced page break, the repair of which required yet another repagination. After which I found yet another misplaced page break, which will require recompiling and repaginating the entire thing AGAIN. I gotta learn how to write fiction. It would be so nice to do like the king said to the white rabbit and just "Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop."
Update: Apparently IngramSpark can do up to 1200 pages so, if I'm willing to pay to have them do it, I can publish my book in its entirety. How difficult is it to navigate their book setup process? And what format(s) do they accept/require for e-books? Since they seems to not charge extra for an e-book version if it's submitted at the same time as the print version(s), I guess I need to get cracking on making my tome into an e-book. If I do both paperback and hard cover, I know they get different ISBNs, but does each edition require a separate LCCN?
generally you can find codes online to negate their set up charges FREE2020 may still be working, and i know EXPERT is but only for a 50% discount
^^^ Thanks for the tip on their fees. I'll give it a try. Is that a one-time discount? If I have trouble converting the PDF to EPUB and want to come back later for the e-book, can I use a code twice?
generally the codes are evergreen... theres usually a lot more kicking about but they generate them for events and there havent been very many events because of covid if you join the aliance of indepedent authors their members get free set up etc for the duration of their membership
