Apple Pages program and KDP-amazon

Question

Apple Pages program and KDP-amazon

Are writers still having a problem uploading stories written with the Pages program to KDP?

I have tried file formats like EPUB and PDFs and they all get screwed up somewhere along the line, like wrong fonts, inconsistent dropcaps, spacing errors, etc.

About the only one that works reasonably well is Word, and even the results there make me feel ashamed.

For instance, I set chapter heads in American Typewriter (in Pages) and they appear on KDP as bland small Helvetica. Page breaks don't work properly either.

Is there a fix? I have been trying for two weeks to format a 110,000-word novel. It looks great in Pages but like crap on KDP, no matter how I try to transfer it. I am getting desperate for a fix. I love Pages but may have to give up on it for this reason.

This seems to be a long-running problem but why? Don't the clowns at Amazon know that my best course of action will be to publish through Apple Books instead? It's not my preferred course of action but is there a choice? Or is it a sneaky plan by Apple to keep me away from KDP for just that purpose?

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 15.1

Posted on Jan 14, 2025 8:44 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Jan 15, 2025 5:08 AM in response to Cinnamoncrumbs

Your fellow users here cannot answer Apple or Amazon-related "why" questions.

Amazon has a section entitled Paths to Getting Your Content on Kindle in the Kindle Publishing Guidelines that explain how PDF may not be the best choice, and how Word .docx document content is converted to different Kindle eBook formats based on that document content.

Pages is not a Word clone and there is a translation of Pages content into the exported format. The Finder's Quick Look will not present an exported Word document in the same manner as it would appear when opened directly in a current version of MS Word or LibreOffice Writer. Apple does not guarantee the translation process for accuracy either.

A Word document created and saved in a current version of MS Word may be better suited as input to KDP as it uses exact, original Microsoft internal styling and Word has a Save preference allowing one to embed the actual document fonts, not font references, in the document. Those font references may be substituted by Kindle, but not the embedded document fonts.

There is an Apple Books for Authors community available.