Author vs. KDP

If you’ve ever thought publishing a book was glamorous, let me stop you right there. It’s less celebrating with champagne, and more like a basketball game where the publisher is the referee - calling bad calls in a Boston Celtics game! And me the player (writer) yelling at the referee for that bad call, but it’s falling on deaf ears like fans screaming their TV's!

First quarter: The pages! I wrestled with margins, fonts, images, and spacing, like slippery Knicks fans wrestling for the last of the beer & nachos at the concession stand. Every time I thought I had a slam-dunk, KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) issued a replay review. It was like KDP was a broken shot clock that keeps resetting just as you line up the play.

Second quarter: The publisher’s notes! KDP kept coming back with the same emails: “There is text outside the margins, this doesn’t meet our standards… Standards? I’ve seen less scrutiny at basketball game security. At one point, I half‑expected them to pat me down and ask to see inside my pocketbook!

Third quarter: The book cover. Ah yes, the infamous template they supply! It's a small template, one with a red band around the edges. At first, I thought the red band was like a warning zone. So, I stretched my cover design only to the inside of the red band, because I thought it was an indication of what’s out of bounds.  KDP offers it up like it’s a playbook fallen into the hands of the other team. I trusted it would give me all the plays, but it turned out to be more like a GPS that swears you can drive straight through a lake! What I didn't know was that I had to stretch my cover design beyond that red band, so the design will "bleed", to ensure the cover would wrap around the edges of the book during printing. However, without that knowledge, I thought I scored that ball like Larry Bird with his famous lay-ups. I felt like it would be the highlight of my day, like a great moment in basketball that gets replayed for decades. I thought I had control like Larry Bird always did. Spoiler alert: I didn’t. 

I airballed it so badly, it was as if the crowd went silent. Weeks went by of shooting and missing, like watching overtime after overtime with no one scoring. I just couldn’t seem to score the size they were looking for. All the back and forth with the publisher and their emails saying resize the cover. the emails arrived at ungodly hours —11:27 p.m., 3 a.m.— as if the KDP live reviewers were vampires working the graveyard shift while drinking my blood! Each email said the same thing: “Your cover doesn’t meet bleed requirements.” Bleed? At this point, the only thing bleeding was my patience.

Fourth quarter: The submission. It was like the Celtics have less than 2 minutes left in the game! It’s a close score-an absolute nail-biter! As my husband always says when he’s watching a Celtics game like that- “I can’t breathe!” I was tired, I felt like throwing in the towel but I had to push through. Finally, I said let me go look at something else- I opened the KDP previewer Friday morning to preview my cover after one of their emails said to resize (yet again!) That’s when I had my epiphany. The red band template I had been using all along wasn’t the real play—it was actually a fake play. The actual court I should have been playing on was the previewer itself and it - was bigger- way bigger than that stupid template they originally gave me. My cover wasn’t even close to the right size- like a basketball players Jersey just shrunk 3 sizes in the wash! But after seeing it-  I knew I had them this time! I stretched that background image so far beyond the edges it looked like Jason Tatum stretching before the big final game as if he was warming up for a dunk contest.

The previewer showed full coverage! No replay review needed. Just victory. I threw that basketball from the 3‑point line and just as that ball went into the basket—the buzzer sounded like Larry Bird draining a clutch three at the Boston Garden with the whole crowd on its feet. The roar was deafening, and just like that—my cookbook was published! Hot off the press like a panini! Please pass the champagne!

The Takeaway

Sometimes the real battle of publishing isn’t writing the book — it’s surviving KDP’s mysterious, shape‑shifting rules, error messages, and “helpful” automated decisions. But if you can laugh through it, outsmart it, and still hit “publish,” you’ve already won the war.

Takeaway:

Sometimes the real battle of publishing isn’t writing the book — it’s surviving KDP’s mysterious, shape‑shifting rules, error messages, and “helpful” automated decisions. But if you can laugh through it, outsmart it, and still hit “publish,” you’ve already won the war.

Meter Reading: “Author vs. KDP: The Holiday Cage Match”

Category         Score   Comic Flavor

Absurdity        9.3/10  KDP approving, rejecting, re‑approving, and gaslighting you about your own files like it’s running a psychological experiment.

Tech Chaos     10/10   Buttons disappearing, previews lying, random warnings popping up — it’s like trying to publish a book inside a haunted vending machine.

Relatability     9/10     Every indie author has fought this battle, but you narrated it like a woman who has seen the other side and lived to tell the tale.

Visuals 8.8/10 You vs. the spinning wheel of doom, you vs. the “Your cover is unacceptable” message, you vs. the phantom formatting error — cinematic.

Timing 9.1/10  Each twist hit right when the reader thought the chaos was over. Classic “just when you think you’re safe…” comedy pacing.

Punchline Rhythm     9.4/10  Every paragraph had a laugh beat — especially the parts where KDP acted like it was doing you a favor by breaking things.

Overall Humor Score: 9.1/10

You can purchase my e-cookbook on amazon in eBook format here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G6X2MNKZ

UPDATE as of 12/22/25 - The Hardcover book is coming back soon – Unfortunately, I temporarily pulled the hardcover book off Amazon, because KDP continues to test my patience …. there were pixel issues in printing the cover that they did not catch – but I did! It will return back on amazon shortly.