December 2019

Regarding your trade paperback books published by KDP, the question might come up: Are your fonts commercial?

I learned this during a kerfluffle I had with Amazon regarding one of my books. It took a week to resolve, and diverted me from my other book-writing projects, but since I learned a little something about fonts, I thought I should pass this along.

It happened when I updated the content for the trade paperback version of The Complete, Annotated Mysterious Affair at Styles. It was a simple process, and when they sent me the email that it had been published, I went on with my life.

A few months later, while checking something else on my dashboard, I saw that my book was listed as “On Hold.” In other words, it wasn’t on sale. No reason given.

First lesson: Amazon will not tell you when a book is on hold.

Working through the Contact Me section of the dashboard, I had them call me and I explained the situation. I’ll give them credit, when the operator saw that my book was On Hold, he passed me up to a senior support specialist. Over the next few days, I talked to three of them, because they were passing messages to the tech people about my problem.

The tl;dr edition: Once I understood what their problem was, I solved the problem.

Here’s how.

During the review process, KDP examines the fonts used in the book to see if they’re approved for commercial use. Two of mine weren’t. They told me which ones.

This surprised me. I wasn’t using them for the book.

Then I looked at the interior PDF to see what fonts were embedded in it (to get there, click on File, then Properties, then Fonts).

Turns out I was wrong. There they were.

I checked my Word file. It seems that, I created the Styles file by taking the file for another book, cleared out the text, and replaced it with the new book. But when I did that, blank spaces retained the non-commercial fonts. They did not appear in the book, but remember that in Word, blank spaces have a font assigned to them as well.

And it was these blank spaces that tripped the Font sensor at KDP.

I searched for those fonts and replaced them with commercial fonts, and the book went through just fine.

Are You Using Commercial Fonts?

Here’s how to find out. If you’re using Windows, the Fonts folder can be found by going to the C: drive, opening the Windows folder, then the Fonts folder.

Once there, look for the Font Embeddability category. Chances are, it’s not there. You’ll have to turn it on.

Hover the cursor above the subject line (which displays “Name”, “Font style”, “Show/hide”, “Category”, etc.), right-click, and select “Font Embeddability.”

Here’s what it’ll look like:

Every font has a status in this column: blank, Installable, Editable, Print and preview, and Restricted.

If a font is Restricted, it does not have a commercial license. If it says anything else, you’re good to go.

Second lesson: Even if you have a free font, even if it was given to you to use for commercial purposes, it doesn’t matter if the font is Restricted.

I had downloaded the font from a free site. It had no author attached to it, and no way to reach him. He had even commented that the font was free and could be used for any purpose.

But what he had done was create it using professional software that automatically saved the font as Restricted.

It doesn’t matter what I can tell KDP. All they can see is the Restricted flag, and I had no way to remove it.

(Actually, I lie. Back in the 1990s, someone wrote a program that flips the Restricted bit to Installable. A notable typographical firm made him remove it from the Internet, but he left the source code online. It’s a bit hinky, and I wouldn’t use it on a licensable font, but it’s there.)

As you know, I searched the Word document for every appearance of the banned fonts and eliminated them. I made the PDF of the interior and checked it to make sure that the fonts were gone and uploaded the new file.

A day later, KDP emailed me and reported that the book was for sale again! Which was great, but I still lost sales.

Conclusion

Like I said, chances are, this may be a problem you’ll never run into.

On the other hand, now you know how to check your fonts to make sure they’ll pass the test. If you put your fonts to the test, you won’t wake up one day to find your books not selling.