Problems with KDP – Error processing interior

We have accidentally turned into experts in KDP publishing at eQuality Time, so it’s always interesting to find a problem we haven’t come across before.

The book we’re looking at is actually my own book, but I’m using it as a case study.

I recently found a typo in a book I published so I corrected the manuscript and went to upload a new version to KDP. In theory this is a big advantaged of KDP – as soon as you spot an issue you can correct it and all future copies of your book are corrected.

However when I went to upload the new version I got this:

“Error processing interior – There was a problem processing your interior. Please check your file and try again.”

That’s an extremely unhelpful error message. In increasing desperation I tried the following things:

  • Upload the same PDF to a fresh new title in kdp – also failed.
  • Find the original version of the PDF from first publication and upload – also failed
  • Try a different browser with original version – also failed.
  • Try publishing a recent WWW – totally fine.

What does this suggest? Potential ideas include:

  • That kdp has changed it’s internal systems and something about my PDF now trips a problem detector that it didn’t before
  • ???

Other things to try:

  • Cut out half of the book and see if it causes a problem (and then cut out the other half)
  • Try on an entirely different operating system (my laptop in this case)

Work go in the way before this to be properly investigated, but when I came back to it after two weeks the modified PDF was accepted meekly without problems, which suggests that either Amazon was having problems of it’s own or that some reboot or other system event cleared up my system in some way. If the error turns up again, we’ll update this post.