Quote:
Originally Posted by SigilBear
Wow, I didn't know that.
<snippage>
P.S. How do they "punish" you? They never sent me any warnings or error messages.
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I knew if I said this--in an attempt to be somewhat humorous but accurate--somebody would make hay with it (cough, cough, wheeze,
Red, cough...)
Well, because a) suddenly, not only will your font not work, but if you embeddded it, it will be stripped from the file, and b) see a) and you might get the ubiquitous Kindle Quality Notice, AND, c) in addition to that, the Dreaded on-sales-page customer warning, about BAD or POOR formatting.
That part? Not bloody humorous, so you know. Not a bit.
The FG specifically say, no forced fonts, and the way that Amazon means that is that, NO fonts on the html body tag. If you do that, you stand a very good chance of having the fonts literally ripped out of the ePUB/MOBI/Zipped HTML/etc., package. I've seen it not only remove the fonts, but ALTER the CSS in the book, removing any mention of said fonts.
The Warning?
Trust me when I tell you, they are getting mighty goddamned
liberal with it.
I have a still (also) trade-pubbed client, published a scholarly bio book on a Golden Age Hollywood Celebrity. The client is a known author, biographer of such folks, etc. The book's been up on Amazon in Kindle format
since 2011. No worries, and it sells a nice moderate number, as would be expected given it's not about a bloody Kardashian. The book is a backlist book--originally published by Knopf in H/C.
In 2011, we received a scan and OCR of the original printed work, and made the book. (n.b.: everybody
please remember, we just make the ebooks,
we're not an editing service, at all.)
He recently gets a Nastygram from Amazon (aka, a Kindle Quality Notice). Somebody found
THIRTEEN (13) WHOLE scan/text errors, right? Our of
595 original print pages.
595. Not 20, or even "only" 100 printed pages,
nearly 600 pages. So Amazon sent the Kindle Quality Notice. Okay, so, that's not so bad.
But wait, there's MORE!
They also put a
Quality Issues Reported WARNING, up on the book's sales page. (And yes, my client tells me that the sales volume has dropped off, since same appeared. Not a total standstill, but still...).
I've attached a screenshot of the actual notice, from his Amazon page. Now, I've seen them a LOT worse, mind you, about formatting errors, etc., around Amazon, but still. Warn off prospective buyers? For 13 whole typos, in 600 pages, honestly, that seems pretty (*&^%$#@
draconian. I'd bet real money that the Knopf version had 13 damn typos in it,
which is a pretty freaking LOW error rate. (Word count, 233K words. Error count, 13. Error rate: .005579. For the love of mike...)
Offered FWIW, y'all can feel free to ignore me if you want. Don't say you haven't been warned.
Hitch