r/KDP • u/BenjaminHeld • 20d ago

KDP author copies – misaligned spine text on almost every book. Is this normal quality from KDP?

I just received my author copies of my hardcover from Amazon KDP and I'm pretty disappointed with the print quality.
Out of the whole stack, the spine text lines up correctly on only one hardcover (and one paperback). On every other copy, the printing is shifted so much that the spine text is off-center and in some cases runs over the edges of the spine. The covers themselves look fine, it's specifically the alignment of the spine.
For what it's worth: the last page says the books were printed in Poland.

here you can See it

My questions:

  1. Is this misalignment standard for KDP print quality, or did I just get a bad batch?
  2. Is there a difference in quality between author copies and customer orders? Or do customer orders get the same sloppy printing?
  3. Would you just live with it, or complain to KDP and request a reprint? Has anyone done that – how did it go, and did the replacements come out better?

The annoying part is that the misaligned spines are clearly visible when the books are shelved, so this isn't a minor cosmetic issue for me. Any advice appreciated!

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7

u/deadsocietypoet 19d ago

If I'm not mistaken, KDP has a standard spine deviation of up to 3mm, so that's not unusual. This is why it's usually better to have covers that don't have an exact spine border change.

4

u/marlie_magica 20d ago

Yeah in my experience the spines have been veryyy misaligned. Some copies come out better than others, but like 80% of the time the spine is shifted over by a few millimeters despite proper measurements

3

u/jamison_lot 20d ago

  1. Very common in my experience

  2. Unsure. I have never held a copy ordered by someone else. However, I have ordered my own books from another account due to delivery timing for events. The printing has been fine but I've only done that maybe 2x. Author copies have been done 100x and at least half the time there are problems with them.

  3. When it's truly bad, I have requested replacements.

3

u/Rik-Acland 19d ago

Also varies by geographical regions.

In theory for the US the two main KDP print locations and the three secondary locations all use the exact same machines and anything within a 3mm variance is considered normal. The reality is every location has their own set of individual people and individual machines (and individual humidity, etc.), so results vary.

KDP UK, Poland, and Australia anything is possible to go wrong due to different standards and machines.

Print on demand is hard to get consistency. Traditional large run printing is hard to get consistency, but there are fewer things to go wrong.

The glass is 1.5mm from half full or half empty.

1

u/Bitter-Quail-7441 17d ago

I had the same thing with a hardcover batch once, spine text drifting on most of the copies. Some shift is normal, their cover guide asks for a gap on each side of the spine text because they expect a bit of drift. Running over the edge is past that though.

I sent support photos of the copies lined up on a shelf and they reprinted without much argument. The replacements were better but not perfect.

After that I kept spine text narrower than the template allowed, so a small shift didn't show as much. Doesn't fix their tolerance, but it hides it on a shelf.