Affinity Photo export book cover to PDF for Amazon KDP

[Commontater]

Hello all.

I designed my paperback book cover using Affinity Photo 2 (not Designer or Publisher as I am less familiar with them).

Amazon KDP has specific requirements such as using their template, and exporting as a PDF. 

The Affinity Photo 2 form for exporting has a number of settings, and I am a bit confused. Here is Amazon's checklist for the cover:

1. Save as a PDF. Your cover must be a single PDF that includes the back cover, spine, and front cover as one image.
2. Flatten all transparencies. These can cause the file to print with missing or distorted content. Consult your software's documentation to learn how.
3. Embed your fonts. Consult your software's documentation to learn how.
4. Remove crop marks, color bars, template text. Crop marks are lines showing where pages should be trimmed. Color bars are strips with a series of patches used to ensure color balance during printing. Also, remove any template text, PDF creation guides, or software references.
5. Ensure your cover image meets the minimum resolution of 300 DPI (dots per inch).
6. Optimize PDFs. Optimization is useful to reduce your file size, allowing for higher performance when transferring, uploading, viewing, and printing the files.

 

Questions:

Should I flatten the entire PDF?  If so, what settings should I use?

How do I embed fonts?

How do I optimize the PDF?

Thanks.

 

[Chris26]

Hallo Commentator,  

1. Flatten?  If you click on Rasterize everything, this flattens all.  Otherwise just save your Inmge in Photo with a different name via save as, and flatten all layers.

2. Fonts are automatically embedded, see last entry bottom of your screenshot.

3.  As far as I am aware, pdf optimize is just another fancy way of saying, compress Jpegs for example.  If you have a hundred Tiff files , I would not want to upload them, just save as Jpegs for example.

I am doing the same as you, but for another company, and this is what I understand.  Personally, unless you use Adobe acrobat which I have done, I would NOT click on any Affinity preset and leave it at that.  Click on PDF for Print, NOT PRESS READY unless you are rquired to export as CMYK, which is unusual.  Click on pdf for PRINT and change some settings manually that need to be changed.  I do not know KDP's requirements so can not help there.  But you should UNTICK 'allow jpeg compression', and if your images are at 360 PPI (which is a common photographer's resolution) then untick the  DPI and tick 'use document resolution'.   The Compatibility, colour space and document profile are set ok,  and at the moment this is all I can see.

[Commontater]

Hello Chris26,

Thanks for these tips. Very helpful.

I suppose most book publishers will not be using Affinity Photo to create a KDP cover, of course, but perhaps this info will be helpful to others, too.

I chose PDF for print, as you suggest. The cover image was accepted by the bots at KDP, at least as far as I know right now.

Again, thank you for explaining this option-rich feature. :-)

 

[Chris26]

13 hours ago, Commontater said:

Hello Chris26,

Thanks for these tips. Very helpful.

I suppose most book publishers will not be using Affinity Photo to create a KDP cover, of course

 

Just to re-assure you, though I think perhaps you may already realse this I don' know.  I have studied the top 4 self-publishing printers and can say that t does not matter what software you use to create the product, it's how you output that product that is crucial.  The only exception I came across that some companies did not like was their note on NOT using microsoft word to output to PDF.  (To be expected really).  Hope all goes smoothly at KDP.