My Kawaii Japan book has finally been accepted by Apple’s iBookstore, after 3 rejections. My Tokyo Shopping Guide was accepted everywhere first time so I was unprepared for this and had enormous fun (not really) figuring out what changes to make. I have a big epublishing post to finish later but I thought it might be helpful to post about this separately.
REJECTION #1: THE TITLE
This is the most annoying rejection as it comes with the helpful explanation of ‘the title or author does not match the cover image’. Being pretty sure I’d spelled my own name correctly, I could only assume they wanted me to add the subtitle, which is dumb but whatever.
REJECTION #2A: IMPROPER CAPITALIZATION
Turns out I guessed the title issue correctly but I wasn’t conforming to Apple’s personal capitalisation wishes.
“The first letter of all words in the title, subtitle and author name should be capitalized, except for the following words: a, an, and, for, from, of, or, the, to. The first and last word of the title and subtitle should always be capitalized.”
Okay, fine.
REJECTION 2B: THE COVER
Who wants to play Spot The Difference? At the top of the post is my print book cover and above is my new iBookstore-only cover. My cover was basically rejected for being square as it must fit their exact dimensions. Everywhere else is happy for me to have a square cover but not Apple. They horrifyingly suggested I just stretch the image. What the actual hell? They’d rather have a horrible stretched image than the actual proportioned cover of the book?! Please don’t do this. If you get this rejection and have no designer and are clueless about Photoshop, please email me and I will resize your cover for free.
While resizing my cover, I realised I was being set up for another rejection, as the capitalisation on my cover image wouldn’t match the Apple-ised new title. So, I basically designed a whole new cover. Something to consider next time I design a book/zine cover I might potentially sell as an ebook.
And then it got accepted, woo! You can download a free sample from your iPhone or iPad through the app and you can view my iBookstore page here (it’ll take a few days to appear for all countries).
I hope I actually sell some copies now, after all that. And I hope this helps someone else. I always thought Amazon would be the picky ones but they were no trouble at all. More on that whole process another time.
