Of all the KDP rejections, this is the friendliest: nothing is wrong with your book's design, and the fix is usually a single setting. It's also the one that hides best, because the PDF looks perfect on your computer — the one machine that definitely has your fonts installed.
What KDP is actually saying
A PDF handles fonts one of two ways. It can reference them — “show this in Garamond” — and hope every computer that opens the file has Garamond. Or it can embed them: carry a copy of the font (or a subset — just the characters used) inside the file itself, so the text renders identically everywhere, forever.
KDP and IngramSpark both require every font embedded, in the interior and the cover PDF. The trap: it only takes one. A single unembedded font — in one chapter heading, a drop cap, a text element inside an imported image — and the entire file is rejected. The font list in your PDF often surprises people: fonts sneak in via pasted elements, templates, and that one decorative title font you used exactly once.
Check it yourself
- Open the PDF in Acrobat or the free Acrobat Reader. (Mac Preview won't show you this — use Acrobat Reader for this check.)
- Go to File > Properties > Fonts tab.
- Read the list. Every font should say (Embedded) or (Embedded Subset) next to its name. Any font without those words is your culprit — and now you know its name.
- Check the cover PDF separately. It has its own font list and its own chances to fail.
That Fonts tab is also how you verify any fix: re-export, reopen, re-check. Two minutes, certainty instead of hope.
Don't want to check this yourself? Send us your interior and cover files and we'll run the full 13-point check — fonts, bleed, margins, spine, all of it — and tell you in plain English what's wrong. The check is free. Get the free check →
How to fix it — per tool
Word (Windows)
File > Options > Save > check “Embed fonts in the file.” Embedding only the characters used is fine — that's an embedded subset, and KDP accepts it. Then Save As PDF. One honest warning: Word for Mac doesn't offer font embedding. If you're on a Mac, open the .docx in free LibreOffice and use its switch (below), or in Pages.
LibreOffice
File > Properties > Font tab > check “Embed fonts in the document,” then Export as PDF. Done.
Pages (Mac)
Pages embeds fonts in its PDF exports automatically in most cases. Export, then verify in Acrobat's Fonts tab rather than trusting it — especially if you used a downloaded font.
Canva
Canva's PDF Print downloads embed its fonts for you, including fonts you uploaded. Export, then verify with the Fonts tab — it takes less time than re-uploading after a rejection.
InDesign
Export with a press-grade preset (PDF/X-1a or Press Quality) — these embed all fonts automatically. The export dialog's summary warns you if any font couldn't be embedded; read that warning screen, it's there for exactly this.
The honest limit
Some fonts are licensed to forbid embedding — the font file itself carries a do-not-embed flag, and exporters silently skip those fonts no matter what settings you choose. If you've embedded everything you can and one font still shows unembedded in the Fonts tab, that's almost certainly why. No setting overrides it: the fix is swapping that one font for a similar, embeddable one in your source document, then re-exporting. The same goes for text baked into a placed image — convert that text to outlines in the image tool, or replace the image.
Or send us the files — the check is free
Email your interior and cover PDFs and we'll tell you exactly what's wrong — in plain English, free, within 48 hours. If it does need fixing, the by-hand fix is $19 and we redo it free if KDP rejects it for a formatting issue we were hired to fix. We rebuild files to be compliant with KDP's published spec — that's the promise we can keep.