Self publish in Korean (or any other non-KDP language)
Further to my piece on publishing books from a Chromebook via KDP, I thought — gee — I can use Deepl on my book for my Korean-speaking friends!
The first step, of course, is to get a beautiful Korean PDF with the proper mirrored margins. I tried handing the PDF directly to Deepl, but it printed it in a really big font that doubled the page count. Yuck. So I had it to the DOCX file, but then it lost the mirror margins, so I had to reset them.
The second step is to translate the cover text in Deepl and add it to the cover in Pixlr, export it to a JPEG, and then change the DPI to 300 in https://clideo.com/dpi-converter and convert it to a PDF in Cloudconvert.
Then — get it printed. Not on KDP! They support Welsh (1/2 million speakers), Frisian (ditto) and Japanese (even more complex fonts) but not Korean (82 million speakers — 뭐야 씨발). I tried telling KDP my book was actually in English, but it caught me out during the final review and rejected it.
There is a fair amount of chatter about urging support for Korean on the KDP Community, but no.
After a search, I found that Barnes & Noble will do Personal Books that I hoped would require less rejection, so I took my Content and Cover PDFs to them.
Uploading my Contents PDF failed as it lacked embedded fonts. (KDP will automatically embed fonts). I was told MS Word has an option for doing that, but B&N rejected that too — apparently MS Word doesn’t do it properly. I could not find any free online tools for that, and I was not about to purchase Adobe Acrobat Pro, which won’t run on a Chromebook anyway.
The answer — use the Linux command line with GhostScript! This little line will do it!
$ gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf
Yippee! That worked.
Uploading the cover 300dpi PDF was also initially rejected. I had made it 13 inches wide. No, no, no — must be 12.718!
Finally, after a very quick review process, I was informed I could order copies. Yay! But my friend lives in Canada, and they don’t ship to Canada. But that part I can handle myself.
