Googled around a bunch and didn’t find anything. Since I figured it out the hard way, I thought I’d share with the rest of you.
When submitting print books to Ingram spark, you need to provide separate interior and cover files.
To create an interior file that Ingram Spark will accept, get everything perfect in your main formatting app (Scrivener, Word, etc.) then choose File -> Print, and in the print dialog, choose ‘Save as PDF’. To convert the file into proper PDF/X-1, run the script I show below.
To create a cover file, use the same process, but your graphics app (Photoshop, Pixelmator, etc.) probably has its own PDF export function, which you should use.
PDF conversion
You’ll need an open source app called ghostscript. The easist way to get this is to first install Mac homebrew, which you probably should have anyway. Follow the instructions at https://brew.sh/.
Once you have Homebrew installed, grab ghostscript with the following command entered at a terminal
brew install ghostscript
This will churn along for a while, then finish. Finally, enter this command, substituting the name of your saved PDF file, and desired output file. Upload to Ingram Spark.
gs -dPDFX -dBATCH -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -dNOPAUSE \ -sColorConversionStrategy=CMYK -dEmbedAllFonts=true -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \ -sOutputFile=NAME_OF_FINAL_FILE_TO_CREATE.pdf \ NAME_OF_FILE_SAVED_FROM_ABOVE_STEP.pdf
If you found this helpful, please hop on my geeky mailing list to see what else I’m up to. 🙂
UPDATE: one of my files is still producing a ‘missing glyphs’ message after this process. It turns out to come from an invisible character that somehow got in there. If you run into this, click on the blue banner on the error page, which will lead to an annotated PDF. You’ll need to carefully look over this file (in Preview, better than in the browser) and find things that are marked in red. Fix them, and repeat.