InDesign Insufficient Gutter Space

 I was writing my first novel Spirit of the Wolf, and first book in the 6×9 publishing size when I came across this vexing problem when trying to publish. Adobe InDesign -Insufficient Gutter Space. Amazon said there wasn’t enough room on the inside margin. Oh no, I thought, am I going to have to reformat my entire manuscript?

Repairing Insufficient Gutter Space

So I went into my InDesign settings for columns and margins and tinkered with the settings, a little more room on the inside margin, a little less on the outside. Nothing seemed to work. So I then went to the web, who else might have had this problem. And apparently it was fairly widespread but nobody seemed to have a good solution.

A Closer Look

I took a closer look at the error and noticed some numbers included with the message, what were they? I clicked on one of the numbers and it took me to a page number in the manuscript. Apparently Amazon was giving me the page numbers for the errors. So it wasn’t the entire document. That was a relief, I would not have to reformat the entire book.

Coloring Outside the Lines

As it turned out, Coloring outside the lines might have been a better error message.  When I set up the pages on a few of them the text box went slightly over the edge of the InDesign box. That was enough to exceed the gutter limit. All I had to do was grab onto the inside edge of the text box and bring it back within the InDesign page boundary on the pages that Amazon had flagged.

So there you have it. A simple solution to an apparently complex problem.