When you import a Word document into Amazon, Amazon’s import routine is buggy. If your Word document has a section break – a standard formatting unit – Word chokes on it and creates an extra hard return.
You might not think that an extra hard return is a big deal, but Amazon’s quality team can then penalize you for ‘bad formatting’ because you have an extra hard return in your document – which THEY THEMSELVES CAUSED.
Here is an explanation of the issue and a way to work around it. I have talked with Amazon’s support staff countless times, to document what is happening and what they need to fix, but half of their support team doesn’t understand technical issues and the other half seems to think this isn’t a high priority. So it’s up to us, the authors, to create workarounds so that we don’t have any section breaks in places that might become “too visible” to the Amazon quality review team.
Let me know if you have any questions about this process. If you do run into a section break which MUST be somewhere, and which Amazon then quality-alert dings you for, let me know. I can gather together a group of authors and maybe together we can help elevate this problem so it gets fixed.