Publishing

This is the last mile: turning a finished book into files a printer will accept, and being sure they are right before you upload them.

1. Print format and platforms — KDP, IngramSpark, Barnes & Noble and Lulu, and how they differ.
2. Measuring the interior — the one number everything else depends on.
3. The release board — the checks, and why some of them refuse to go green.
4. The release bundle — every target, rendered and zipped.
5. Exports — PDF, EPUB, DOCX and covers on their own.

What this product does and does not do

It produces the files. It does not upload them.

There is no KDP integration, no one-click publish, and no account linking. You download a bundle and upload it yourself, in the store's own dashboard. Anything suggesting otherwise about this product is wrong.

What it does instead is make sure that when you upload, it is accepted: the trim is one the platform prints, the page count is inside its range, the spine matches the interior, the margins clear the gutter, the barcode zone is respected, and no text is sitting in the bleed.

The principle behind all of it

Nothing is marked ready on the strength of a guess.

• A page-dependent check will not run at all without a measured interior. It reports that it needs one rather than quietly using an estimate.
• A check that cannot be evaluated reports "couldn't measure" — never a pass.
• A sign-off is bound to the page count it was given, and un-ticks itself when the manuscript moves. A cover approved at 312 pages is about a different book at
• A spine width shows where its paper caliper came from and when that source was last checked.

Third-party spine calculators disagree with each other and with the platforms' own published figures — in one case by enough to fail a cover outright. That is why every number here carries its provenance, and why the board sometimes tells you it does not know rather than guessing.