The release board

The release board lives in the Cover Studio's third stage. It checks your book against each platform you intend to publish on, and it is what stands between you and a rejected upload.

Publish targets

Tick the platforms you are publishing on. Your book's own primary platform is locked in, because it is the one driving the interior.

Each target keeps its own state — its own measured page count, its own spine, its own sign-off. That is not redundancy: two targets of the same manuscript legitimately have different page counts, because their gutter rules differ.

Show this wrap on the canvas re-points the Cover Studio at a chosen target, so one design can be checked against every wrap it has to print on.

The three steps

① Render & measure the interior

Typesets the book and counts the pages. See Measuring the interior.

Nothing else on the board runs until this is done — the geometry checks are not merely hidden, they are not evaluated, because a check run against an estimate is worse than no check.

② Establish the spine

Where the platform's caliper is published and exact, this passes for free and shows you the source and the date it was checked.

Where it is approximate, you are asked to read one figure off the platform's own cover template generator and enter it. Your number outranks anything computed.

The confirmation is bound to the page count and the paper. Change either and it un-sticks, for the same reason the sign-off does.

③ Mark verified

Your own sign-off that you have looked at the cover and it is right.

It un-ticks itself when the page count changes. A tick that survives a page-count change is a lie: a cover approved at 312 pages is about a different book at 340. The board remembers that you approved it, and at what length, so it can say so.

Blockers and warnings

Blockers stop a release:

• trim not supported by the platform
• page count outside its range
• text in the bleed
• text overflowing its box in a layout book
• an ink and binding combination the platform does not print
• an AI-content declaration below what can be demonstrated

Warnings do not:

• text within a quarter inch of the trim
• spine text below the minimum page count — the renderer drops it silently
• an image whose resolution is low for print
• copy over an approximate store limit

Checks that cannot be evaluated

An image whose dimensions were never recorded reports "couldn't measure", not "fine".

This is the rule the whole board is built on and the one worth internalising: a check that cannot run is never reported as a pass, because a fabricated pass defeats the only mechanism that would have caught the problem.

AI content disclosure

Three questions — text, images, translation — asked every visit, because that is what the platform does on every republish. A stored answer nobody looks at is how a book that gained AI artwork last month gets resubmitted under last year's answer.

Evidence is derived from the layers in your book, so deleting the AI cover deletes the evidence. It is a lower bound: an uploaded image leaves no trail, so "no evidence" is never reported as "no AI". Declaring more than can be demonstrated is always fine; declaring less is a blocker.

What to watch for

• Ready needs all three: no blockers, a spine established, and a sign-off that is not stale.
• Do the board last. Every step is invalidated by editing the manuscript, so running it before you have finished writing is work you will do twice.