The release board

The release board is the manuscript's ④ Release. It checks your book against each store you intend to publish on, and it is what stands between you and a rejected upload. (It used to live in the Cover Studio; it moved so that getting a book out happens in one place.)

Where you'll publish

Tick the print platforms and the ebook stores you are publishing on. Your book's own print platform is locked in, because it is the one driving the interior — change it in ① Premise.

Each target gets its own card.

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.

Each print target's card draws its wrap — back, spine and front — at that platform's spine width, so one design can be checked against every wrap it has to print on. Until the interior is measured it says the drawing is at an estimated length.

The three steps

① Typeset and 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 I've checked this wrap

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
• a full cover whose painted lettering was read back and does not match what you typed, or could not be read back at all. A reader can misread, so this warns rather than blocks; it never checks the back blurb (the full cover)

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.

Ebook stores

Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books and Draft2Digital each get a card: the manuscript checks, whether every chapter has a title for the table of contents (a broken contents is the most common reason KDP sends a book back), the cover size against the store's own limits, and what the store tells authors — each with the page it came from and the day it was read.

Apple and Google require the EPUB to pass EPUBCheck, the W3C's validator for EPUB files. Their cards have a Check the EPUB button: we build your EPUB exactly as the download does and run the current EPUBCheck on it. Nothing is downloaded and it costs no credits.

• No errors and the check passes. Warnings are listed but do not fail it — the stores refuse errors, not warnings.
• Any error blocks Apple and Google, and the card shows what EPUBCheck said and where, so you can find the passage.
• Edit the book afterwards and the result goes stale: it was about a different file, so those cards block again until you check once more.
• If the check cannot run, the card says so and it stays unchecked. It is never shown as a pass.

Kindle, Kobo and Draft2Digital do not require EPUBCheck, so their cards do not ask for it. If a check has found errors, though, they show a warning too: a broken EPUB can still misbehave on readers.

A layout book is print only, so it has no ebook cards.

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.