Check your book before you publish

Before Write makes your files, it looks the book over and tells you anything worth knowing—an unaccepted change, a missing copyright page, a picture that will print fuzzy. This page is about reading that list, and about proofs: quick looks at your pages while you're still working.

Where to find it

Open the book and choose Publish (in the Book menu, or the Publish button in the toolbar). The list is in the Preflight card. It updates when you switch between Print PDF and EPUB, since some checks only matter for one of them.

Screenshot: the Publish window, with the Preflight list showing a mix of ticks, notes and a warning.

Reading the list

Each line has a mark beside it:

• A green tick means that check is fine.
• A grey i is a note—something you might want, like a table of contents or a list of your other books at the back. Leave it if it doesn't suit this book.
• A yellow ! is a warning, worth a look before you upload: a chapter with no words, chapter numbers out of order, no cover for the ebook.
• A red ! is a stop: something that would make the file wrong.

Most lines say what to do about them, and where. You can still publish with warnings; they're there so nothing surprises you later.

The preflight is always about your book as it is right now. What a finished file is like—whether it passed EPUBCheck, how big it is—belongs to that file, so you'll find it under Files instead (see below).

Open changes

The first line is the one that matters most. If any scene has suggested changes that nobody has accepted or rejected yet—from an editor, a co-author or an AI—Write prints them as though they had been accepted, so the file matches what you see when you read the book.

Usually you'll want to go through them first. If you're happy to publish as things stand, tick Publish anyway: the open changes will print as though they were accepted, and the Publish button becomes Publish anyway.

You may also see a line about scenes an AI wrote that nobody has read yet. That's a gentle nudge rather than a stop: worth a read before the book goes out.

Proofs: a look at the pages while you write

At the top of the Publish window are two links:

• Proof this chapter opens the chapter you're in, set exactly as it will print, in a new tab.
• Proof whole book does the same for the whole book.

A proof is just for looking. It isn't saved in your files list, it doesn't need the preflight to be clear, and you can make as many as you like. It's the quickest way to check how a chapter opening, a picture or a scene break really falls on the page.

Once it's built

Your finished files are listed under Files, newest first, each with its page count and a Download link. They stay there, so you can download an earlier one again.

Under the newest file of each kind, Write tells you what that file is like: its size (an ebook over Amazon's limit is marked in red), and for an ebook whether it passed EPUBCheck—the same validator the stores run when you upload—with any errors or warnings it found. These are about that particular file. If you've changed the book since it was made, you'll see Built before your latest changes: publish again and the new file gets a fresh check.