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.
Screenshot: the Publish window, with the Preflight list showing a mix of ticks, notes and a warning. 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 or get it refused, such as an ebook over Amazon's size limit.
Most lines say what to do about them, and where. You can still publish with warnings; they're there so nothing surprises you later.
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 I know the open changes will print as though 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. An ebook also shows whether it passed EPUBCheck—the same validator the stores run when you upload—with any errors or warnings it found.