Forty-plus questions, answered.

PagePrinted Studio is a book-making workshop where you start with a theme — a pre-built skeleton like a picture book, a memoir, or a cookbook — fill in a handful of variables that matter to your story, and end up with a print-ready PDF and a physical book shipped to your door. The AI does the heavy text-and-layout work inside guard rails the theme author set, you keep editorial control at every step, and the same source file produces both the digital and the printed object.

No. Themes encode the design choices — typography, margins, spreads, image placement — so what you control is the content: the names, the dates, the photos, the manuscript, the tone of voice. If you do know typesetting, you can fork a theme and edit its layout directly, but that is a separate creator workflow you opt into. The default path is content-only, and every theme has been reviewed against a craft rubric so you start from a strong baseline rather than a blank page.

For a short children's book with photos you have ready, you can be looking at a print preview in roughly fifteen minutes. For a novel-length memoir the writing itself is the long pole — the studio is fast, you are not. After you press the order button there is a sixty-minute pre-press window during which you can cancel for free, then Lulu prints and binds in two to five business days, and shipping adds three to fourteen depending on where you live.

A theme is a parametric template authored by a designer or by us. It defines the page layout, the typographic system, the spread rhythm, the variables you fill in, and the AI prompts that turn those variables into the finished pages. Think of it as a pattern in dressmaking: the cut and the seams are fixed, but the fabric and the buttons are yours. Themes are versioned, and once you start a book you stay on whichever version you began with so updates never surprise an in-progress project.

Every theme renders a free low-resolution preview the moment you fill in the variables — full text, full layout, watermarked. You can iterate as many times as you like at no cost, swapping wording, regenerating sections, swapping photos. The paid step is the print-ready high-resolution PDF, which removes the watermark and is what we send to the press. There is no upsell tier where preview quality is hidden; what you see in preview is what you get in print, only smaller.

You enter the pre-press window — sixty minutes by default, configurable up to twenty-four hours in your account — during which you can cancel for a full cash refund with one click. When the window closes, we commit the PDF to Lulu and you receive an email titled "Your book is on press" with the commit timestamp. After that point the order is firm under EU withdrawal law because the book is personalised; quality issues are still covered separately under our refunds policy.

Three line items: the theme (one-time, optional — many themes are free), the AI render (a small per-book fee that covers the LLM and image-generation calls), and the physical book through Lulu (paper, ink, binding, shipping at cost). We mark up the AI by a fixed percentage so there is no surprise volume surcharge, and the Lulu portion is passed through transparently. You see all three split out at checkout, in your currency, with VAT or sales tax labelled where it applies.

It is not. Every theme runs a sequence of LLM calls to draft text, fact-check it, and lay it out, plus image-generation calls if the theme uses generative art. Those calls have measured token and pixel costs we pay to upstream providers like Anthropic and Replicate. We mark that pass-through cost up by a transparent percentage rather than running tiered subscriptions, so a small book costs a small amount and a big book costs more in direct proportion to the work the AI did.

No. We do not run subscriptions. Pricing is per-book and per-theme, full stop. We considered a "Pro" tier and decided against it because the cost structure is genuinely usage-based on the AI side — charging a flat monthly fee would either over-charge light users or under-charge heavy ones, and we would rather price honestly than bundle. The only recurring thing in your account is your store credit balance, which never expires and accrues only when we credit you, never on auto-bill.

Yes. Every theme page shows a "typical render cost" range based on the last hundred renders of that theme. When you fill in the variables, the preview screen updates that range to a tighter estimate based on your specific inputs — a longer manuscript or more generated images push it higher, a shorter or photo-only project lower. The final number is locked at the moment you press render, and we will never charge above the locked amount even if the upstream provider hiccups and we have to retry.

We have a three-tier policy: self-service store credit for small issues (up to three times per account, capped at the original line value), human review above that cap, and the EU 14-day right of withdrawal for printed books up to the press-commit moment. Premium theme downloads are non-refundable once delivered because you tick the EU Article 16(m) waiver at checkout. The whole policy lives at /legal/refunds in plain language with examples, not legalese.

Four formats today: children's square at 8.5×8.5 inches, photo book at 7×10 or 8×10, paperback novel at 6×9, and A4 portfolio for cookbooks and lookbooks. Each format has a paper and binding profile chosen for the use case — heavier coated stock for photo books, lighter cream stock for novels, perfect-bound or saddle-stitched depending on page count. We deliberately do not support every Lulu format; we support the ones we can actually craft a great theme around.

Practical minimums and maximums vary by format. Children's books work between sixteen and forty-eight pages, photo books between twenty and two hundred, novels between sixty and six hundred. Below the minimum a theme refuses to render because the binding will not hold; above the maximum we route to a heavier binding option and the price reflects it. The theme tells you the count in real time as you write, and the cover spine width updates automatically as the page count changes.

Depends on the theme. Picture books default to hardcover with a printed dust jacket because that is what a four-year-old needs. Novels default to trade paperback because that is the publishing convention readers expect. Photo books offer both, with hardcover marked as a price upgrade clearly at checkout. We do not currently offer leather-bound or cloth-bound presentation editions — Lulu does, but the quality has been uneven enough that we have not added it to the studio yet.

Yes. Every printed book has a paired EPUB you can download for two dollars (covers our format-conversion costs). The EPUB is properly typeset for reflowable reading rather than a flat PDF export, with chapter navigation, table of contents, and embedded fonts where licensing permits. Photo-heavy themes also offer a fixed-layout EPUB option for tablets. The studio does not currently support direct uploads to Kindle KDP from your account — we are working on it; the EPUB you download is valid for manual upload today.

Lulu's standard ranges: 60# cream uncoated for novels, 80# white coated for photo books, 100# cover stock for hardcover wraps. These are industry-typical choices and represent the best print-quality-to-cost trade-off for each format. We do not currently support custom paper specifications because Lulu prices custom orders out of reach for individual books; if and when print-on-demand opens broader paper choices at reasonable cost, we will surface them in the theme settings.

Yes, with caveats. Up to twenty-five copies of the same book is a click in the order screen and the per-unit price drops at quantity breaks Lulu sets. Above twenty-five, write to support and we will quote you against Lulu's bulk programme — the discount steps up meaningfully at fifty, two hundred, and a thousand units. Lead times also lengthen at scale; expect two to four weeks for a five-hundred-copy run versus the usual three-to-five days for a single book.

Yes — fork it. Forking creates a copy you own and can edit freely, from typography choices to spread structure to the AI prompts the theme uses. Forks are private by default and live in your creator dashboard. If you make changes you are proud of, you can publish your fork to the discover marketplace under your own name and earn royalties when other people use it. The original theme stays untouched, and your in-progress books on the original keep rendering against the version they started on.

Yes, for themes that have opted in to RTL. The studio shell, the editor, and the preview all flip mirror-style when you pick Arabic, Hebrew, or Persian. Themes declare RTL support in their manifest; if a theme has only been authored against LTR scripts, the picker greys out non-LTR languages with a tooltip explaining why and suggesting alternatives. Bidirectional text mixing inside otherwise-LTR layouts works through Unicode bidi controls in the editor — paste an Arabic quote into an English memoir and it lays out correctly.

Yes. The editor and the marketing surfaces both respect your operating-system preference by default and offer a manual toggle in the header. Print preview always renders against a paper-cream background because that is what the book will physically look like — dark mode there would lie to you. The dark theme uses the same Workshop Romanticism palette inverted around a near-black ground, with terracotta and sage accents tuned for contrast against the dark surface so the typography still feels warm rather than clinical.

Inside a fork, yes — upload OTF or TTF files in your creator settings and reference them by family name in the theme manifest. You are responsible for licensing the font for embedding in a printed and digital book; commercial use rights vary widely between foundries. For the default themes we have licensed Spectral, Cabinet Grotesk, and JetBrains Mono for unlimited end-user output, which is why they show up across the studio surfaces and inside many of the platform themes.

Yes. Cover and interior are independent variable sets in every theme. You can iterate on a cover thirty times while the interior stays frozen, and vice versa. The cover editor includes spine-width auto-calculation so as your page count changes the spine grows or shrinks without you doing any math. Front, spine, and back are laid out as a single spread you can edit as one piece, with the trim and bleed marks shown clearly so nothing important sits in the cut zone.

JPEG, PNG, HEIC, WebP, and TIFF up to fifty megabytes per file. We re-encode to the colour profile the printer expects (typically Adobe RGB for photo books, sRGB for everything else) and warn you if a photo will print noticeably differently from how it looks on your screen. For best results upload the original camera-roll file rather than a screenshot or a download from social media; we do not upscale aggressively, so a low-resolution source will look low-resolution in print.

Plain text, Markdown, DOCX, ODT, RTF, and EPUB. We parse chapter structure heuristically from heading levels in formatted files and from blank-line patterns in plain text; you can correct the parse in the editor before rendering. We do not yet import PDF manuscripts because text extraction from PDF is genuinely lossy and produces enough errors to be more frustrating than useful — we are tracking a fix using vision-language models but it is not shipped.

Not yet, honestly. We do not accept .tex files as a first-class input format today, and the studio does not run a LaTeX engine on the print pipeline. The accepted manuscript formats are plain text, Markdown, DOCX, ODT, RTF, and EPUB — if you have a .tex source you would need to convert it yourself first (Pandoc from LaTeX to Markdown or DOCX is the path most authors take, with the understanding that complex math environments and custom macros will not survive the round-trip cleanly). Inline mathematical notation written as Unicode characters typesets fine in the body text, but rendered display equations, numbered theorem environments, BibTeX bibliographies, and TikZ figures are not supported in any current theme. Math typesetting and a native LaTeX-to-print path are on the roadmap and not yet shipped; if you have a manuscript that genuinely needs them, the studio is not the right workshop for that book today and we would rather tell you that up front than print something that looks wrong.

Not directly. Books are static objects, and we are not currently building enhanced-ebook formats with embedded media. If you have a podcast or a video diary you would like to turn into a book, the standard path is to transcribe the audio first (we recommend Whisper or Descript) and upload the transcript as a manuscript. Some creator-authored themes for podcast-to-book conversion do exist on the marketplace and handle the transcript-to-prose step inside the theme itself.

You assert ownership at upload — there is a checkbox attesting you have the right to use each file in a printed and distributed book. We do not run automated content-id matching at upload because false positives on private family photos would be a worse failure than the rare misuse we would catch. If a copyright holder contacts us about an infringement after publication, we act fast under DMCA-equivalent processes; the full takedown procedure lives in our legal pages.

The upload widget will refuse it with the size limit displayed. For photos the limit is fifty megabytes per file and a few hundred per book; for manuscripts the limit is twenty megabytes. If you have a genuine large-file need — a fine-art photo book at native resolution, say — write to support and we will turn on a higher quota for your account. We are conservative on default limits because uploading a hundred forty-megapixel RAWs over a slow connection is a worse user experience than choking early.

Not yet, honestly. The studio is built for one book at a time today — there is no class-list CSV import, no per-recipient template fan-out, and no teacher dashboard for tracking a cohort of student books from a single account. A teacher who wants to give every child in a class a personalised storybook currently has to create each book in its own draft, which is workable for a handful of kids and tedious for a class of thirty. A batch-import path (upload a CSV of names plus a template book; we render N personalised copies; you pay once with a per-copy discount) is on the roadmap but not shipped. If you have a near-term classroom need and the manual workflow is blocking, write to support and we will work through it with you by hand; we would rather do that than have you assume a feature exists that does not. The same answer applies to wedding-favour batches, corporate-gift cohorts, and any other one-template-to-many-recipients use case.

Yes. We are established in the EU, our processing complies with the GDPR end-to-end, and you can exercise all your data-subject rights — access, rectification, erasure, portability, restriction, objection — from /account/privacy with no human-in-the-loop. The full policy with our legal basis for each processing activity lives at /legal/gdpr; the short version is we process the minimum necessary, do not sell anything to advertisers, and keep payment data only as long as tax law requires.

Yes, in one click from /account/privacy. Deletion is immediate for everything except the financial records we are legally required to retain for tax audit purposes (typically seven years in the EU). Your books, drafts, photos, manuscripts, and any unpublished theme forks are removed within twenty-four hours, including from our backups within the next thirty-day backup rotation. Themes you have published to the marketplace remain available to buyers who have already purchased them; we delist them from new sales.

From the account you want to keep, go to /account/merge and enter the email of the second account. Both accounts receive a confirmation link; once both are clicked, the merge runs and the second account is absorbed into the first. Books, drafts, themes, store credit, and order history all move across. Past invoices keep their original account label for tax-record integrity. If both accounts have published themes, you keep them all under the surviving account; royalty histories also merge cleanly.

Yes. /account/privacy has a "Download my data" button that produces a zip with every book project as source files (PDFs, EPUBs, manuscript originals, photo originals), your order history as CSV, and your account profile as JSON. The export runs in the background and emails you a download link when ready, typically within ten minutes. You can take that zip to any other tool you like; we have no lock-in clause and no formal claim on your content.

Yes. /account/orders shows every order with a live status — pre-press window open, on press, printed, in transit, delivered — plus the Lulu tracking number once shipping is dispatched. Status updates are pushed by Lulu's webhook to us in real time and surfaced in your account within a minute or two of the change. If you have notifications enabled, you also receive emails at each status milestone; you can tune which milestones notify in /account/notifications.

Apply at /creator/onboarding. We ask for a sample of your design work, a short statement of what you want to make on the platform, and your Stripe Connect details for payouts. Approvals run on a rolling basis with a one-week median turnaround. Once approved, you can fork any existing theme as a starting point, build from scratch using our authoring docs, and submit your first theme for review. The submission review checks against a craft rubric — readability, originality, sound technical structure.

Seventy percent of the theme price on each sale, net of payment processor fees. Theme prices are set by you within a band the platform recommends; you can list a theme for free as a portfolio piece, or up to a hundred dollars for a substantial body of work. Payouts run weekly via Stripe Connect to your bank account, with full per-sale reporting in your creator dashboard. We take thirty percent to cover platform hosting, marketing surface, and the review work.

Yes for ISBN, partially for KDP. We can issue you a free ISBN through our Lulu partnership when you publish a paperback or hardcover — the registration goes through Bowker (US) or the equivalent national registrar. KDP (Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing) is a separate upload you do yourself today; we provide a KDP-ready EPUB and the PDF Amazon needs, but the actual upload is on you because Amazon's terms require the publisher account to be the author's own.

Not as a paid service, no. What we do offer is a discover surface at /discover, a creator profile page at /creator/yourname, embeddable previews you can put on your own site, and the EPUB and PDF outputs in formats compatible with every major retailer. We deliberately do not run a "promote your book to our list" upsell because the platforms that do that tend to overstate their reach. If we ever add marketing services, they will be opt-in and clearly priced.

Yes. Every theme page has an "Embed" tab with copy-paste iframe HTML and a sandboxed JS widget option. The iframe variant is lightweight and respects the parent page's dark/light mode; the widget variant supports a "buy on PagePrinted" call-to-action that opens a checkout flow in a modal. Both pass UTM parameters back to your creator dashboard so you can see exactly which embed locations are driving sales without setting up your own analytics.

Lulu, on demand, from their network of print partners closest to your shipping address. We selected Lulu because their quality at single-copy economics is the best in the market and they print in the US, the UK, the EU, Canada, and Australia, which means most orders ship locally rather than crossing borders. We do not white-label Lulu; the Lulu logo appears on the back of the colophon of every book, which we consider honest disclosure.

Anywhere Lulu ships, which today is the EU, EFTA, UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most of the rest of the world via international post. Domestic delivery in major markets is three to seven business days; international can be two to four weeks. The exact options and prices are shown at checkout based on the shipping address you enter, with the carrier and service level visible per option so you can choose between cheaper-and-slower and faster-and-pricier.

Set by Lulu and passed through at cost — typically four to nine euros for a domestic single book in the EU, similar in dollars for US domestic, and twelve to twenty for transcontinental. Quantity orders qualify for box-rate shipping which can drop the per-unit cost significantly. The full shipping calculator runs against your address at checkout before you pay, so you see the final number including any rural-surcharge or remote-delivery uplifts the carrier applies.

For orders that cross a customs border, duties and import VAT are the recipient's responsibility unless we have explicitly DDP-prepaid the route (we do this for most EU intra-bloc and US domestic routes today). When duties apply we estimate them at checkout based on the destination tariff schedule and label the estimate clearly. The carrier collects on delivery; the actual figure is usually within ten percent of our estimate but can vary with currency exchange and local rate changes.

Photograph the damage, go to /account/orders, tap the order, and request a refund or reprint. The first three requests on your account are self-service and resolved within minutes — choose store credit, refund, or a fresh print, your call. Beyond three or for unusually large issues, the request goes to a human reviewer with a one-business-day median response. You do not need to ship the damaged book back unless we specifically ask; keep it as a curiosity, or recycle it.

Rarely. Lulu, the print partner we ship through, publishes an average defect rate of about 0.5% across their network — roughly one book in two hundred turns up with a binding flaw, a misprinted page, or a colour shift worth flagging. That matches what we have seen on our own orders. When it does happen we reprint or refund no questions asked, from /account/orders, with no return shipping required — the policy is the same one written out in plain language at /legal/refunds. The 0.5% figure is Lulu's published average, not a marketing number we invented.

No. PagePrinted is a printed-book workshop; we do not sell PDFs as a separate digital-only product. Every paid render is tied to a physical book we send to Lulu — that is the whole point of the workshop. What we do include with every printed book is a paired EPUB download for two dollars (covers the format-conversion cost) so you have a portable reading copy alongside the bound object. If you only want a PDF and no book, the studio is not the right tool for you; we would rather say that honestly than sell you a worse version of what we do well.

Yes. Billing and shipping are separate at checkout, and you can save multiple shipping addresses to your account for gifting. Gift orders also support an optional gift note that prints on the inside front cover or on a separate enclosed card depending on the theme. The recipient sees no pricing information in the package; the packing slip shows the gift label and your name only, with the financial detail going only to your email.

Yes. The studio is fully responsive and the editor works on phones and tablets, though long-form writing on a phone is — let us be honest — better in short bursts than for a whole novel sitting. Preview, ordering, account management, and creator dashboard all work cleanly on mobile. We do not have a native iOS or Android app today, and we are not currently building one; the web app on a modern phone browser is fast enough that the native overhead has not earned its keep yet.