Frequently asked questions

Yes. When your book is ready, Heritage Press takes it from there without leaving the studio: upload your book's PDF, choose your binding and paper, add your cover, and order — professionally printed and shipped to your door. Everything you need is inside Heritage Studio.

Printing is priced per copy, and you see the exact price on screen before you order — it updates live as you choose your options. There are never setup fees. (Some services charge around $100 in setup fees per book before a single copy prints. We never do.)

Paperback, hardcover, or clothbound linen with a foil-stamped spine and dust jacket. Professionals can also order the Client Report — a saddle-stitched booklet for client deliverables of 4 to 48 pages.

Yes — just maintain your book's PDF file. Come back any time, upload it, and order additional copies.

Absolutely. Export a press-ready PDF and print anywhere you like. We even provide a true-size cover guide for your exact page count and binding — just make sure any cover intended for use outside Heritage Studio is verified against your printer's specifications.

Heritage Studio has over a half dozen standard print sizes from 6 × 9 in (152 × 229 mm) to 11 × 8.5 in (279 × 216 mm) in portrait, square, and landscape options — plus custom sizes and margins if you're printing it yourself.

Production takes 3–5 business days, and shipping can be up to 13 days depending on the shipping option you choose — though delivery often beats the projected dates. For holidays, it's best to get orders in three weeks in advance; standard order-to-door estimates don't apply during those times.

A GEDCOM (say “GED-com”) is the standard file format for family tree data — it ends in .ged and holds the people in your tree, their relationships, dates, places, and sources in one file. Nearly every genealogy program, from Ancestry to RootsMagic, can export one, which is how you move your research from one program into another. To create your book, you just export a GEDCOM from wherever your tree lives now and upload it here.

Never. Your uploaded file is stored exactly as it came and is never altered. Corrections you make in the studio are kept alongside it, and when you export, we write a fresh GEDCOM with only the corrections you choose to keep — your original stays untouched.

Ancestry, FamilySearch, MyHeritage, and desktop programs like RootsMagic, Legacy, and Family Tree Maker — any standard GEDCOM file.

Heritage Studio supports publishing projects of any size, with no known restrictions on how large your tree can be. However, most of the book configurations we offer have a maximum page limit near 600 pages.

That's your call, with real controls: privacy is off until you turn it on, and when you do, you choose the treatment — show a placeholder, withhold names, limit the facts shown, or omit living people entirely — with an age threshold and per-person exceptions.

Standard GEDCOM files don't carry photographs. MyHeritage exports include photo links that expire about a week after export — so when you import one, we offer to fetch and store your photos right then. Otherwise, add photographs any time through your Media Vault, at full resolution — you can import multiple images and documents at one time.

Yes — export a GEDCOM whenever you like: your original file plus whichever of your corrections you choose to keep.

You do. Your tree and photographs are private to your account, and you can delete a project at any time — we offer you a complete backup first.

No. Choose a numbering style from a menu — Register, NGSQ, Henry, d'Aboville, Ahnentafel, and more — and the studio handles the numbering, citations, child lists, and indexes to publishing standards. If you know the standards, you'll find them done right; if you don't, you don't need to.

Everything. The typeset book itself is editable — every person, every paragraph, every page, live on screen. The book reflows as you work.

Yes — unlimited book projects. Different ancestors, different family lines, different styles, all from the same tree.

Yes. Every citation from your file rides with its fact and prints as proper numbered notes with a full bibliography. You can add, edit, or delete any citation as needed.

Yes. Write directly into the book, place photographs and documents from your Media Vault, and set full chapters of your own — or the Heritage Storyteller's — anywhere they belong.

Heritage Storyteller uses AI to take all of your documents, notes, records, and manuscripts, combines them with the applicable GEDCOM information, and applies the prose style you’ve selected to produce the most compelling biographies in the industry. Heritage Studio also optionally uses AI to weave in world and local histories to align with each person’s timeline events, creating a richer, more complete report narrative.

No. Your entire book — importing, numbering, editing, charts, indexes, covers, printing — works without using the AI at all. It's there when you want a story written or a document read, and invisible when you don't.

Credits are included with every plan and are spent only when the AI works for you — writing a chapter, reading a document, building a timeline. The cost is shown before anything is written. Building, editing, and exporting your book never use credits.

No. When you ask the AI to write or read something, your material is used to fulfill that request and nothing else — it is not used to train AI models.

Every plan includes the full studio — every canvas, every report, every export. What scales between tiers is monthly AI credits and storage capacity.