How to make an EPUB e-book yourself

An e-book isn't a PDF. It's text that flows and adapts to the screen — the reader chooses the typeface and its size, and the words reflow to fit. That's why a proper EPUB reads well on a phone and on an e-reader alike, while a PDF stays a frozen, tiny page.

Akapitly makes a finished EPUB from your manuscript in one click. Below is the whole path — and the parts that stay on your side.

EPUB, not PDF — and why it matters

An EPUB is reflowable: the text has no fixed pages, so it looks equally good on a small phone and a large e-reader, and bumping up the font size simply pours the paragraphs further along. A PDF works the opposite way — it's an image of a specific page, which on a phone shrinks to an unreadable size. For prose, the format is EPUB.

The exception is Kindle, which has its own format — but even there you upload an EPUB to Amazon KDP and it converts the file for you. In practice, one good EPUB covers most stores.

A clean text first

An e-book is like any export: what you put in is what comes out. Before you click Download EPUB, sort out the chapters and the typography. Chapters matter twice over, because the EPUB builds its table of contents and section breaks from them. The typography (dialogue, quotation marks, ellipses) is handled by the same Format button as in the other profiles.

Exporting the EPUB

Switch the profile to e-Book. From that point the geometry settings — margins, page size — stop mattering, because the text is reflowable. From here you have two routes.

The first, simpler one: a finished EPUB file. The second, for those who want to polish a little more: reflowable HTML for the Calibre program, where you finish the job.

Always check it in a reader or in Calibre

Before you send the EPUB anywhere, open it and look through it. Check that the chapters break where they should, that the table of contents jumps to the right places, that the dashes and ellipses (—, …) render correctly, and that nothing falls apart at a small or a large font size.

The easiest way to do this is in Calibre — the free, standard e-book program. You open the file in it, preview it as if on a reader, and while you're there add a cover and fill in the book's details.

What Akapitly won't do (and that's fine)

Akapitly gives you a clean, valid EPUB with a chapter structure and a table of contents. It won't do three things for you: the cover, the full metadata (ISBN, description, author, categories) and distribution. The cover and metadata are easiest to add in Calibre, and the selling happens on a publishing platform. That's a natural division of labor — a text tool makes the text, not the marketing.

ISBN and where to publish

An ISBN usually isn't required to publish on the big stores — Amazon will assign its own identifier (an ASIN), and most retailers let you list without one. It becomes useful for wider distribution, for libraries, and if you want a single identity for the book across stores. One number identifies one format, so an EPUB and a print edition need separate ISBNs.

Where you get an ISBN depends on your country: in the United States they're sold through Bowker (MyIdentifiers), in the United Kingdom through the Nielsen ISBN Store, and many countries have a national agency that issues them free or cheaply. Some aggregators also hand you a free ISBN when you publish through them.

You upload the finished EPUB to a self-publishing platform — that's a topic of its own, and you should check each one's current requirements as you go. The common choices are Amazon KDP (global reach; the EPUB is uploaded and converted to the Kindle format), Apple Books, Kobo Writing Life, Google Play Books and Barnes & Noble Press. To reach many stores at once you can go through an aggregator such as Draft2Digital or IngramSpark (the latter also handles print and library distribution). You can also sell the file directly from your own site — no middleman, no commission.

One well-prepared EPUB will serve most of these places. The rest — cover, blurb, price, promotion — is work around the book, not on the text itself.

Before you make an e-book, it's worth having the text buttoned up: there's a separate guide on formatting a manuscript, one on dialogue in English prose, and one on how not to sound like a bot — AI Detox.