Making an EPUB book

You can turn any piece, or a whole series, into an EPUB: the standard ebook format that opens in Apple Books, Kobo, Thorium, and most e-readers. You design the book in The Press and see exactly how it will look before you export it.

Open The Press

Open a piece in the editor, open the More menu, choose Tools, and pick The Press. It opens your work as a finished book: a cover, a title page, your chapters, and a design panel on the side. Everything you change shows up in the live preview, where your book is laid out as framed pages, so you can see exactly where each page ends, the same way the exported file will read.

The Press is open to everyone. You can design and preview freely.

Your cover

A book opens on its cover, so every book gets one.

• Use Design cover in Cover Studio in the design panel. Cover Studio opens right over The Press, with its full design canvas and a public-domain image library from the Met, the Smithsonian, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Cleveland Museum. Close it and your new cover lands back in your book.
• If you already made a cover in Cover Studio (or uploaded one in the piece’s settings), it shows here as your book cover.
• With no cover yet, your book still gets a clean one: your title and author on the theme’s colors, until you design your own.

A landscape image fills the whole cover rather than leaving bars, so most photos and paintings work.

Pick a theme

Themes set the look of your book’s chapter titles, drop cap, and scene-break ornament. Choose from Classic, Literary, Fantasy, Romance, Modern, and Manuscript. The panel shows each one as a small swatch, and picking one restyles the whole book in the preview at once.

Each theme also picks a scene break ornament, the small mark between sections. Want a different one? Pick any ornament under Scene break (a fleuron, a flourish, an asterism, and more), and it replaces the theme’s mark while keeping the theme’s color.

Typography and details

Set your body font (each option previews in its own typeface), the font size, and the line spacing. Turn on Drop cap to open each chapter with a large decorative initial, and Number chapters to add a chapter label. Pick the numeral style: numerals (Chapter 1), Roman (Chapter I), or spelled out (Chapter One).

Under Book details, fill in a subtitle, author name, publisher, language, ISBN, and rights. These become the book’s catalog information, so e-readers and stores list it correctly. Leave author blank to use your profile name.

Front and back matter

A finished book carries more than chapters. Add the pages a reader expects:

• Front: copyright, dedication, epigraph, preface.
• Back: about the author, acknowledgments, also by the author, appendix.

Each template fills itself in from your book details (the copyright page already has the year, your name, and your rights line). A title page is generated for you automatically.

Design each page

Add a page, then choose Design page to open it full-size and lay it out on the page itself. You type your text where it will actually sit and watch the page compose as you go:

• Position on page: place the text at the top, center, or foot. A copyright sits at the foot, a dedication floats in the center.
• Text alignment: left, center, or right.
• Ornaments: add a fleuron, a flourish, or a rule above or below the text, sized how you like.
• Page image: add an illustration above the text, or a full-page plate (a map you drew, a piece of art) that fills the whole leaf.
• Page margins and fill its own page, plus start on a right-hand page for openers.

Each kind starts from a layout that already looks like a real book, so you can leave it as is or make it yours. You can also reorder pages or remove them. What you design on the page is exactly what exports.

On an Also by page, build a shelf of your other books. Add them straight from your published work, or add any book by hand with its title and a cover you upload (handy for off-platform titles). The covers embed in the EPUB like any other image. Uploading images is part of a paid Pro plan.

Chapters

Your chapters come from your writing, two ways:

• In a single piece, every chapter heading you add starts a new chapter. A part divider groups chapters under a part.
• In a series, each part is a chapter, in reading order.
• If you have grouped that series into Parts in the Manuscript view (you can name them Part, Act, or Book), those parts come through as Part dividers in the book, with the scenes inside them as the chapters, so your whole structure carries over.

You do not organize anything special. Write the way you write, and the book follows.

Export your book

Use Export book in The Press, the EPUB option in the editor’s export menu, or Assemble book at the top of the Manuscript view. Assemble is the quickest way to compile a structured series: it takes every Part and scene in your manuscript tree, in reading order, and pours it into one file. You can assemble it as an EPUB book (designed, e-reader-ready), as a Word document (a .docx with your Parts and chapters as Word headings, for an editor or agent), or as one Markdown file (a single portable .md) for editing elsewhere or handing off.

Writing a series of books, like a trilogy? Each grouping in your manuscript can be assembled on its own. Hover a Part (or Book, Act, whatever you named it) in the Manuscript view and use its assemble action to compile just that one, titled by the grouping, so Book Two comes out as its own file without the rest.

The plain EPUB is free for everyone: your full manuscript, ready to read on any e-reader. The designed layer (your theme, drop caps, cover design, embedded fonts, and front and back matter) is part of a paid Pro plan, not the trial. Your words always export, designed or plain.

Invented-script fonts

If you wrote in a constructed script from the Languages tools, its font is embedded in the EPUB, so readers see your real glyphs. In formats that cannot carry a custom font (PDF, Word, Markdown), that text falls back to its romanization, so it stays readable everywhere.

Make it accessible

Every image needs a description (alt text) so readers using a screen reader can follow your book. If an image is missing one, the export pauses and tells you which chapters to fix. The EPUB also carries standard accessibility information about its structure and reading order.

Designing a series as a book

A series exports as one book, parts in order. Open your notebook, go to the Series tab, and use Design in The Press on any series. You get the same surface: cover, theme, front and back matter you can lay out page by page, and one export for the whole thing.

Opening your book

The file is a standard EPUB 3. Open it in Apple Books, Kobo, Thorium, Calibre, or send it to a Kindle. Your cover shows as the book’s thumbnail, and the inside reads with your chosen design.