Making an EPUB or print PDF 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 Imprint and see exactly how it will look before you export it.

Open Imprint

Open a piece in the editor, open the More menu, choose Tools, and pick Imprint. 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.

Imprint 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 Imprint, 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 a dozen genre themes: Classic, Literary, Fantasy, Romance, Modern, Manuscript, Noir, Sci-Fi, Historical, Poetry, Nonfiction, and Children. The panel shows each one as a small swatch, and picking one restyles the whole book in the preview at once. Picking a theme also seeds a recommended body font, spacing, and chapter opener, which you can fine-tune afterward.

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.

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

Distinctive formatting blocks

Some of the book’s signature touches are written into your prose, not set in Imprint. In the editor’s slash menu you can drop in a text-message thread, a letter, a verse or poetry block, and callouts or sidebars. You add and edit them while writing; Imprint styles them to match your chosen theme when you export, so a text thread picks up your theme’s bubble color and a callout its accent. There is nothing to switch on here: write them in the editor and they arrive designed.

Table of contents

Turn on Table of contents to build a contents page, name it, and show page numbers beside each entry. Set the depth to control how much it lists: chapters only, chapters plus H2 sub-headings, or all the way down to H3. Nonfiction and how-to authors usually want the deeper levels so a reader can jump to a section inside a chapter.

Your own fonts

Beyond the curated faces, you can upload your own font (a TTF, OTF, or WOFF2 you are licensed to embed) and set it as your book’s body face. It embeds in the exported EPUB and print PDF so the book reads in your typeface on every device. A single font file carries one weight, so bold and italic passages use a synthesized style unless your file includes them. Uploading your own font is part of a paid Pro plan.

Box sets

You can bind several works, or a whole series, into one book, with each work as its own Part. Reach for it from your notebook, assemble the works you want, and design the combined book in Imprint the same way you design any other: one cover, one theme, shared front and back matter, and a single export for the whole set.

Fixed layout

For an image-forward book (a picture book, an art book, a graphic-heavy title), choose Fixed layout under Book details in the Design rail. Each page is a fixed canvas, laid out exactly as you place it, rather than reflowing to the reader’s screen. Because a fixed page does not reflow, prose that runs past one page is clipped, so fixed layout suits full-page images with short captions or verse rather than long passages of text. Imprint tells you in the preflight if a page’s text would overflow.

Export your book

Open Imprint from the editor’s tools (or pick the EPUB option in the editor’s export menu) to lay your work out as a finished book and export it. You can export it as an EPUB book (designed, e-reader-ready), as a Word document (a .docx with your chapters as Word headings, for an editor or agent), or as one Markdown file (a single portable .md) for editing elsewhere or handing off.

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.

Print-ready PDF (paperback)

Preparing a paperback for Amazon KDP or IngramSpark? Open the Print section in Imprint to lay your book out as a real print interior and export a print-ready PDF, sized with printer-safe margins.

• Start from a preset. One tap loads a KDP or IngramSpark bundle (trim size and safe margins) for common sizes, including a KDP Large Print preset that also raises the body type and line spacing to large-print standards. Tweak anything after.
• Trim size. Pick the finished page size (5 × 8″, 5.25 × 8″, 5.5 × 8.5″, 6 × 9″, 7 × 10″, or 8.5 × 11″), or set a custom width and height. The live preview reshapes to the trim you choose, so you see the real paperback proportions.
• Margins. Set the inside (binding/gutter), outside, top, and bottom margins in inches. The inside margin is mirrored: it falls on the left of right-hand pages and the right of left-hand pages, so text never disappears into the spine. Give it more room on longer books; the pre-export check warns if your gutter is below KDP’s minimum for your page count.
• Spine width. The Print section shows your estimated page count and spine width on cream and white paper, the number your print cover wrap needs.
• Bleed. Turn on 0.125″ of bleed when art or a background runs to the very edge of the page; leave it off for a plain text interior.
• Running heads and page numbers. Carry the book title along the top of right-hand pages and your name along the top of left-hand pages, with page numbers at the outer corner. They stay off the opening page, the way a printed book reads.
• Chapters on the right. Open each chapter on a right-hand page, the printed-book convention.

When it’s ready, choose Print PDF. The book renders in the background (it can take a moment for a long manuscript) and a Download PDF link appears when it’s done. Upload that file as your interior on KDP or IngramSpark. Print-ready PDF is part of a paid Pro plan.

Drop caps, scene-break ornaments, and your chosen theme all print exactly as they look in the preview.

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; you can relax this check in Book details if your images are purely decorative. Book details also takes an accessibility summary, a sentence describing how accessible this edition is, which ships inside the EPUB metadata that stores read. 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 Imprint 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.