Publishing an ebook that stores accept

A family history, a club handbook, a novel or a course workbook: an EPUB reads well on any e-reader, phone or tablet, with text the reader can resize. Stores and readers are strict about what’s inside one, and reject a book for a missing date or a stray file. These tools make the book and check it in your browser, without an account or an upload.

1. Get the text into Markdown

Markdown is plain text with # before chapter headings, *italic* and **bold**, and it’s what the EPUB is made from. Most writing apps (iA Writer, Obsidian, Ulysses, Bear, Notion) export it, as does Google Docs (File › Download › Markdown). From Word, open the .docx in the Markup Converter: it fills Source with the document and gives Markdown as the result. Check the headings came through: each chapter needs a # line, with ## for sections inside it, which come from Word’s Heading 1 and Heading 2 styles. Pictures aren’t carried across; add them in the next step.

2. Prepare the cover and pictures

Stores want a cover of about 1600 × 2560 pixels (a 1:1.6 portrait). In Image Convert / Resize, crop the picture to that shape, set Width to 1600, and save as JPEG at quality 0.85; covers over a few megabytes are often refused. Do the same for pictures in the text at a Width of about 1200: anything larger only makes the book slower to open. Keep their file names simple, such as map.jpg, and refer to them in the Markdown as ![A map of the village in 1890](map.jpg). The words in the brackets are what screen readers say, so describe what the picture shows.

3. Make the book

In Markdown to EPUB, fill in the Title, Author and Language (en-GB, en-US, fr…: readers use it for hyphenation and read-aloud), then paste the Markdown or open the files (one file a chapter is fine; they’re joined in name order). The Chapters list shows how it will split; set New chapter at to ## if your chapters are ## headings. Add the Cover picture and the Pictures the text uses, then Make the EPUB. The message lists any picture the text names that you didn’t add.

The book doesn’t carry a font of its own: readers show it in the font each reader chooses, which is what most people want. To embed one anyway, check its licence allows it, then add it in an EPUB editor such as Sigil.

4. Check it before you upload it

Open the EPUB in the EPUB Checker. It should report no errors: the cover, title, author and table of contents show as readers will see them. It’s also the check for an EPUB made elsewhere, such as an export from Pages, Vellum or Calibre, or one a designer sends you, where the usual faults are a   in the text, files in the ZIP that aren’t listed, and no accessibility metadata, which stores in the EU now expect.

Where to send it

Apple Books, Kobo Writing Life and Google Play Books take the EPUB as it is. Amazon KDP accepts EPUB uploads and converts them, and Send to Kindle takes EPUB for reading your own books on a Kindle.