How to Create an Ebook (EPUB/FB2)

Where to start: choosing the format

Before building anything, decide what format your book will live in. For the vast majority of cases the answer is EPUB: it's the international standard read by almost every device and store, and Kindle accepts it through Send to Kindle with automatic conversion. If you haven't read about the format differences yet, take a look at our EPUB vs PDF vs FB2 breakdown.

The logic is simple: make EPUB as your main, "master" format, and generate everything else from it when needed. Publishing for a Russian-speaking audience and libraries? Also build an FB2 version — it's popular there. Need a copy for print or reading on a big screen with a fixed layout? Convert the EPUB to PDF.

Preparing the manuscript in Word

This is the most important stage, and beginners usually skip it — to their cost. The quality of your future book is 80% determined by how cleanly and structurally the source document is laid out. Any converter merely carries over your structure; if there is none, it won't invent it for you.

The key rule — use the built-in heading styles. Don't make a chapter title just large bold text by hand: apply the "Heading 1" style to chapter titles and "Heading 2" to subsections. It's from those styles that the program later builds the table of contents automatically and the correct jumps between chapters.

• Separate chapters with a page break (not five blank paragraphs) — so each chapter starts on a new page in the book.
• Remove manual formatting: extra spaces for indents, forced line breaks inside a paragraph, double blank lines. In a reflowable book all of this breaks the layout.
• Insert images as standalone objects, rather than anchoring them to text with complex wrapping.

The cleaner the document, the less you'll fix afterwards. A tidy DOCX is already 90% of the win.

Calibre: a book in one click

Ready to build? The simplest tool is Calibre, a free, open-source ebook manager and converter. It's an all-in-one that does almost everything automatically and is perfect for beginners.

Calibre's plus is speed and automation. Its minus is that you have almost no control over fine layout. For prose that's usually enough; for complex publications, move on to Sigil.

Sigil: hand-finishing the EPUB

If you want to control every detail, your tool is Sigil. It's not a converter but a full, free EPUB editor. It gives you a split screen: on one side a live preview of the book, on the other its HTML code, which you can edit directly.

Sigil is indispensable when you need to: clean up "junk" code after converting from Word, tune styles by hand, fix complex tables, insert and precisely position images, or build a custom table of contents. It's essentially a workbench where the book is finished to perfection.

A handy workflow is a combo: first quickly build a draft EPUB in Calibre, then open it in Sigil and polish the problem spots. In Sigil the table of contents is built in a couple of clicks via "Tools → Table of Contents → Generate Table of Contents" — it scans the headings and assembles the navigation.

Pandoc: build it with one command

Love automation and the command line? Then take a look at Pandoc — the "Swiss army knife" of document conversion. It builds an EPUB from DOCX, Markdown and other formats with a single command, and is known for stripping formatting more aggressively than Calibre, producing a very "sterile" EPUB with no Word cruft.

A basic command looks like this:

pandoc manuscript.docx -o book.epub \
  --epub-cover-image=cover.jpg \
  --toc \
  --metadata title="Book Title" \
  --metadata author="Author Name"

Here --epub-cover-image sets the cover, --toc builds the table of contents, and --metadata writes the title and author. Pandoc is especially good for technical books and anyone who writes in Markdown: one line and out comes a finished book. We also have an MD to PDF converter if you need a PDF version too.

Cover, table of contents, metadata

Three things turn "just a file" into a real book. Let's take each one.

The cover is a separate image (JPG or PNG) that you set at build time: in Calibre in the metadata pane, in Pandoc with the --epub-cover-image option. It's what readers see in the reader's library and in the store, so don't neglect it.

The table of contents is built automatically from chapter headings — but only if you marked them up with styles in the source document (remember the first stage?). That's why preparation matters so much: without styles, no tool will produce a table of contents.

Metadata — title, author, language, publisher, description — go into the book's properties. They're not for decoration: readers and stores use them to sort and find your book. Fill them in carefully from the start.

Checking and final formats

Once the book is built, don't rush to hand it out. Open the EPUB in a real reader (Apple Books, PocketBook, a phone app) and flip through it: is the table of contents in place, did images shift, do chapters start on a new page, does the text read well at different font sizes? It's a five-minute check that saves you from embarrassing mistakes.

When your main EPUB is ready and proofread, it's easy to generate the other formats for different needs:

• FB2 — for Russian-language libraries and readers like FBReader (convert it in Calibre too).
• PDF — for print or reading on a big screen with a fixed layout.
• Kindle — just send the EPUB through Send to Kindle and Amazon converts it (details in our Kindle formats guide).

Want to dig deeper into book formats and readers? Start with our EPUB vs PDF vs FB2 overview and the guide to Kindle formats. The full list of conversions is on the all formats page.