How to convert a Word document to EPUB

A converter cannot see your document the way you do. It cannot tell that a line is a chapter title because it looks like one. It only knows what you told Word — which is why the same converter produces a clean book from one manuscript and a mess from another.

Use real heading styles

This is the whole article, honestly. Apply Heading 1 to your chapter titles from Word’s style gallery. Not bold. Not 18pt. Not centred-and-bigger. The actual style.

Heading 1 is what the DOCX to EPUB converter uses to decide where one chapter ends and the next begins, and the heading text becomes that chapter’s entry in the table of contents. Text that merely looks like a heading converts to an ordinary paragraph that happens to be large — and you get a single-chapter ebook with no navigation.

Use Heading 2 and Heading 3 freely for sections inside a chapter. They carry across as real headings without starting a new chapter.

Drop the manual layout

Anything you did to control where things sit on a page is meaningless in a reflowable book, and most of it is discarded:

Images are the exception: they are extracted at full resolution and embedded properly in the book.

Finish the job

Two steps that take a minute and are skipped constantly:

1. Add a cover. A converted manuscript has none. Use the Cover Editor with a portrait image around 1600×2560.
2. Validate. Run the Validator before you upload anywhere. Stores reject files with missing metadata and give famously unhelpful error messages; you would rather find out here.

Then fix the metadata — the title and author fields decide what appears in a reader’s library, and “Document1” is not the look you want.

Styles are structure, not decoration

The deeper idea worth internalising: in Word, a style is a statement about what something is, while direct formatting is a statement about how it should look. Converters can only act on the first.

When you select a line and make it 18pt bold, you have told Word to draw those characters differently. You have not said “this is a chapter title”. When you apply Heading 1, you have said exactly that — and the visual result is a consequence.

This distinction is why two manuscripts that look identical on screen convert completely differently. It is also why the fix is never “make it look more like a heading”.

A pre-flight checklist

Before converting, five minutes here saves an hour of repair later:

1. Every chapter title is Heading 1. Check the navigation pane, not the page.
2. No manual page breaks doing structural work. Chapters break at Heading 1.
3. No tabs or spaces for indentation. Set a first-line indent on the paragraph style instead — tabs become literal characters.
4. Images are inline, not floating with text wrapping. Floating positions have no meaning in a reflowable book.
5. Front matter is separated. Title page, copyright and dedication each want their own Heading 1, or they merge into chapter one.

What happens to your images

Images are extracted at their original resolution and embedded as real files, which is usually what you want and occasionally a problem. A manuscript with a dozen print-resolution photographs will produce an EPUB of 60 MB or more.

Convert first, then run the result through the Compressor. Text is untouched; the images come down to screen resolution and the file typically shrinks by half or better.

Footnotes, tables and the awkward cases

Footnotes come through as text but lose their linked markers. In a reflowable book there is no “bottom of the page” to anchor to, so ebooks conventionally use endnotes with links. Rebuilding those links is manual work.

Tables survive structurally but rarely look good. A table designed for a Word page is usually too wide for a phone. Anything more than three or four columns is worth reconsidering as a list.

Text boxes, headers, footers, multi-column sections are all dropped. They describe positions on a fixed page, and the book no longer has one.

Before you publish

Two checks, both quick:

• Validate. Stores reject files for missing metadata and give famously unhelpful errors. Finding out here is faster.
• Read the first page on a phone. Not a preview pane — an actual phone. Chapter openings and image sizing are where auto-conversion shows, and they are the first thing a reader sees.

Then set the title and author properly. Those fields decide what appears in a reader’s library, and “Document1” is not the look you want.