Can I just save my Word file as an EPUB?

Word does not export EPUB. You can export to PDF or to filtered HTML, and some tools convert from there, but a PDF is a fixed page and an EPUB reflows, so converting one to the other loses the structure rather than preserving it. Every reliable route reads the .docx itself.

Why does my chapter heading look right but behave wrong?

Because a converter reads styles, not appearance. A line you made big and bold by hand is a body paragraph with formatting on it, and it converts as body text no matter how it looks on screen. The same line with Heading 1 applied is a chapter, and every tool that touches the file afterwards knows it.

What Word styles should I use?

Heading 1 for chapters, Heading 2 and 3 for sections beneath them, and Normal for body text. Use Title and Subtitle for the book's own title. Block quotations take Quote. If you need a style that does not exist, create a named one rather than formatting the text directly.

Why do my page breaks disappear in the ebook?

Because an EPUB has no pages. The reader chooses the type size, so the text reflows and page boundaries are computed on the device. A manual page break in Word carries no meaning that survives. Chapter breaks survive because the chapter is a structural fact, not because of where a break was inserted.

Should I set the font size in my ebook?

Not for body text. Reflowable ebooks let the reader pick the size, and a book that fixes it takes that control away. Amazon states the requirement for Kindle and enforces it: where a book's font rules conflict with the reader's settings, the font files can be removed from the book. Headings, captions and pull quotes are exempt.

What happens to my images?

They come across, but their placement does not, because there is no page to place them on. An image anchored beside a paragraph in Word becomes an image between paragraphs in an EPUB. Give every image real alt text in Word before converting, because that does carry over and it is now a compliance requirement.

Do I need a table of contents in the Word file?

Not the page Word generates. An EPUB carries its own structural navigation document, which is built from the headings, and that is what the reading system uses. A typeset contents page is optional in addition. What you need in Word is correctly applied heading styles, which is what both are built from.

How to turn a Word manuscript into an EPUB

There are two ways to make a line of text look like a chapter title in Word. You can select it and make it large and bold, or you can apply the Heading 1 style.

On screen they can look identical. To every piece of software that reads the file afterwards, they are not remotely the same thing, and the difference decides whether your ebook works.

A converter reads structure, not appearance

A .docx file is a zip archive of XML. When you apply a style, Word records a name against the paragraph. When you format text by hand, Word records the formatting and nothing else — no name, no statement of what the paragraph is.

A converter reading that file has one useful question: what is this paragraph? A style answers it. A font size does not, because 18-point bold is a chapter title in one manuscript, a section heading in the next, and an emphasised sentence in a third.

Formatting describes how something looks. A style describes what it is. Only the second one survives a conversion.

This is why manuscripts that look immaculate in Word produce ebooks with no chapter navigation, and why a manuscript that looks plain converts perfectly.

The styles that matter

You do not need many.

Word style	What it becomes
Title	The book’s title
Subtitle	The subtitle
Heading 1	A chapter
Heading 2, 3	Sections within a chapter
Normal	Body text
Quote	A block quotation

A good converter reads the outline level Word records against a style rather than only its name, which means a renamed or custom style still works as long as it declares its level. Title and Subtitle are a special case: Word treats the document title as standing outside the outline, so they carry no level at all and have to be recognised by name.

Style names are localised. A French manuscript carries Titre 1, not Heading 1, and a converter that only knows English names reads a French book as one long body paragraph. Worth testing rather than assuming.

Clean the manuscript before converting

Most conversion problems come from things authors do to make a Word document look right on a printed page. In a reflowable ebook, none of them mean anything.

Remove manual page breaks. An EPUB has no pages. The reader picks the type size and the text reflows, so page boundaries are computed on the device. A chapter break survives because the chapter is a structural fact; a page break inserted to push text down does not.

Remove empty paragraphs used as spacing. Return pressed six times is six empty paragraphs, and they arrive in the ebook as six blank lines wherever the reader’s type size happens to put them. If you want space, it belongs to the style.

Remove manual indents made with tabs or spaces. Paragraph indentation is a property of the paragraph style. A tab is a character, and it lands in the middle of the first word when the text reflows.

Remove headers, footers and page numbers. There is no page for them to sit on.

Check your quotation marks. Straight quotes and apostrophes convert to straight quotes, which look wrong in a published book. Word’s autocorrect usually handles this, but text pasted from elsewhere often is not converted.

What genuinely does not carry over

Some things are lost because the target format has no equivalent, and no converter can help:

Exact image placement. An image anchored beside a paragraph becomes an image between paragraphs. There is no page, so there is nothing to sit beside.
Columns. A reflowable ebook is one column.
Precise typographic positioning. Anything positioned by eye rather than by rule.
Complex tables. Simple tables survive. A wide table with merged cells is unreadable on a phone regardless of how it converts.

Footnotes are the interesting case. They survive, but they change form: an EPUB has no page foot, so they become linked endnotes, or popup notes on readers that support them.

Do the accessibility work in Word

Alt text is the one piece of accessibility metadata you can only really write where the images live. Right-click an image in Word, choose Edit Alt Text, and describe what the image shows.

This is no longer only good practice. The European Accessibility Act applies from June 2025 and covers ebooks, so distributors selling into the EU ask for accessibility metadata and increasingly refuse files without it.

Write it for a reader, not a search engine. “Chapter 3 illustration” describes a file. “A woodcut of a hare running across a ploughed field” describes what a sighted reader receives. Purely decorative images should be marked as decorative, which produces an empty alt attribute — also correct, and different from having none.

Let the reader own the type size

The requirement that surprises people most: body text in a reflowable ebook should not have a fixed font size or line height.

Every e-reader has a size slider, and a book that fixes the size takes that control away. Amazon states it outright for Kindle and attaches a real penalty — where a book’s font rules conflict with the reader’s chosen settings, the font files can be removed from the book entirely. So a book that over-specifies its body type risks losing the typeface it shipped with.

Headings, epigraphs, captions and pull quotes are exempt, and are meant to be styled.

Check the result

Validate it. Run epubcheck, which is the same tool the retailers run. If it fails, the errors have a guide of their own.
Open it on a device, or in a real reading application. Change the type size to the largest setting and look at what breaks.
If the book is going to Amazon, open it in Kindle Previewer, because KDP converts the EPUB again after accepting it.

The pattern behind all of this is a single idea: a document that states what its parts are converts cleanly to anything, and a document that only states how they look converts cleanly to nothing.

Nueel reads the .docx directly and maps Word’s outline levels onto semantic roles, so a Heading 1 is a chapter whatever it looks like, and a hand-formatted line that merely resembles one is reported rather than silently promoted. The EPUB and the print PDF are then two projections of the same structure, which is why they cannot disagree about where a chapter begins.

Common questions

Can I just save my Word file as an EPUB?: Word does not export EPUB. You can export to PDF or to filtered HTML, and some tools convert from there, but a PDF is a fixed page and an EPUB reflows, so converting one to the other loses the structure rather than preserving it. Every reliable route reads the .docx itself.
Why does my chapter heading look right but behave wrong?: Because a converter reads styles, not appearance. A line you made big and bold by hand is a body paragraph with formatting on it, and it converts as body text no matter how it looks on screen. The same line with Heading 1 applied is a chapter, and every tool that touches the file afterwards knows it.
What Word styles should I use?: Heading 1 for chapters, Heading 2 and 3 for sections beneath them, and Normal for body text. Use Title and Subtitle for the book's own title. Block quotations take Quote. If you need a style that does not exist, create a named one rather than formatting the text directly.
Why do my page breaks disappear in the ebook?: Because an EPUB has no pages. The reader chooses the type size, so the text reflows and page boundaries are computed on the device. A manual page break in Word carries no meaning that survives. Chapter breaks survive because the chapter is a structural fact, not because of where a break was inserted.
Should I set the font size in my ebook?: Not for body text. Reflowable ebooks let the reader pick the size, and a book that fixes it takes that control away. Amazon states the requirement for Kindle and enforces it: where a book's font rules conflict with the reader's settings, the font files can be removed from the book. Headings, captions and pull quotes are exempt.
What happens to my images?: They come across, but their placement does not, because there is no page to place them on. An image anchored beside a paragraph in Word becomes an image between paragraphs in an EPUB. Give every image real alt text in Word before converting, because that does carry over and it is now a compliance requirement.
Do I need a table of contents in the Word file?: Not the page Word generates. An EPUB carries its own structural navigation document, which is built from the headings, and that is what the reading system uses. A typeset contents page is optional in addition. What you need in Word is correctly applied heading styles, which is what both are built from.