How Do You Create An Ebook With The Best Formatting Tools?

I take a stubbornly minimalist approach. A plain text editor and Pandoc. Write everything in Markdown—it forces you to think about structure without getting distracted by visual fluff. Chapters are just headings. Emphasis is asterisks. Then you run a Pandoc command to convert the Markdown file into an EPUB, injecting your CSS stylesheet for basic font and margin control. It’s incredibly lightweight and reproducible. The ebook is just... solid. No hidden junk code. It feels like building a piece of furniture with hand tools versus a power saw—more deliberate, and you understand every joint.

Okay, so I just went through this whole process for a short story collection I'm self-publishing, and it was a massive learning curve. I bounced between a bunch of tools before landing on a combo that actually worked. Started in Scrivener for the writing and basic structure—its compile feature is honestly a lifesaver for generating clean HTML and table of contents stuff. But for the final polish and formatting tweaks, I had to bring the exported EPUB into Sigil. It's an EPUB editor, free and open-source, and it lets you peek under the hood at the code. That was key for fixing wonky chapter breaks and making sure my images scaled right on different readers.

I see a lot of people swear by Vellum, and if you're on a Mac and willing to pay, it does make gorgeous books with almost zero effort. But I'm on Windows, and I wanted more control. The biggest 'aha' moment was realizing that 'good' formatting is less about fancy fonts and more about semantic structure—using proper heading tags, consistent paragraph styles, and a linked table of contents that actually works. I spent an embarrassing amount of time testing the final file on my old Kindle, my phone's app, and a Kobo simulator to catch spacing issues. In the end, the tool is just a means to that end of a seamless reading experience.

Everyone says to use the big dedicated apps, and they're not wrong, but have you considered just using Google Docs? Hear me out. If you're not trying to do anything super complex—no drop caps, multi-column layouts, or embedded fonts—Docs can get you a surprisingly decent EPUB. You write, use the heading styles properly, insert a page break for chapters, and then use an add-on like 'Docs to Epub' to convert it. The output is clean and functional.

It's obviously not for a heavily designed art book or a poetry collection with specific typographical needs. But for a straightforward novel or non-fiction work, it removes so much friction. You're already writing in it, and the formatting sticks. I've done a couple of short projects this way when I wanted to share drafts with beta readers in an ebook format quickly. It won't win design awards, but it gets the job done without any new software to learn.