Converting the ebook yourself, or paying someone
We make a tool that turns a manuscript into an ebook. A page like this is worth reading only if it is honest about when a tool is the wrong answer.
Conversion services are not a scam, and for a small number of books they are the right call. For most books they are not, and the reason is not that we are cheaper. It is that most books contain nothing a conversion needs a human for.
The book that converts itself
Look at what your book actually consists of. A novel, a memoir, most nonfiction without apparatus — the whole structure is chapters, italics, bold, and scene breaks. That is four things. Each is unambiguous, each maps onto a standard structure in an EPUB, and none requires a judgment call.
That is not a small category. It is the large majority of books published in a year. If yours is in it, paying a conversion service is paying someone to press a button on your behalf and then wait a week before telling you they did.
The part that goes wrong is almost never the conversion. It is the manuscript arriving with chapter titles that are big bold paragraphs rather than headings, and scene breaks typed as three asterisks in some places and four blank lines in others. A service will fix that, which is real work — but it is work you can do once, in your own file, and then own forever. Preparing a manuscript that typesets cleanly is the whole job, and it takes an afternoon.
When paying is genuinely worth it
There are books where a person earns the money, and they share a feature: something in them requires a decision that cannot be derived from the text.
- Heavy tables. A table has to survive on a phone screen. Deciding what to do when it cannot — rotate it, split it, redraw it, make it an image with a text alternative — is a design decision per table, not a setting.
- Mathematics. Equations in an ebook are their own discipline. Getting them to display across reading systems, and to be read aloud correctly, is specialist work.
- Mixed scripts, or right-to-left text. A book that runs Arabic or Hebrew alongside Latin script needs direction, font coverage and punctuation handled deliberately at every junction.
- A fixed-layout children's book. Where position on the page carries the meaning, the file is not really a converted manuscript at all. Fixed layout: when the page is the design covers what you are taking on.
- A complex reference work. Extensive internal cross-referencing — thousands of links between entries, a live index, notes that point in both directions — is a build, not a conversion.
- A book you have tried and cannot fix. If the output is wrong and you cannot work out why, paying someone to diagnose it is a reasonable purchase. Do it after you have tried, not instead.
In the Interior Formatter. It reads a .docx keeping structure only — chapter starts, italics, bold, scene breaks — and detects chapters even in files with no styles, then produces the print PDF and an EPUB 3 from that one source, so the two editions cannot drift apart. Start your ebook → · about the Interior Formatter
What to ask before you hire anyone
If you are in one of those categories, four questions separate a professional from a person with a converter.
Does the file validate, and will you show me? Ask for the epubcheck result on your finished book. Zero errors and zero warnings is the standard, it is free to verify, and a supplier who will not produce it is telling you something. What makes an EPUB pass validation explains what the check covers.
Do I receive the source files, or only an EPUB? This is the one authors forget. A finished EPUB is an output; the source it was built from is what you need to make a correction in two years. If all you get is the output, every future fix is another invoice.
How many revision rounds are included, and what counts as one? Get the number, and get the definition. "We fix our mistakes" and "you get two rounds of changes" are different offers.
Who fixes it if a store rejects the file? Stores run their own checks and reject files for reasons that have nothing to do with your text. Find out before you pay whether that is covered or billed.
The question that actually decides it
How many books do you intend to publish?
For a single memoir, written once and not repeated, outsourcing is defensible. You are buying a finished object and will never need the skill again.
For a series, outsourcing every conversion buys two things you did not want: a recurring cost that scales with your output, and a dependency. Every typo fix, every updated back-matter link goes through someone else's queue. Authors discover this the first time they need a same-day correction. Updating an ebook after it is published is routine when you hold the source and awkward when you do not.
Our own position, stated plainly: our EPUB validates with zero errors and zero warnings under epubcheck, and it is built from the same manuscript as the print PDF, so the two editions cannot drift. If your book is tables and equations, that is not enough and you should hire someone. If your book is chapters and italics, it is the whole job.
Make your ebook
The tools are free to use: bring your manuscript once and get both a print PDF and an EPUB out of the same source, so the two editions cannot drift apart. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Navigation and reading order in an ebook · More: EPUB and print PDF are two different books · Hire a cover designer, or do it yourself? · Checking an ebook before you publish it