Design, publish, and export a book

Book Settings, in the sidebar while a book is open, holds what applies to the whole book.

Book details

• Title & subtitle, and the Author name shown on the title page (a pen name is fine).
• About this book, used as the description in the EPUB.
• Web address, the book's address under /books/. Old links keep working after you change it.
• Language.

Cover and public page

These settings change how the book looks at its public address:

• Cover: the assigned design, One color, or An image. Choose an image picks a picture from Your images, or uploads one there first; it is shown in a book's 2:3 shape in place of the colour. Remove image goes back to the colour or the assigned design, and the image stays in Your images.
• Page background: Paper, Cream, Sage, Mist, Blush or Ink, behind the public page.
• About the author: a short bio. It belongs to your account, so every book you publish shows the same one.

Pictures from Your images, on the cover and in sections, show on the published book for readers who are not signed in.

Text and pages

• Body text: serif or sans serif, with Text size, Line spacing and Web text width (the reading column on the web).
• Typographer's punctuation in the PDF and EPUB turns straight quotes into curly ones and three dots into an ellipsis in those files only.
• Chapter & page numbers: how chapters are numbered (3, Chapter 3, Chapter Three, III, - 3 - or none), whether chapter titles get a page of their own, where page numbers go, and running heads (the author's name on left pages and the title on right pages, in the PDF only).
• Book size: Pocket (5 × 8 inches), Trade (6 × 9 inches) or Large (7 × 10 inches), for the PDF. The web version and the EPUB fit the reader's screen.
• Word count goal, shown beside the word count on the Contents page.
• Imported note dates: whether notes you import start with their date, in which format, and aligned left or right.

Front pages

• Copyright page: publisher, edition, ISBN, copyright holder and year. Turn off Include the standard copyright page if you wrote your own as front matter.
• Dedication and Epigraph (with its attribution), each on its own page when filled in.

Preview and download

On the Contents page, Preview has Web preview, PDF and EPUB. They include the front matter, chapters and back matter, but not Set aside.

PDF opens the book laid out for print in a new tab with the browser's print dialog; choose Save as PDF there, or print it. EPUB downloads an ebook file with the book's details, contents and cover. Pictures from Your images, on the cover and in sections, are included in the file. A picture linked from another website is left out of the EPUB, because ebook files cannot show pictures from the internet; the web version and the PDF still show it.

Publish a book

Select Publish on the Contents page or in Book Settings, and confirm. The book needs at least one section. Its public page, at its web address, shows the cover, the author, Read online, downloads of the EPUB and PDF, details of the edition, the contents, the author's bio and your other published books.

Read online opens the book in a reader with Flow (one continuous column) and Pages views; it offers to take a returning reader back to where they stopped.

Link to a chapter

Each chapter has its own address, which opens the book at that chapter in either view. In the reader, select the chapter in the book's contents: the browser's address bar then shows the chapter's address, ending in #section- and a number. On the book's public page, each title in the contents links to its chapter, so you can copy the link there. A chapter keeps its address when chapters are renamed, added or moved.

Share the address, bookmark it, or write it to an NFC tag. In Web preview, for a book that is not published, a chapter's address opens only for you, while you are signed in.

To find a chapter by words in it, type them into Search, at the top of the sidebar, or press ⌘K (Ctrl K on Windows). The sections of your books that contain them are listed under Books, each with a line of its text, and selecting a chapter opens the book at it, with its address in the browser's address bar. See Find your way around Magpie.

Unpublish turns the public page off until you publish again. The book and its sections are kept.

Delete a book

Delete book, at the foot of Book Settings, removes the book and its sections from Books after you confirm, and its public page stops working. A deleted book does not go to Trash, so it cannot be restored there. Notes you imported into the book are not affected.

If a download leaves out a section that is in the book, Contact support.