Draft2Digital will take a Word document and convert it for you, or take a finished EPUB and pass it through to every store it distributes to. Its own words on the second route: "We won't make any changes to your epub formatting, but we'll gladly distribute it to all our digital stores for you."
That sentence is the whole reason to read this page. If you upload an EPUB, nothing between you and the reader will fix it. The chapter menu, the metadata, the validity of the file — those are decided in the EPUB you hand over, and they travel to Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble and the rest exactly as you built them.
manuscript.docx
↓
validated EPUB 3
↓
Draft2Digital
↓
every store it serves, unchanged
The two ways in
Upload a Word file, and let Draft2Digital build the EPUB. It accepts .doc and .docx and, by its own account, "anything Word can read" — RTF, OTF and plain text too. It reads your heading styles to find the chapters, builds a table of contents from them, and applies one of its templates. This is the easy route, and for a cleanly structured manuscript it works.
Upload an EPUB you already have. Draft2Digital distributes it as-is. This is the route for anyone who wants control over the navigation and the metadata, has a file that was built and validated elsewhere, or has already tried the first route and found the chapter menu came out wrong.
The difference is not quality; Draft2Digital's converter is decent. The difference is who decides. With Word, its converter decides what a chapter is. With EPUB, you already did.
What it needs the file to be
Two things Draft2Digital's own documentation states, and two it does not.
It accepts EPUB. Its FAQ does not distinguish EPUB 2 from EPUB 3; build EPUB 3, which is the current standard and the one Apple and Google both say they validate.
It sets a size limit: ebooks "must be under 100 MB in file size". A novel is a fraction of that. A file that approaches it almost always has uncompressed images in it, which is a different problem.
It does not, on its FAQ, state that it runs EPUBCheck on an uploaded file before distributing it. It does host a public EPUB validator of its own, at the address cited at the foot of this page — which is a fair indication of how it expects files to arrive. Treat validation as your job either way: the stores downstream check, and a file that fails EPUBCheck at Apple fails whether it came through Draft2Digital or not.
It does not state a required set of metadata fields for an uploaded EPUB.
You enter title, author, description and categories in its dashboard
regardless, but the EPUB's own package document should already carry the
title, author and language — that is what a reading device shows, and an EPUB
whose dc:title says "Untitled" will be sold as such.
What to get right before you upload
Because nothing downstream will correct it, the file has to be right at the point you hand it over. Four things, in order of how often they go wrong.
The navigation document. The chapter menu a reader sees is a literal list of links inside the EPUB. If a chapter is not in that list, it is not in the menu, on every store at once. This is the single most common failure, and it comes from chapter titles that were made large and bold by hand in Word rather than styled as headings. What's inside an EPUB file shows exactly where the list lives.
Validity. Run EPUBCheck. Draft2Digital's validator will do, and so will the free one here. An EPUB that opens in a reading app is not the same as one that passes; the failures are usually dull — a file listed in the package that is not in the archive, an unclosed tag — and invisible until a store rejects the upload. What EPUBCheck errors actually mean decodes the messages.
Metadata inside the file. Title, author and language in the package document, matching what you type into the dashboard. A mismatch is not fatal but it is confusing, and the file's own values are what a device displays.
Scene breaks that survive. A blank line between scenes vanishes at a
screen edge. A visible marker — a centred # or * * * — does not. Since the
file will not be reprocessed, this has to be in the EPUB already.
Why go through Draft2Digital at all
Because it is one upload to many stores, and because it handles the stores that are awkward to reach directly — Barnes & Noble, library platforms, subscription services. If you are publishing wide, it or an aggregator like it is how most authors avoid maintaining six dashboards.
What it does not change is the file. A validated EPUB 3 with real navigation is what Draft2Digital passes through, what Apple and Google say they check, and what every reading device is built to open. Build that once, and the distribution question becomes only a question of which dashboards you can be bothered with.
We are not affiliated with Draft2Digital. The statements attributed to it above are from its FAQ, read on the date at the foot of this page; where its documentation is silent we have said so rather than guessed.