Building an EPUB that has both a table of contents and a cover follows a fixed order: series information, then volume, then choose your manuscript files, then chapter order and which chapters appear in the contents, then cover and publication date, then review and export. Work through those six steps in sequence and you rarely have to go back.
This article is for the point where the manuscript is finished but the export screen is unfamiliar. Fixing a broken EPUB and the internal anatomy of the file are covered elsewhere; this one is only about the order in which decisions are made.
Why the order is fixed
Each step consumes a value the previous step produced.
You cannot set chapter order until you have chosen which files to include. You cannot pick which chapters appear in the contents until the chapter order exists. You cannot attach a cover to a volume until the volume exists.
Put the other way round: skip a step and you will come back to it. The most common way people get stuck is starting from the table of contents without having selected any manuscript files.
Doing it by hand, or with a free converter
Assembling an EPUB by hand means preparing the body pages, the contents page, the cover page, and the metadata record as separate files, arranging them in a prescribed folder structure, and zipping the result. There is no guided order; you lay everything out yourself.
With a converter, first check what it accepts and what it generates. Some tools can create a contents page and cover, while a body-only conversion route leaves those as separate steps.
Where the effort actually goes
The cost is the number of rebuilds.
Adding a table of contents later is not just making a contents page. Each body page has to be linked from the contents, and the same ordering has to be written into the navigation the reading app uses. Add one chapter or reorder two, and both have to be edited.
The cover is similar. It is not enough to include the image; the metadata record has to identify it as the cover, and the cover page has to sit first in the reading order. Swapping the image is easy. Deciding to drop the cover entirely means deleting from three places.
What adds another round of checking is a missing field. Hand-built workflows and converters differ in which omissions they report and when they report them. The later an omission surfaces, the more work it takes to separate a manuscript issue from metadata or cover setup. That makes a pre-export check of required inputs a useful part of the sequence.
In rune Studio the decision order is the screen order
rune Studio splits EPUB creation into a six-page wizard, and the pages follow the same six steps listed above: series information, volume, manuscript selection, chapter order and contents inclusion, publication date and cover, then review and export.
I verified this by driving the development build from the command line. I created a workspace, placed two chapters in it, set title, author, publisher, language, writing direction, and output file name, entered the version and publication date for the volume, specified a cover image, and exported. Inspecting the result, the reading order was cover, title page, contents, chapter one, chapter two, colophon; the contents listed both chapters; and two images were embedded.
I did not build the contents page or the colophon. Chapter names were taken from the headings in the manuscript, and the colophon text was generated from the metadata values.
Missing fields are named before the export runs
Attempting an export with the metadata still empty stopped the export and returned three named items — no title, no author name, no output file name — and no EPUB was written. After entering title, author, publisher, language, writing direction, and output file name, the same check returned zero findings.
Not being left with "something is missing but I don't know what" is where this step earns its keep.
One thing that tripped me up
Specifying the cover image with a short relative path failed with a not-found error. Giving the full path worked. If your cover is not appearing, suspect how the image location is written before you suspect anything else.
Who this suits, and who is fine without it
It suits anyone producing a complete book with contents and a cover. Fiction or non-fiction, three or more chapters reads better with contents, and selling generally calls for a cover. Having the decision order built into the screen order matters most on your first book.
If body text alone is enough, you can use any existing conversion route that produces that result. For a short piece you are simply handing out, contents and cover are optional. And if you already have a pipeline that adds both automatically, there is little reason to switch.
To be precise about scope: what was verified here is that the EPUB file is built. Whether a store accepts it, and whether every reading app renders it identically, is outside what this procedure covers.
Summary
- The order is: series information, volume, manuscript selection, chapter order and contents, cover and publication date, review and export
- Each step uses values from the one before, so skipping ahead makes a return trip more likely
- rune Studio makes that order the screen order, and generates the contents and colophon from your manuscript and metadata
- Missing fields are named before export, reducing the need to search the settings one by one
For a first step, write down three things for your current manuscript: title, author name, and output file name. With those settled, the rest is simply working down the pages in order.
See the current product scope on the Rune Studio product page.
