Publishing with Smashwords

[elf]

Smashwords' blog has a linkspam post about How to Self-Publish an Ebook with Smashwords: 31 Authors Share Their Tips and Tricks

All of them that I've read so far have a strong nod to the Style Guide. While authors pretty much universally insist that following the style guide gets good results, they don't point out the nuisance level involved: in order to follow the guide *exactly,* you have to *strip all formatting from your book,* then use Word's Style functions to put it back. This gets faster with practice, but authors who are used to thinking of the edited-and-proofread version as "finished" are likely to be annoyed at the extra few hours (for a novel) of formatting time.

Also. No matter how excellently well you've followed the guide, the RTF version is likely to be lousy. Tolerable at best. (I assume the guide itself was formatted with the guide; its RTF version is unpleasant to read & needs a lot of reformatting to be suitable for print.) And the Meatgrinder only allows those features supported by the simplest format ... no tables, no drop caps, limited image placement options.

Still, though... 31 authors being enthusiastic about Smashwords. None of them, AFAIK, are on the Konrath path to wealth & internet power, but they're all *happy* about getting their ebooks at Smashwords. They're not saying, "Do this and become rich!" They're saying, "This was definitely worth doing, and it could be for you, too." Some of them are making money. Some are making connections. Some are just learning new skills, and happy with that.

Comments

[amalthia]

I still don't trust styles in MS Word. I prefer coding my own HTML because it's consistent. I have the impression that some people think it's easier to learn how to use the MS Word styles than it is to learn the html for italics, bolded text, and headings...

[elf]

I don't trust styles in Word; they're messed-up. A paragraph can look like one style--even the paragraph mark show up as that style--and the original style is still hidden *somewhere* in the doc, so if you delete a paragraph mark the whole thing reverts to Arial Unicode.

The SW guide has a way around that ("copy the whole thing into Notepad; copy & paste it back into a blank Word doc") but it's pretty drastic.

It's easier to learn *basic* HTML than Word styles; it's harder to learn what's necessary for indented quotations, images, and changing fonts, if those are necessary. And I can certainly understand the Meatgrinder not being willing to take HTML, considering that it'd mostly get "Word 03/07 docs which were saved as HTML." Twitch.

I hear Smashwords is working on a system to let people upload their own final-version ebooks, instead of forcing them through an intermediate step that doesn't allow the full use of the formats.

[amalthia]

It would be really nice if Smashwords would allow their author base to upload their own created ebooks. With Calibre or Sigil I have complete control over every formatting element in a story. Though, I don't know if all authors have the time or the technical know-how to use either program...

[stasia]

I hope this is okay, but I'm curious. You clearly know what you're doing/talking about with Calibre and I'm ... less experienced. Are there any tutorials or websites you recommend for someone who's just learning?

Thank you so much for any information.

Stasia

[amalthia]

Hi,

I have created a tutorial: Ebook Formatting Tutorial but it does somewhat rely on the user knowing a bit of HTML.

I'm probably going to revise the site because I don't think I made it clear the first time that for creating an ebook it really helps to start off with a cleanly formatted Word Document. For example, each paragraph should have paragraph breaks not line breaks.

If you have questions please don't hesitate to ask.

[stasia]

THANK YOU!! This will be very helpful. I'll start going through the tutorial this week.

*glee*

Stasia

[alexdraven]

I've used Smashwords to put out one novella, mostly as an experiment, and did find it very easy, although Fall is just about the simplest form of an e-book - I'm contemplating doing a Halloween compilation, which would be a fairer test, with indexing, chapter headings and in-line art ...