My eBook eXperience -- part seven of many

Smashwords provides a formatting guide. Basically, they want a Word doc with as few different styles as possible. The only challenge is that Word loves creating styles. The easiest approach is to start out with plain text, then add in the formatting for bold, italics, and chapter headings. I didn't want to backtrack that far, since the ms. was already fomrtted and it had a lot of bold and italic. But I knew I could check whether Word was doing anything undesirable by writing the file out as html and looking at the code. The hardest part was that I now had to generate a hand-made table of contents. (This was hard in the tedious sense, not in the complicated sense. I had more than seventy entries.) Happily, I didn't have to type up the entries. Here's a quick and easy way that I got a copy of my table-of-contents entries.

I used a web browser to open my mbp_toc file. (This is the file that MobiPocket Creator generates.) I could have opened any html version of my ebook, but the mobi one was the first that came to mind. Then I selected the entire table of contents and copied it into the clipboard. Next, I opened Notepad (not Wordpad) and pasted the text. Now, I had my TOC in plain text. I then had to insert all the hyperlinks and book marks. After that, I put my title page back (I'd put it in a separate document so I could place it ahead of the TOC in the Kindle version) and I was ready to sumbit the ms. to Smashwords,

The process seemed to go well. The problem is that Smashwords generates all the files with an automated system, so the author doesn't have total control of the format. When I tested the Kindle version, it didn't go to the introduction. It skipped over it and went right to Part One. Taking a guess that Smashword's software looked for phrases like "part," at the start of a page, I added "Part Zero" to the chapter heading for my introduction. That fixed the problem. There were some other tiny issues, but none that I felt made enough of a difference to drive me back into the depths of Word. My book was now available on Smashwords.

All that remained was for me to spread the word, and then sit back and watch the sales come in. Right. I'll get to the ugly and dismaying world of self-promotion next time.