Wrangling Through Smashwords Formatting
Well, I’m learning about eBook formatting by leaps and bounds this week. I’m am happy to announce to my reader(s) that the tour de force that is Fate’s Needle is now available on Smashwords.
The whole process was fairly painless, much like banging your funny bone. That’s not really the normal pain you feel when you slam an appendage into a hard surface. It’s numbing and paralyzing, unpleasant and long-lasting. But it’s not painful, like being stabbed.
You do have to follow the Smashwords style guide. As you scroll through the endless white spaces of that PDF, you begin to suspect what your final product is going to look like. But overall, now that it’s all over, I think my final product looks good in the formats that I’ve reviewed.
I’ve learned that so much time can be saved in the process if I had just written my manuscripts in the format they want. You are basically advised to use formatting styles to manage your document. If you do that, most of what you have to do for Smashwords prep work will be minimal. Also, do yourself a favor and don’t do minimalist chapter headings like “Fourteen” or whatnot. Stick the word “chapter” on each heading and you will be a happier person.
Once you’ve got the document set up like the style guide wants, the actual uploading was fast. It converted to all major eBook formats and gave me the results of its “auto vetter” for inclusion in premium services. Premium services, despite the name, are free and basically allows you to sell via all major online book sellers besides Amazon. Pretty slick!
I got one error,which was a vestigial paragraph tab that I had not deleted. It was just one that knocked me out. However, this did not mean I wasn’t published. I was. I was just not ready for premium services. Once I fixed that little error I reloaded via my dashboard, repeated the same process, and was good to go. I had to assign an ISBN, which Smashwords gives you for free and is only needed for premium services.
The whole process took me three hours to complete. That’s because I had so much to fix. Now that I know what to do and how to prepare, next time will be faster. I was even able to pick off another typo (how many will I continue to find, even after a million reads!) before uploading. So this is a massively improved version! Go get it! (I deleted an extraneous “the”; I think the whole book is a lot clearer for now.)
