How to Beat the Meatgrinder…

I have been with Smashwords.com for some time now, and in a way, I like them better than I like Amazon. I sell more books on their site, for a start.
It’s a lot harder to upload your books with them, but that may be a good thing. I thought I had the formatting they insist upon down pat, so was not prepared for the trouble I had last week. 
Smashwords distribute your work to so many outlets in the US, including Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, WHSmith and far too many more to list here.  Apple had just decided to update their requirements, and my book failed.

 

If you haven’t tried them yet, you will want to know about something they call ‘The Meatgrinder’. If you don’t follow their instructions to the letter, this Meatgrinder will fail your book in record time. You will still be published on Smashwords, but not their premium list that gets all the lovely distribution.
As I say, been there, got the t-shirt, so when I received an email from them saying my book had failed, I was gobsmacked to say the least.They do tell you what is wrong, that’s if you can understand the lingo, so I changed a few things and tried to upload my book again. And again. Only to fail repeatedly. I didn’t understand, what was I doing wrong?
Nearly reached this point!








Almost at the point of pulling my hair out, I had an idea. I had uploaded all of Anita’s books before and they were fine. There had to be something different about mine. So I took a long hard look at all of them, just to see if there was a difference somewhere.I checked the font, headers, page breaks, paragraph returns, anything at all where I might have slipped up. But found no difference between my book and Anita’s.I wiped the formatting and did it again, with the same result.




Smashwords are very helpful, with all kinds of advice and instructions for you to solve the problem. They told me something called the EPUB was wrong and some other technical term was missing, none of which made any sense to me, being a dyed in the wool technophobe.

Then the phrase ‘chapter heads missing’ suddenly started to make sense. All of Anita’s books had proper chapter headings, where mine were just numbered. Could this be what was wrong? Surely not. How could a simple thing like this be causing all this trouble?
But it was. Once I put in the missing words, my book sailed through and would now be distributed far and wide…

Amazon Link for The Ninth Life...    amzn.to/1f7taIW