Smashwords Formatting Question

[Chad]

I am currently navigating the literary rectal exam that is formatting my book for premium status on Smashwords. The irony being, when you go to the table of contents in their style guide and click on a section (7a), it doesn't take you there automatically, like an e-book is supposed to. Very poorly formatted. I mean, they REALLY suck at formatting. Anyway, I hope this boosts my sales. I'm not going through this for my other six books if it doesn't.

[Heidi]

have you tried Draft2digital? I foubd their system so much easier and distribution very quick. they have a lot of the same distribution channels as Smashwords, but only distribute as epub. I do both simultaneously, and remove the Smashwords ones from D2D. just a thought.

[G.G.]

I really don't get it. I mean, I've done two books with them in the past (I have removed them from there since because I prefer KDP anyway). It always worked on the first download and was accepted for premium catalogue both times.

I don't know what you're doing wrong but it's not that difficult. Oh and in my version, 7a goes to step 7a as it should. Strange.

[Micah]

I've done five books through Smashwords (one novel, one novella, two short stories, and one collection) with no problems at all.

Where I've see other people having issues it always came down to either not using the full-blown nuclear option with Word docs, or with trying to do more complicated things like tables of contents with multiple layers.

My process was to start with their simplest Word template, and then paste in raw text to the various sections, making sure to NOT paste any formatting. ALL formatting has to be done with Styles in Word.

So I typically have one Style for each of the following:
* Book Title
* Author
* Chapter
* First Paragraph (in a chapter or section, with no indent)
* Book text (same as First Paragraph but with an indentation on the first line)

Can't remember if I have Styles for TOC or not, probably do.

Anyway, once I had a document that passed the meatgrinder (which I did on my first try), I've just used a copy of that as my go-forward template. Every subsequent book has used the same template with all the Styles.

[Ken]

Chad wrote: "I am currently navigating the literary rectal exam that is formatting my book for premium status on Smashwords. The irony being, when you go to the table of contents in their style guide and click ..."

I upload ePubs to Smashwords, not Word docs. However, at one point, I used to do Word docs in addition to the ePub, but soon discovered that it wasn't worth the extra time just to get a few more sales on the SW direct site.

When I formatted the Word docs, though, I never had any issues with their style guide. Just use the template that they supply and you should be fine. As Micah said, as long as you use Word styles for everything, you won't run into any issues. It's also a good practice to follow if you upload Word docs to KDP.