Questions about Smashwords.com

Bramblethorn said:

Yeah, I was thinking sort of "mismatched buddies". Yours is like "but if you eat him he can't throw the ball for us".

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With mine, it had better be a basketball. He loved basketballs. Of course one bite and it went flat. He could pop a basketball with one bite. That's what happens when you have a Rottweiler / Pit Bull mix. A gentle giant, with the capacity to rip an intruder apart in seconds.

lovecraft68 said:

It's not difficult. They have something called the "meatgrinder" that formats your book for you.

As long as you don't do anything crazy with paragraph indentations or spacing the book will go through.

As for the "butt cracks" SW will let you show pretty much anything, but it can;t go into their premium catalog(which is all the affiliates) with any nudity.

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If your book formatting uses custom paragraphs, you're probably okay. I tried using 'carriage returns,' not okay. Once I got through the meat grinder, I found that some of my formatting was mot the way that my word processor set it up. It took me a while to figure things out.

I have had trouble, even when I tired to resubmit cover images.

The story I'm working on now is called, "The Spider Bite". I just passed 4,600 words.

To make things easier set up word exactly like you have it set up for Lit.



Always use a paragraph mark - just hit the enter key, unless you have somehow changed the mapping. Don't ask me how or why?

I use the block paragraphs in my ebooks, just like I use them here at lit.

For you Open Office people...

Mello_SixtyNine said:

The story I'm working on now is called, "The Spider Bite". I just passed 4,600 words.

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Now I'm at 5,339. Damn, it's hot so far!

What Zeb Carter said, as far as the text body of a Smashwords submission is fine. However, the preamble, tittles and chapter headings really need to have their own formatting.

R. Richard said:

What Zeb Carter said, as far as the text body of a Smashwords submission is fine. However, the preamble, tittles and chapter headings really need to have their own formatting.

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I just bold them. I might sometimes center them or leave them left justified. I may sometimes insert a graphic line of some type to fill out the line. I may also increase the font sized by two points. But usually I just bold them.

As far as scene separators, I have started using graphic items, in place of the standard * * * *.

Then there is the title page, the copyright page, etc. They are mostly just plain text same as the body of the story.

Then there is the TOC. Sometimes the meatgrinder goofs up on the TOC entries. Learn to create a hyperlink TOC. It's in the Style Guide. Check it out. It's not all that hard and gives the reader a way to jump right to the chapter they left off at, instead of scrolling through the entire book.

R. Richard said:

What Zeb Carter said, as far as the text body of a Smashwords submission is fine. However, the preamble, tittles and chapter headings really need to have their own formatting.

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I took the advice out of the Smashwords Style Guide and created a centered style just for preamble, title, and asterisks denoting scene changes. Worked out easily enough, I just wrote the whole story in the Normal Style then changed what I needed to the Centered Style during editing.