I’ve waded through the Smashwords Style Guide and come out the other side, humbled and wiser. I’ve learned more about Microsoft Word than I ever wanted to know. But at last I’ve loaded up Vampire Road to Smashwords, and I’ve got my hour in the sunshine that is the New Releases page.
Next task is marketing, but for an indie e-pubbed author the fun never ends. I also want to put it up to Barnes and Noble through Pubit, and by the fall Kobo intends to have a version of self-pubbing as well.
The good news is that now I know how to format my MS document as I write it, so that I don’t have to go through the excruciating cleaning process with my next novel. This cleaning of Vampire Road’s formatting was required to enable the Smashwords Meatgrinder program to digest my words and spit out multiple e-book formats.
I’m still waiting with fingers crossed to find out if I qualify for their “Premium Catalog,” which is proof of my prowess with Microsoft Word formatting. It also gets me into the ibook store and the Sony Reader store, which was the whole point of publishing through Smashwords.
For all you indie authors out there, I’m going to finish the guide that will take your manuscript to Kindle. It’s far easier and the biggest e-book market. I’ll write up my notes about Smashwords later next week.
Tomorrow: the clickable table of contents.
I have a couple of novels on smashwords too and I have to agree that amazon is much easier. I eneded up putting my free short story on smashwords and I’ll probably continue publishing my novels on Kindle. I’m still trying to figure out the formating for smashwords. I understand that the ebooks have to be formatted a certain way so they can be sold on sony but I’m just not sure I want to go through that again…I’ll check back and see how you made out.
RSB
After two weeks I’ve finally got my approval for the Smashwords Premium catalog, which is the only way to get Vampire Road into Sony’s Reader store. The good news is that Smashwords is promising to speed up the approvals process. The other good news is that Kobo intends to launch a self-pub platform in Sept, so between that and Barnes and Noble’s Pubit, we can get our books into all the bricks and mortar bookstore websites without using Smashwords as an intermediary. That means more money for writers.