So last night after my husband and son went to bed, I decided it was time to get "In a Stranger's Arms" ready for submission to Smashwords. I'm expecting to get my cover back from the designer today, and I'd like to be able to get the e-book up as soon as I get it back.
So, I armed myself with the invaluable Smashwords Style Guide by Mark Coker and set to work. I was actually impressed by how easy it was. It took a little reading and a little time, but it wasn't really a complicated process.
For those of you who don't know, Smashwords e-publishes to a variety of formats and makes its books available to a number of different e-book retailers. Because of this, Smashwords uses a system that it has effectively termed "The Meat Grinder" to prepare all of the different formats. Now, I've heard that the tricky thing about the Meat Grinder is that if you don't format your e-book correctly, you could end up with some very bizarre and ugly results. That's what you get with automation. As such, a large part of the style guide is dedicated to helping you avoid the errors and anomalies that could lead to serious formatting goofs.
Smashwords's current system accepts .doc files, and it is recommended to use Microsoft Word as you prepare your document for submission. But because Microsoft Word hides a lot of data and formatting in places that we can't always see it, we need a way to strip that away.
The first thing I did was copy my entire story (first composed in Google Drive) and paste it into notepad. Doing this strips out all of the formatting. Then, I copied the text in notepad and pasted that into Word (I use 2013).
From here, I went into File>Options>Display> and clicked all of the boxes under the heading "Always show these formatting marks on the screen." This makes it so that tabs, spaces, hidden text, paragraph marks, etc. are visible. Not all indents are created equal. Some are created on a style level, and some are created using a tab character. These two different sorts of indents are treated differently by the Meat Grinder, and they can make for big problems in the way that your e-book comes out. But if you don't have these boxes checked, you won't be able to see the difference between the two.
The Smashwords Style Guide does a much better job than I will be able to of explaining all of the hows and whys of formatting, but the basic gist is that just about all formatting should come down to styles. This means that instead of manually putting tabs or bold or font changes, you should define these elements in a style and then apply styles to the different parts of your e-book text.
Here are the styles that I used:
Normal (for all of the general body of my e-book):
Font: (Default) Garamond, 12 pt, Indent:
First line: 0.3", Left
Line spacing: single, Widow/Orphan control, Style: Show in the Styles gallery
BookTitle (for the title on the title page):
Font: 16 pt, Bold, Space
Before: 60 pt
After: 24 pt, Style: Show in the Styles gallery
Based on: Centered
Centered (for the front matter):
Indent:
First line: 0", Centered, Style: Automatically update, Show in the Styles gallery
Based on: Normal
Centered Bold (for when I wanted to bold something in the front matter)
Font: Bold, Style: Show in the Styles gallery
Based on: Centered
CustomHead (for section titles):
Font: 16 pt, Bold, Indent:
First line: 0", Centered, Space
Before: 60 pt
After: 18 pt, Page break before, Style: Show in the Styles gallery
Based on: Normal
Flushleft (for making the very first paragraph of text flush left just to make it look pretty):
Indent:
First line: 0", Style: Show in the Styles gallery
Based on: Normal
As I went through the formatting, I started by making everything "Normal" style, then changed the different parts as necessary. Following the Smashwords Style Guide, I was also able to add in a table of contents with links to the proper sections.
I'm interested in seeing how my story comes out of the Meat Grinder. It's possible that I've goofed something, and it'll come out with the formatting completely destroyed. But if I've got it right, then it really wasn't too painful of a process. If you follow the Style Guide as you do your formatting, you'll come out just fine.
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