Well, "In a Stranger's Arms" is now up at both Smashwords and Amazon. Of course, as soon as I submitted, I found a typo that I'd missed before. It seems like no matter how carefully you proof-read, something will slip by. Well, I guess that's the nice thing about e-publishing.
For Smashwords, fixing the typo was as simple as just making the change in the source file and re-uploading it. The whole process probably took about two minutes. On Amazon, it was a longer process. I made the appropriate change and then uploaded it. However, I again got the message saying that I needed to wait 12 hours for review. Uploading a new version didn't take my old version down, so my book is still up. When the 12 hours (or whatever it is) is over, the new version will slip into place.
One place where Amazon has been superior to Smashwords is in ease of formatting. On Amazon, it really went very smoothly to take my .doc and change it into an e-book. I ran into one small hitch when I accidentally had track changes on before I uploaded and ended up with a word crossed out. Other than that, as far as I can tell, what I saw in my .doc is what I got.
With Smashwords it's a bit of a different story. In my post about Surviving the Meat Grinder, I talked about how the Smashwords submissions process was relatively painless. I recant. I thought I understood everything as I initially went through it, and almost everything worked. However, for some reason anytime I tried to use a style other than "Normal," the Meat Grinder would default my font to something like Arial or Calibri. I tinkered and re-uploaded my file 5 or 10 times, but was never able to solve that problem.
As it stands, my section headings and front matter appear in a different font, which I don't think looks terrible, but I do wish that I could solve this. I was using Word 2013, and I have absolutely no idea what is causing this problem. If anyone reading has had this problem, or knows how to solve it, I'd love to hear what you have to say.
Showing posts with label meat grinder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label meat grinder. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Monday, March 24, 2014
In a Stranger's Arms
Well, I finally did it. "In a Stranger's Arms," my first erotica short story is out there. I submitted it to Smashwords and also to KDP (Amazon). I figure this will cover my bases as far as getting the most exposure. With Smashwords, the process of submission was very fast. After I'd put all of the information up, it was only a matter of minutes before my ebook was up and ready for downloads. With Amazon, it looks like it's going to take a little longer. On my author dashboard on Amazon, it says that it is "In Review" and will probably be up within 12 hours.
When I submitted to Amazon, I mostly used the same document as I'd prepared for Smashwords. I changed my copyright notice and removed the references to my Smashwords profile page and interview, because I didn't know whether it was kosher to direct Amazon customers there. Aside from that, things really were mostly the same, and it certainly wasn't much extra work to upload it in two places. Going forward, I will be very interested to see how my story performs on Amazon and Smashwords.
I'm happy and proud to have my work online and available (and a little nervous too, if I'm being completely honest). But it's a good feeling to have something that I've worked on actually be in a place where people can purchase and enjoy it.
I'm not planning on resting on my laurels, though. I have complete drafts of two more stories at the moment, and I'm just planning on writing more!
If you'd like to purchase my book, it's up at Smashwords right now. It's not up on on Amazon yet, but when it is, I'll post the link there as well.
When I submitted to Amazon, I mostly used the same document as I'd prepared for Smashwords. I changed my copyright notice and removed the references to my Smashwords profile page and interview, because I didn't know whether it was kosher to direct Amazon customers there. Aside from that, things really were mostly the same, and it certainly wasn't much extra work to upload it in two places. Going forward, I will be very interested to see how my story performs on Amazon and Smashwords.
I'm happy and proud to have my work online and available (and a little nervous too, if I'm being completely honest). But it's a good feeling to have something that I've worked on actually be in a place where people can purchase and enjoy it.
I'm not planning on resting on my laurels, though. I have complete drafts of two more stories at the moment, and I'm just planning on writing more!
If you'd like to purchase my book, it's up at Smashwords right now. It's not up on on Amazon yet, but when it is, I'll post the link there as well.
Saturday, March 22, 2014
Smashwords Formatting: Surviving the Meat Grinder
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.
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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