by Mark Coker
HTML Source Files: We previously allowed HTML file uploads, but now we no longer allow them because most HTML files provided to us contained serious corruption as defined by the WC3 HTML Validator at http://validator.w3.org/check and as a result didn’t upload properly. If you only have your source file as an HTML file, follow these instructions: 1. Open the HTML document in a browser. 2. Copy and paste the entire document into a new Word doc by clicking "Edit: paste special" within the Word menu, then selecting "unformatted text" as the output. 3. From here, you'll find that you've got a consistent number of spaces, such as four spaces, making up your indents. This won't work, so do a CTRL+H (press the CTRL key and the H key at the same time) search and replace and search for ^p space space space space (a paragraph return followed by four taps on the space bar) and replace with only ^p. This will eliminate the leading spaces at the beginning of each paragraph. 4. Next, CTRL+A the document, right mouse click, click paragraph, and then under “special” do a first line paragraph indent of .25”. 5. Next, clean up the remaining minor issues, like manually removing the indents from your title and copyright pages, and using Word’s center button center those sections.
Understanding the Different Ebook Formats
One of the important benefits of Smashwords is that we take your single file and convert it into multiple ebook formats. Why is this so important to the success of your book? Because customers read on many different devices, and the more formats you offer, the more books you’ll sell. In early January 2010, we did a survey of the most popular ebook formats for Smashwords customers. The results were interesting. Although PDF is the most popular ebook format, two thirds of customers preferred formats other than PDF. You can read the survey yourself at http://blog.smashwords.com/2010/02/most-popular-ebook-formats-revealed.html.
You should publish your book into as many digital formats as possible (even if certain formats translate less well than others) because this expands your potential audience of readers. Review the outputs of each format for acceptability after you publish.
Here’s a summary of the formats offered:
EPUB - This is your most important format! Epub is an open industry ebook format. This is the format we distribute to Apple, Barnes&Noble, Sony, Kobo, Diesel eBooks, and others. If your book is available in epub, it can be read on the most popular ebook readers and ebook reading software applications (Like Stanza on the iPhone or Aldiko on Android devices), and will gain the widest distribution via Smashwords’ distribution outlets (EPUB is a requirement for inclusion in Smashwords’ Premium Catalog, and it’s what we distribute to every retailer except Amazon).
Mobipocket (Kindle) – Mobipocket, A.K.A. MOBI, allows your books to be read on the Amazon Kindle, so this is an important format for you. Mobipocket is supported on many handheld devices and e-reading applications. Mobipocket is a requirement for distribution to Amazon.
Palm Doc (PDB) - PalmDoc is a format primarily used on Palm Pilot devices, but software readers are available for PalmOS, Symbian OS, Windows Mobile Pocket PC/Smartphone, desktop Windows, and Macintosh. Be sure to turn off “smart quotes” in your source file, otherwise they may appear garbled in your PDB file. Our PDB is little more than ugly plain text.
PDF - Portable Document Format, or PDF, is a file format readable by most devices, including handheld e-readers, PDAs, and personal computers. It’s a good format if your work contains complex layout, charts or images. Odds are, if your work looks good in Microsoft Word it will look good in PDF. PDF is also a good option for readers who may want to print out your book on their home computers. On the negative side, PDF is a rigid, inflexible format because it’s not reflowable, so it’s horrible for reading novels. Your customers can’t easily change the font size or style to match their preferences, the text isn’t reflowable, and the reader is forced to read page by page.
LRF - This is the old format for the Sony Reader. Sony has shifted to the EPUB format, so LRF is less important than it once was.
RTF - Rich Text Format, or RTF, is a cross-platform document format supported by many word processors and devices. It’s usually pretty good at preserving the original formatting from Word documents.
Plain Text - Plain text is the most widely supported file format. It works on nearly all readers and devices. It lacks formatting, but will work anywhere. For best results with plain text, your source document should not contain images or fancy formatting.
HTML SmashReader – This is our online reader that allows customers to sample or read your book from their web browser. Your sample pages will be indexed by Google, which will increase the ability for potential customers to find your book, even if they didn’t know your book is what they were looking for. Think of it as serendipity on steroids. If your book looks good in our HTML reader, it will probably also look good in EPUB and MOBI. Linked tables of contents (ToCs) don’t work in the HTML reader.
Javascript SmashReader - This online reader isn’t indexable by search engines like the HTML reader, but it does allow your readers to customize their reading experience. They can increase or decrease the fonts, change the line spacing, change the font, change the font color or the background color. Our Javascript Reader has always been a bit buggy, so if you see strange characters along the top of the page, ignore them. Linked ToCs don’t work here.
More options coming - In the future, we’ll add support for other formats based on author requests. If there’s a particular format you want, drop us a note.
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FORMATTING
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Formatting Your Work, Making Microsoft Word Behave
Before you upload your book to Smashwords, follow the steps below to ensure proper formatting of your book. The first steps focus on making Word behave.
A note about all the different versions of Word: You can use any version of Microsoft Word, even the old versions like Word 2000 (my personal favorite), Word 2003 (I like this one too), Word 2007 (Ugh, steep learning curve, but it’s growing on me), and the newer ones. Luckily, although the user interface changes (tell me, Microsoft, why do you make Word more difficult to use with every version?), the inner guts of Word are remarkably similar across all versions. If, for religious reasons you’re hesitant to use Microsoft Word, please reconsider. If you plan to publish frequently with Smashwords, it’s a smart investment because you’ll gain better control over your ebook’s formatting and you’ll save yourself time. If you’re stubborn and want to use Open Office (a good free word processor popular with many Smashwords authors) or Apple Pages (also popular), you can still use the Style Guide if you’re careful to implement the intent of the instructions, though you should understand up front that your book may not come out as you intended.
Step 1: This goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway. Don’t make the formatting modifications below on your original document. Instead, open your final manuscript within Microsoft Word, and create a copy of it by going to File: Save As: and then enter a new file name, such as MySmashwordsMasterpiece, and save as a .doc file (the default). This way, if you make any mistakes as you follow my advice you won’t screw up your original. Also make sure you’ve turned off Word’s “Track Changes” feature, also known as “markup mode.”
Step 2: *Important* Activate Word’s Show/Hide Do this now, BEFORE you start formatting, otherwise you might as well blindfold your eyes. This is one of my favorite editing features in Word. The show/hide feature is designated by the “¶” mark in the toolbar (I’ve always thought of it as the “reverse P thingy,” but for you typography purists out there, you know it as a “pilcrow.”), as shown below.
The show/hide button helps you view the guts of your formatting
When clicked, it exposes your paragraph returns, extra spaces, tabs, field codes or strange formatting. It’s a great tool to help polish your document for the cleanest possible conversions. If it’s not in your toolbar, you can usually find it in Tools: Options: View and then under Formatting Marks click All.
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br /> Step 3: *Important* Turn off Word's AutoCorrect: AutoFormat As You Type and AutoFormat features (see screen shot below). I’ve always found these to be Word’s most annoying features. If you have them engaged, Word will try to guess what type of formatting you want based on how you write the paragraph, how you manually format the paragraph, or by how you formatted something before it. If you upload a Word file to Smashwords with paragraphs formatted inconsistently, like some paragraphs formatted as “Body Text” and others formatted as “Normal Text,” the book will look horrible as an ebook. To turn off the features, in Word 2000 & 2003, go to “Tools”: “Autocorrect,” then click on the “Auto Format As You Type” tab and then uncheck most of the boxes, and then click on the “AutoFormat” tab and uncheck the four boxes under “Apply.”
The reason we want to turn off these autoformatting options is because later in the Style Guide, you’re going to try to simplify and normalize your text to prepare it for conversion. If you don’t turn off autoformatting, Word will cheerfully and automatically mess things up again as you make the corrections below.
To access the same screen in Word 2007, click on the round Microsoft Office button (upper left) then click Word Options, then click Proofing, then click the button at right for Autocorrect Options. See the screen shot below, which is similar for most versions of Word.
Step 4. Eliminate “text boxes.” To learn if you have text boxes, from your Word menu choose View: Print Layout, then simply click on your pages and if the shaded dashy lines appear around your text, that’s a text box. Text boxes will corrupt your ebook conversions by inserting a paragraph return at the end of every line. Be sure to check your headers and footers, because you’ll often find text boxes hiding there, surrounding paragraph returns, or surrounding the auto-page-numbering. Remove them. We have seen instances where a simple auto-page-numbering textbox in the header will cause some file conversions to become corrupted.
Here’s a screenshot:
The easiest shortcut to eliminate the text box is to save your document as plain text (.txt), then close the document, then re-open it in Microsoft Word, then reformat the book per the recommendations in this Guide and then save your document as a .doc file. Another option is called the Nuclear Option, mentioned above, and described in greater detail in the next section below.
If you already know your formatted is screwed up, or if your manuscript originated from a PDF file, or if it has touched multiple Word processors over the years, it’s not a bad idea to pursue the Nuclear Option now, because it gives you a fresh clean document. As you’ll see later when I discuss the topic of EPUBCHECK (an industry-standard validator your EPUB must pass in order for us to ship your book to Apple), the Nuclear Option is the last-resort solutions to fix files that can’t pass EPUBCHECK. If you do it now, you won’t have to do it later.
Step 5. Normalize the Text In your raw Microsoft Word document, you probably have a mishmash of conflicting and inconsistent paragraph styles. You might have Normal paragraph style, or other paragraph styles such as Body Text, Plain Text, or multiple Heading styles. You probably don’t even know you’ve got these styles (often because of Word’s annoying habit mentioned above in Step 3 of changing your formatting to what Word thinks you want, rather than what you really want).
CHANGE EVERYTHING TO NORMAL PARAGRAPH STYLE: If you change your entire book the Normal paragraph style, right now, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and headache (you can add other styles back in later) and you’ll get a cleaner conversion.
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Here’s quick sneak peek flash forward of where I’m taking you: You’ll change everything to Normal paragraph style, then you’ll modify Normal to define what you want it to define based on whether you want first line indents or the block method, then you’ll judiciously add in additional paragraph styles if necessary (such as maybe the Heading style for chapter headings), then you’ll add your bold and italics, then you’ll do clean up and then you’re done.
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If you ignore the Normalization step, then you’ll receive complaints from customers that your font size and font style changes erratically from one paragraph to the next. Such inconsistent style usage can also prevent you from gaining access to the Premium Catalog, or, if your inconsistent styling slips past our reviewers, retailers will reject your book for the same reason.
To unify your text around the Normal paragraph style, in Microsoft Word press CTRL+A (press the CTRL key at the same time you press the “a” key, or choose Edit: Select All from the menu) to highlight all your text, and then select "Normal" from your option bar up above. This will allow you to standardize on a single font, single font size, the same line spacing, and the same text justification (we recommend left justified, a.k.a. “ragged right” by its detractors). Note that depending on your formatting, when you change the text to Normal you may lose some formatting (what was centered previously may become left justified or your italics may disappear, for example, as well as other changes, so be sure to carefully re-apply necessary elements later).
Remember, although we recommend changing everything to Normal paragraph style at this step, it doesn’t mean you can’t add additional styles later (in fact, we recommend you add additional style later).
Step 6. Purge Old or Corrupted Formatting: If your book has been touched by multiple Word processors, or contains dozens of custom paragraph styles introduced during the process to format it for print, you might want to purge all the formatting so you can start fresh. From the main Word 2003 menu, click Format: Styles and Formatting: and then select “Clear Formatting” from the menu at right. This will help put everything into Normal paragraph style. Warning: Any purge will cause bolds and italics to disappear.
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Step 6a: THE NUCLEAR OPTION (HOW TO REALLY PURGE EVERYTHING):
If you’ve already tried uploading your file to Smashwords and it’s failing its conversions, or the finished outputs contain multiple font sizes and styles (in other words, it looks uglier than sin), then you should consider what we call the Nuclear Option. Some experienced Smashwords formatters prefer to start with the Nuclear Option, because it helps guarantee a clean file. Others turn to the Nuclear Option because their Word document is corrupted.
First, make a backup of your manuscript and set it aside in case the Nuclear Option fails you. Next, copy and paste your entire manuscript into Windows Notepad (usually found in Programs: Accessories) or any other text editor. This will strip out all your formatting. Close Microsoft Word. Then reopen Microsoft Word so it’s showing a fresh empty document. Next, in Notepad, type CTRL+A (press the CTRL key, hold it down, then press the A key at the same time) for “select all” then CTRL+C for “copy” then paste into the empty Word document using either CTRL+V (for paste) or Edit: Paste (in Word 2000 and 2003) or Home: Paste (Word 2007). From here, reformat the book per the Style Guide.
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Step 7. Managing and modifying paragraph styles. Check your document’s style. Just because your book on screen looks like it has a font of Times New Roman, the book may appear in some of the Smashwords formats as Courier or some other font (this happened to me with my own book, Boob Tube). How does this happen? The answer is in Word’s default styles. If Word thinks your default font style for the “Normal” paragraph style is 11pt Courier, even if your document is saved as 12pt Times New Roman, the book it passes on to Meatgrinder will be 11pt Courier.
To prevent this from happening, and to ensure you pass to Smashwords what you intend to pass, follow these instructions: Within Word, click Format: Style, then on the left click “Normal” if it isn’t already highlighted. In the center pane of the window, under “character preview,” Word will show you sample text and tell you the default font style for “Normal” text. If it’s what you want, then close the window. However, if it’s different (as it was in my case when I uploaded my novel), then click Format: Font: and then select the font and font size you want. We recommen
d Times New Roman. Don’t use exotic fonts because they will not translate well, and they could even cause your conversions to fail.
If you’re using Word 2007, click the Home tab, then click the little arrow under “Change Style” (see image below), then hover your mouse over the style and it’ll display its primary properties. If you want to change the properties, click the down arrow of the Normal style and click Modify.
7a. Choose a paragraph separation method: First Line Indent or Block method