[ketadiablo]

Hi everyone, I'm Keta Diablo, erotic romance author. Someone told me to hop on over to the Writer's Corner and then I stumbled upon your thread about Smashwords. I'm going to post a detailed step-by-step below and hope it helps. This isn't mine, but came from a publisher who formats all day long.

Supposedly, it's Smashwords format too, but read and use your own judgment. I'm not good at formatting, thus my formatter friend does it for me and my books look beautiful.

So here goes. Hope it helps:

First thing, control A, which selects the entire document, then select Format, styles and formatting, Remove Formatting, then click on Normal (depending on how your document is formatted you might have to scroll down the list to find normal) once you find it then right click on Normal and select font - apply Times New Roman, Regular, 12 point, then click Paragraph, select Alignment Justified, then 0, 0, 0, 0 (for the spacing categories) then select first line indent 0.5 and spacing single and then select OK.

Then go to search and replace, in the search box, click Special, and click on the tab character, that'll put it in your search box, then click Replace and don't put anything in there. Click replace all. That will take all tabs out of your document.

Next in the search box click Special and enter Manual Line Break and in the replace box, click Paragraph Mark, THEN REPLACE ALL.
Next select Special, in Search box select Section Break and in Replace box select Paragraph Mark THEN REPLACE ALL. Sorry, it's easy to "think" you've typed something, and anytime you have a problem with the formatting don't hesitate to ask.

Next you want to remove the extra paragraphs in the document so you don't have more than two together (if you miss some don't worry I'll catch them) Just enter the Paragraph Mark 4 times in your search box and replace it with one paragraph mark, then do the same entering the Paragraph Mark 3 times in your search box and replace it with one, that'll bring you pretty close.

Next Click your Search box and in the box hit your space bar twice Then in the replace box hit your space bar once. That will take out all the double spaces between words.

Next, search for the number of *** or however many of those you use when indicating a scene switch in your document, enter those into your search box, then in Replace, (make sure your cursor is in the replace box, it has a tendency to jump back to the Search box when you do this and if it does you'll have to click the No Formatting button to get it out of there and put your cursor back in the replace box, Select Format, Paragraph, Alignment Center, and then enter go to special and enter a paragraph mark. Then replace all, this will put your *** (scene break indicators) in the center with a paragraph after for safety just to make sure you don't have two few.

Finally, follow the same steps as above for your Chapters, only in this case because you do not want to split the word Chapter and the number, you need to enter your formatting code and your paragraph mark before you type in Chapter. If you don't have an extra paragraph already entered after your chapters in the document then I'll catch it and fix it when I prepare the document.

If any of this is unclear, Keta, please let me know and I'll try to help, or if you run into any other problems let me know that as well.