[teh603]

How the heck did I miss this thread before?

I use Kate, which is a notepad equivalent used in Linux distributions with a KDE frontend. Just remember to set the line endings in the open/save preferences to "DOS/Windows" instead of "UNIX" to make things work properly with Smashwords and other sites.

Gedit is also nice, but I don't remember if it can do DOS/Windows line endings by default. I know you can manually set it when you save the document. Gedit is a lot more primitive than Kate in most respects, but its also available for a lot more platforms since Kate is KDE-specific.

For compiling the final document, I use either OpenOffice or LibreOffice. OO on the laptop which is still running Kubuntu 10.04- the last Kubuntu version to ship with OO- and LibreOffice on the desktop. By compiling from a .txt file, I'm able to sidestep a lot of the "making Word cooperate" issues mentioned in the Smashwords style guide.

I make my covers using GIMP, with a lot of extra filters and plugins installed. If I can't find a public domain image to do what I want, I either pay an artist or go out and shoot my own photo.

Kate and OO/LO are bundled with any release of Kubuntu. GIMP and gimp-data-extras aren't part of the standard loadout, but can be installed from the Kubuntu repositories using either kpackagekit (in 10.04), Muon (11.10 and later), or the command prompt. All are free to download and use.