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It should go without saying that the OP (me) is fascinated by the discussion among the experts that his question started. I hope that no one reading this will consider my comments blasphemy, but I'd like to second Hitch's description of my objective, and that it has been so from the very beginning of my sojourn into indie publishing.
There is no question that a writer's best use of time is to write. And if I were a successful writer with sufficient income from that activity to pay others for all the steps required to put a nice-looking eBook and POD paperback on the market, I'd jump on that option in a heartbeat.
Back to reality, I'll probably never see more than the average indie author in terms of sales, and that puts me in the mode of trying to write the best books I can and break even as my first two objectives. It simply makes more sense for me to find the time to invest, particularly since once I've done that, I don't have to invest the same amount of effort learning new skills with every book I publish. To rely on others is to repeat the initial monetary investment each and every time.
I have no love for Word, but I've learned to maneuver around its limitations and build a template with all the styles I need to format the books exactly the way I want them, including a set of scrubbing actions to remove the most common troublemakers when converting to eBook and POD formats.
I fully appreciate the fact that Word's save-as-html function creates a result that experts on this forum consider to be "messy," and that's probably a mild descriptor in relation to what you really think of it. But when I can open that file in Sigil, insert the chapter breaks, generate the TOC and save as an epub that converts to a mobi with Calibre, the messiness behind the scenes is immaterial when both formats appear flawlessly with ADE and Kindle for Mac and on a Kindle, Nook, iPad, etc.
For now, the quality of the end product has to be my prime objective, regardless of the means used to get there. Maybe someday I'll be able to get a job with Hitch, but until then, I have a process that produces eBooks and POD paperbacks with InDesign that won't win awards, but neither do they repel readers with anything that screams amateur.
That said, I don't for a moment think that any expert on this forum couldn't look at one of my books and show me how to improve it. Maybe someday I'll discover exactly how.
Tango Mike
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