Quote:
Originally Posted by AnemicOak
...Smashwords and the like make it simple to upload a Word doc and publish your material, but it's seldom I've downloaded a books from there that didn't need work before I could comfortably read it. Smashwords makes it easy (so does Amazon DTP for that matter), but I wish all their authors would spend the time to get their books to look decent. Hope that doesn't sound to negative or anything, I think it's great all the avenues that e-publishing offers authors to put out their backlists themselves and if they have the know how to do it without help great, but some need help and seem to be forgoing it to do things on the cheap with mixed results....
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It doesn't sound negative at all to me, Brian. It's frustrating to try to read a book that's poorly formatted or full of mistakes--yanks you right out of the story. It takes time to properly format and re-edit your work for Smashwords and Kindle--the 12 backlist titles I published took me about a month and a half of full-time work (much of that just in-depth re-reading)--but it's not hard. The Smashword guidelines, in particular, are involved, but real easy to understand.
This is a good topic of conversation, Ficbot. Several times recently I've read comments online about what a good idea it would be to post a list somewhere of authors digitally republishing their backlist. If I didn't have so much on my place, I'd do it myself. I'm as eager as any reader to get my hand on good, professionally vetted, reasonably priced ebooks.
Pat
patricia-ryan.com