[M T McGuire]

I HATE Word... with a PASSION... like the rest of you! But I do think Smashwords is Genius. It fills a niche which nobody else has seen and since Word is ubiquitous, I can see why they made it their choice. I'll use Word if that's what it takes to get my book into all these other distribution channels and bear in mind I live in the UK so without Smashwords many of those other outlets are closed to me (or just untenable to non-US bank account holders). I have a choice. I can make my book available to lots of people by using crappy Word and sticking it through the Smashwords meatgrinder or I can put it on my website.

I've only a very small budget to publish my book and that covers a website, a copy editor, a proof reader, the ISBN's and about sixteen million proof copies from Lulu before I even submit the finished article to a printer.

Now, I would call myself a 'gifted amateur' at dtp (being quite generous) but coding goes over my head... badly. I get the gist (it's WordPerfect with reveal codes on) but my kitchen table budget doesn't cover another £300 a pop for a .mobi .epub .lrf (if it's still going) the apple thing, whatever it's called and the palm thing. Smashwords will convert it. Not brilliantly but better than I could do and more to the point, for free. One day, when I can afford a luxury budget per book, then yes, I'll find somebody who knows what they're doing and they can code it all up for me so it looks lovely... unless Messrs Coker and friends have found a way of making their meat grinder do the same thing. The fact it's called a meat grinder should tell us something, I think.

So I hear where you're coming from but without Smashwords my book wouldn't be available to most of you... and Mark Coker still replies to support e-mails personally which I consider impressive.

I'll stop now ;-)

Cheers

MTM

PS... thinking about it what we really need is a wordproccessor which will include e-book formats in the 'save as' section.