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I believe Smashwords can now accept ePub files, Jon. Not sure.
Whatever, we were underwhelmed by our experience of SW conversion quality and also find we're much more successful in getting our own carefully and individually prepared files into all major and minor retail outlets than Smashwords has ever been.
It has taken almost a year of darned hard work at our technical end to convert 120 titles in our current catalogue to PDF, ePub and Mobi, but in the mere two months since our additional US registration came through to allow us to deal direct with all the big new ebook retail stores, we are now everywhere (and several places Smashwords can't reach), with the exception of Apple's iBookstore where we've had to buy in expensive new hardware and even more expensive new Apple-specific publishing software to ensure perfect presentation of our titles. We'll fix that very soon -- and we'll do it ourselves.
Meatgrinding -- aptly named, as has been mentioned in this thread -- can do a very basic job, but it cannot produce excellent results. Mark Coker is an honest man and openly admits this (my only beef [sorry for bad pun] with him is his author-mill approach to what he ambiguously calls 'publishing').
For instance, Kobo demands that each of our ebook titles to be broken down into separate files for front matter and each chapter to ensure an excellent result. That is something auto-fonversion cannot handle. And each store differs wildly on what meta data, etc it needs. One size does not fit all.
Best wishes. Neil
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