Quote:
Originally Posted by egtalbot
I work in openoffice and save as a word document.
|
Same here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by egtalbot
Before I format it for Smashwords, i remove ALL formatting, then go through and add a single style for my chapter headers
|
Same here. I even went the nuclear route: saved as a txt file (having added $$ before every chapter title and ## before all italics so I could find them again afterwards). This process ripped out all formatting, including italics and different font sizes.
Then I created two styles: Smashwords header (not really a header, but for chapter titles, 'Foreword', 'About the Author', etc, centred, 14pt font 2 cm down the page, with a page break before) and Smashwords default (single line spacing, 12pt font, 0,5 cm first line indent, absolutely nothing else). I formatted the whole document with Smashwords default, then went through looking for $$ and changed those lines to Smashwords header. Finally I searched for ## and reinstated italics (mostly for foreign words, a few for emphasis). I've just checked the doc file and it has exactly those two styles.
Since then I've run the odt version through calibre (which doesn't take doc files), and it has produced a perfect epub and a perfect mobi, with page breaks, chapter titles, etc. I have an lrf and a pdf produced by the meat grinder, and Sony's Mac app shows the lrf, and the inbuilt Mac pdf reader show these with page breaks and chapter titles. I don't understand it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by egtalbot
... and then I format it exactly how i want it for Smashwords, which is basically just page breaks for every chapter, centering my asterisks for section breaks, and adding the chapter header styles. I also add the bookmarks to be used by the table of contents links, which I create basically at the end of the process. It takes about 90 minutes soup to nuts for a 100,000 word book.
|
Almost exactly the same procedure as I describe above (except I don't bother with bookmarks - it's a novel).
[/QUOTE]Regarding the duplicate cover, I do not include the cover in my word document when I upload to Smashwords. This means that a single version of the cover will appear in epub and pdf formats (the one we upload separately from the word doc), and no cover will appear in the mobi files. Not sure the reason for this but it seems to be how the meatgrinder works. I upload my books directly to kindle store separately anyway, so this is a tradeoff I have no problem with. But I'm sure that explains what you saw with duplicate covers on some books and not on others. IMO a great update to the meatgrinder would be to have authors NOT include the cover in their word doc and to include the uploaded cover in all formats. Perhaps that update has happened already, not certain.[/QUOTE]
Good explanation and good suggestion. Thanks.
Anyway, I've unpublished my ebook, and when the word has filtered round to all the outlets and it's disappeared from sale, I'll go in with the one I produced in calibre. It's a pity, as it would have been nice to have one distributor to have to deal with, but it's not the end of the world. Would have been nice if I could exchange the calibre ones for the meat-grinder ones. It's only the epub and mobi files that are trashed, but then 99.99% of readers will use one or the other of them.
