Quote:
Originally Posted by caleb72
God - how complicated is it to follow the Smashwords style guide so that you don't get any problems?
It really sounds like a nightmare to me.
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It's not so much that the style guide is onerous as that it's heavily dependent on Word's style sheets. It's really easy while working in Word to have styles proliferate and overlap, and if you don't really pay any attention to it--which I suspect most writers don't--you can have a manuscript that looks the way you want it, and not even know that you've got a snake's nest of styles beneath the surface. I suspect that books that get scanned in and OCR'd suffer this in spades.
The suggested way to deal with it in SW is to nuke the whole manuscript: strip out all formatting and just add back in what you need, which in many cases is nothing more than a bit of italics and centering and bold. This isn't terribly hard. My problem stemmed from the complicated formatting some of my books have (usually having to do with alien or direct-link communication). I wasn't thinking about ebooks at the time, obviously. So I chose to impose order on what I had, rather than going back through it line by line. It worked pretty well in the Chaos books. Not so easily in the Star Rigger books.