[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

The Meatgrinder does tolerably well with minimally-formatted Word docs. (It falls apart on complex Word docs that haven't been made according to the stylesheet.)

Right.

So I'm guessing that the book I'm working now -- that has a character portrait per chapter -- is likely to hit a snag in conversion.

And the book I'm working next year -- a Choose Your Own Adventure style book that has dozens of pictures and hundreds of links and cross-links -- will probably not convert cleanly either, no matter how closely I follow the guidelines.

The guidelines that is AN ENTIRE BOOK. Full of prose trying to scare you into not messing up. And which is not easy to follow as a reference material, imho. Because it's AN ENTIRE BOOK OF PROSE.

I've used Word all my life. My familiarity with it does NOT mean that a conversion service that doesn't let the author tweak the output manually is a good way to run a business. Word is a powerful tool, but conversions are always, ALWAYS given to gremlins in the system.

I should know, my day job IS writing conversions. You always provide a "tweak at the end" option for special cases. Otherwise, you're a hammer who thinks the whole world is nothing but nails.

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

(would you rather they worked on fixing the submission docs, or the search engine?)

As an author and as someone who buys from Kobo more often than I do from Smashwords, I would prefer they fix the submission process.

As a buyer, I would PREFER THEY FIX THE SUBMISSION PROCESS. Nothing makes me run to B&N faster than the realization that the indie books on Kobo are conversions from a Word document that the author wasn't able to hand-tweak for accuracy.

Indie e-publishing already has enough "ew, the books are badly formatted!" bad press. Word conversions aren't going to help that.

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

they just got told that "epub is better than Word" and ran their Word doc through Calibre before sending it to Smashwords. (Which is still better than most of the ones who'd try to tweak the epub first.)

I've been using 2epub.com (which uses Calibre to convert Word to epub) for awhile now to get a quick cut of old Word documents before booting Sigil to fix them. The results can't be worse than what Meatgrinder is getting now from non-specially-formatted-for-Meatgrinder material.

You can't have it both ways -- you can't assume that in the Meatgrinder process, all the authors conscientiously format their Word document perfectly for conversion, but with a "and epubs are allowed too", the authors will universally be careless idiots. Either the idiots exist in BOTH processes, or NEITHER.

I think the Smashwords controversy boils down to users and authors. If you USE Smashwords, you think Meatgrinder is groovy. If you're an author staring down the possibility of having your baby beaten black and blue because you tried to put some nice pictures and links and not just text in your book... yeah. Less cheerleading overall over here on this side of the fence. :/