[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Those should both work fine--with the guidelines.

I'm seriously considering hiring someone to do the Smashwords formatting for me, because I just don't want the headache. I know, I KNOW, that the first cut that I do won't work the way I want it to, and it's going to be a major point of frustration for me.

In the meantime, I will be published on Amazon and B&N and my blog, and I hope the Smashwords shoppers will be patient with me. But I am SUPER anal about formatting and links and TOCs being correct in my work, and not thrilled at the process of forcing it through, well, a meat grinder!!

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I agree. Is ridiculous. And while it may be a lovely book in ePub, I don't want to read formatting instructions in ePub; I want them in an easily-edited format that I can arrange for easy printing, and highlight the sections I'll need help remembering... and for some reason, the RTF output from the Meatgrinder is about the worst of its output formats. Which makes NO BLOODY SENSE, given that it's starting with Word docs; it shouldn't have to "convert" anything.

A "how to format your book" guideline should have a "short form" that covers everything you need to remember after you've gone through the book once. Having to dig information out of prose multiple times is CRIMINAL. Why, yes, I do write user manuals as part of my day job and I am fanatical about this.

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

As a reader, I notice the lack of ability to find stuff I'd like a lot more than poor-quality formatting of what I get. (And the stuff that irritates me the most--lack of page breaks before chapter headings, lack of formatting for indents/quote sections--are likely to stay, because they indicate an uploader who flat-out wasn't paying attention to any of the specs.)

I'm not convinced that the majority of errors in a transform indicate a user not paying attention. But, as I said, transforms are things that I write, so I have a strong ingrained opinion that they should be as idiot-proof as possible. Without empirical evidence, it's really just an assumption that poorly formatted books post-transform were the result of an idiot author.

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I don't mind the poor Word conversions as much as that the Meatgrinder is a least-common-denominator tool... it doesn't support a lot of formatting that ePub *can* do, because the other formats don't support those features. (Tables. Text wrap around images. Drop caps. Font embedding.)

Right. And then there's the ACCIDENTAL embedding of things the author DOESN'T want. Didn't I read somewhere that Smashwords epubs don't support "night mode", or did I hallucinate that?

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I assume the same number of idiots, with the caveats that (1) indifferently-formatted Word docs, with no particular errors but lacking functionality (like chapter breaks), are more likely than similarly indifferently-formatted ePubs and (2) badly-mangled Word docs are likely to provide readable, if ugly, exports; badly-mangled ePubs are likely to provide files that don't open on the user's machine at all.

If Smashwords is checking to see if the converted epub validates, then it should be JUST as easy to check to see if an uploaded epub validates -- the framework for checking validation is already in place.

If Smashwords ISN'T checking to see if the converted epub validates, then the "upload crappy epub that won't work" issue is just the same as an author uploading a crappy Word document that will RESULT in a crappy epub that won't work.

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

However, I do think we're rapidly getting to a point of general awareness of & competence with ePub that not being able to submit download-ready files will set Smashwords up to be another "early groundbreaker that couldn't keep up with tech changes."

I agree. If Smashwords can't keep up with changing technology -- both in the uploading sense AND in the search engine sense -- it's a dying market.