[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Thanks, Ducks, but I have to edit.

And, do you think OO or LO are as good as Word? (I'm writing fiction in Word, cleaning up the Word doc in Notepad++, then going to Sigil.)

And another thought, I don't really have a problem with what I'm using now (MS Office Word 2003). Are there any great advantages to upgrading in the MS line of Word programs or switching to OO or LO?

There's a couple of issues using OO for writing fiction. Perhaps the largest is that you generally need to go to HTML to convert to .mobi and epub. You also have to convert back to .doc to upload to smashwords. All that converting does leave lines of code that are going to require htlm clean-up. Not a lot, but some.

Some of the issues I typically see are spaces between paragraphs (no matter how you have things set. It's a two line change to fix, but has to be fixed every dang time.)

If someone needs .doc to beta read or copyedit, you CANNOT mix the two or you risk having some of the comments appear deleted, but they show back up (usually in the HTML stage). For the most part I've only seen things like italics get turned on and not off, red text -- this is from a comment that was made by someone in doc--the comment itself is deleted, but the red text can stay for paragraphs. The text may be green or blue or whatever color was used for comments.)

I've seen agents laugh at authors because they open a manuscript in doc and can see former editing. They don't realize the author can't see the same thing in the version they view.

I use OO but I never mixed .doc and OO when getting comments (I keep two files open side by side and simply never do the "accept" or "decline"). I make all changes manually.

So some of this depends on how you edit or may edit in the future. Sharing documents isn't that great unless you're willing to do side-by-side editing rather than "accepting" edits.

The issue with Smashwords is actually harder to solve. I have to go back to doc because that is all they accept. They say they accept epub, but I've never yet gotten them to accept an epub (it's never considered clean enough and the error codes are so bad, you can barely "fix" anything.) Most of error codes relate to--you guessed it, conversion. Div statements that are left in and not recognized and a couple of other html lines that cause problems. You can spend a lot of time manually editing and still not get an acceptable epub. The doc usually goes faster, but since it is a conversion, I have NEVER gotten the extra spaces between paragraphs done right without a lot of manual formatting. I have now gone to using an old version of word to create the smashwords file. For this reason, when I release Under Witch Curse, the Smashwords release will be late, but I resolve that by selling the epub and mobi files from my own blog at release. It's the best way around it for me because getting the doc file done and correct usually takes me a couple of extra days.

If you're okay with converting HTML or going in and cleaning a few things by hand, you'll be fine with OO. I know several authors hire someone for formatting because going between the formats can be a royal pain.

I haven't tried the plug-in mentioned earlier in this thread, but I will be looking into it.

If you have specific questions I haven't touched on, let me know. I'll try to answer.

Maria