Quote:
Originally Posted by Toxaris
I do not know anything about selling e-books, since I create them for my own pleasure and some others. However, I do know that you do not want to come near to Smashwords...
[...]
Just do a quick search here on Smashwords and/or Meatgrinder...
I heard that they apparently now also allow upload of ePUB, but I would not trust them with it.
|
I second this... I have heard horrible things about Smashwords. And if I remember correctly from other posts on the forums, even perfectly compliant/clean EPUBs from Hitch's company had horror stories trying to go through Smashwords. (Perhaps Hitch can chime in with updated/recent experiences?)
They are mostly a company that deals with Word documents, and you have to strip/adhere to their VERY STRICTLY STYLED requirements. Recently, they have made a way to directly submit EPUBs that is in "beta":
http://www.smashwords.com/swdirect
I shudder to think what Smashwords would do to a document/EPUB like yours, where you are taking advantage of complex font ligatures and CSS.
Best bet for your book would be to figure it out, get it working nicely in ADE, and submitting it to the stores directly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Psymon
Like, is the best way to try to go direct and set up separate individual accounts with all these different places, or is it better -- or, at least, easier -- to go through an aggregate like Smashwords and let them handle all the paperwork? I've never been much for accounting, and the last thing I need is to have to start keeping ledgers.  |
Just know that Smashwords takes out a percentage cut of the revenue as well, so that is less % in your pocket. That is up to you to weigh the costs/benefits of their "ease of use/collections" + most likely destroying your EPUB, versus you getting the full money from sales.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Psymon
Also, on the design side, in creating this first epub of mine my initial thought was to basically just publish on the iBooks Store -- since at first I was only able to get my design to work correctly in that platform. That's all thankfully changed now, but the way I'd created it was pretty much that it looked best when viewed in two-page landscape mode.
|
Most devices are not as large as the iPad, and most ereaders are going to be read vertically (not landscape) as single pages.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Psymon
I guess I'm just wondering about that nicety of my frontispiece (and other "little niceties" that I incorporated), or if I should, say, scrap the frontispiece, etc. for certain platforms and be designing a whole slew of different versions of my book to sell in different places.
|
I would keep everything in, but just keep in mind with the design, that it will not always be possible to view two pages together side-by-side.
"different versions for different places"...... that, to me, is a huge pain. Imagine you find a typo and want to make a fix. Now instead of fixing it in one spot, you must fix the same thing in three, four, five+ EPUBs. Then you have to make sure you actually did the fix in X, Y, Z versions, and you have to make sure that you update the right version to the right store, etc. etc.
It is a method that some people do... but it will cause you A LOT of overhead (and pain and suffering
).
AT MOST, I would recommend keeping two different versions. One for iBooks (taking advantage of the complex CSS), and one for all the other EPUB devices + being fed through KindleGen.
MAYBE in your special case, there might be a third EPUB, made specifically for KindleGen, where you have images of your "olde" half of the book, with fallback code to display the images in the old Kindles.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Psymon
Re giving out a free copy of my book (once it's finished) to say "thank you" to those of you who have been so helpful here...
|
My eyes hurt from too much of the "ye olde" text.
As a side note... is there a forum you frequent where everyone writes in Middle English?