[gmw]

These days there are two ways to tackle Smashwords:


1) The old way of producing a Word document according to their style guide (which often means undoing all that stuff you carefully did right in the first place) and then let their meatgrinder try to put it back together again. (Because, after all, we all know that an automatic process will always do a much better job than we could possibly do otherwise. ... Okay, that's me being overly cynical.)

Follow this path and Smashwords will generate all the different formats for you, and offer a preview of the first x% of your book.


2) Upload your validated epub directly - just as you did with Amazon (presumably).

In this case only the epub will appear, and there will be no preview. (Take a look at my books for an example of this.)

Typically (if they haven't improved since I did my last one), if you upload exactly the same epub as you gave Amazon, Smashwords will initially refuse to place it on their premium catalogue because it doesn't say "Smashwords Edition". Assuming this is the only thing "wrong", a polite message to the Smashwords team (I explain that my epubs are not Smashwords' specific editions, they're the same editions I use everywhere) will have them let it through (after a few days).


You can, and possibly should (if you have a good epub), do both. The old way will let you exclude epub from the generation process so your carefully made epub can remain. I say "should", because option 1 is currently the only way to get a preview available on Smashwords - which is sad. Another reason is that option 1 is currently the only way to get a Kindle version available on Smashwords, which can be useful if you decide to use their coupon system for give-aways or whatever. (The other formats seem pretty meaningless these days.)