[gmw]

Originally Posted by Rellwood

[...] Regarding Calibre and using it to reformat a book to my specs, I do that. I just didn't mention it because I didn't know how the other authors posting here would take it. I was worried that the idea of stripping a DRM and/or reformatting the books to my specs would anger those who wrote them. However since no one blasted you for mentioning it, I figured I would admit to it. [...]

I don't think I've seen an author here (that participates in these discussions) that would object. We'd like to get it mostly right first, but you can never get it perfect for everyone which is where tools like Calibre step in.

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Hi. Welcome to the land of professional authors. The authors here are pretty cool.
Many of them probably use Calibre.

As a computer geek by day, "cool" is not a commonly received description.

I do use Calibre for my reading library, not for publishing yet. For publishing, so far, my process has been: the base epub is generated from LibreOffice and then cleaned up and checked using Sigil which lets me manually adjust the CSS and HTML to remove detritus left by the automation and generally ensure consistency. The kindle version is then generated from the epub using Amazon supplied tools.

Originally Posted by Hitch

[...] Yes, Yes, before any of our other thread members comments, I am aware that a lot of MR-member authors do publish there, but many first-time authors who have invested precisely zero time and effort in learning their craft have, also. Too many of them read the infamous "Smashwords formatting Guide" and drink that KoolAid, too. The "Nuclear Method" has a lot to answer for.

Hitch

To be fair, the "Nuclear Method" is really the only hope for removing the crap that comes out of a Word document after months of work. ... But there is an Irish phrase I've heard that comes to mind, "You shouldn't be starting from here if you want to get there." (Or something like that.) Starting the automatic generation process from a Word document is about as far from ideal as I can imagine.

I've used the Smashwords "meatgrinder" to publish my short stories, but not my novels - it seemed such a waste to have gone to such lengths to create a clean epub, only to have to go back to a dirty document and let their automation loose on it. The problem being that Smashwords won't even offer a preview of a book that you publish only via epub, which puts it at something of a disadvantage (telling people to read the preview on Amazon doesn't really cut it). I think you're supposed to do both (clean epub and meatgrinder version), but so far I haven't bothered except for the shorts. Which would worry me more if I was trying to make a living at this - I'd like to, but that's not going to happen until I write more, learn more, publish more and get serious about marketing (the last part scares the --- out of me).

But mostly it all comes back to: those that do care about the craft are already trying to do the right thing, those that don't won't be listening anyway.