Hitch, I am content to bow to your greater experience in trying to extract something usable from Word. I don't use much Word myself. My own assessments of its output were made from studying the epubs that I saw coming out of Smashwords, and everything I studied was a mess that made hand tuning of the CSS and HTML impractical. (Even from authors that obviously took great care with all other aspects of their work.)
You are right, of course, that learning to use styles effectively is one key to getting cleaner output from your word processor. As a computer geek of long standing these always felt like the natural way to use a word processor, but I do know that few people make good and consistent use of styles. I will take your word for it (no pun intended) that it is possible to clean out the detritus of an old, long used and edited, Word documents using automatic tools, though I've seen little evidence of this happening in anything I studied. (Disclaimer: It has been some years since I made my studies, perhaps the conversion tools have improved.)
I use LibreOffice and a plugin called Writer2xhtml - part of a larger Writer2LaTeX package - slightly customised by me to work with later LO versions. This produces remarkably clean epubs that neatly reflect my named styles in the CSS. There are still things that I adjust and tidy in Sigil, but there is much less work needed than with anything else I tried.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
[...]Sorry? This section confused me. You can publish a MOBI there, as well as their other formats--?? And what's the LITB on Amazon got to do with it?
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You cannot publish MOBI on Smashwords, or not directly. You can only upload .doc or .epub files. If you upload .doc then Smashwords will generate all the other formats (including .mobi) from that single source, and this includes the ability to have a preview available. You can optionally choose to upload your own .epub file (instead of, or as well as the .doc file). Smashwords does nothing else with the .epub but make it available instead of a meatgrinder generated version. It produces no preview. It gets no conversion to mobi or other formats.
As a result of these limitations: if you only upload an epub, as I did for my novels, then no preview of the books is available on Smashwords. I did, for a while, entertain the naive notion that people would be content to read the preview on Amazon and still buy from Smashwords if that was their preferred store, but I don't think that happens very often.
I first published on Smashwords not long after they introduced support for uploading epub files. I had high hopes that it was the start of something more, but that seems to have fizzled. (It has been almost two years since I last published anything - I can't quite believe that much time has gotten away from me - so it is possible there are subtle changes in the process I haven't seen yet.)
My guess is that Smashwords is accepting the reality that you and I might not like very much: that they have done as much as the vast majority of their authors are ever going to use. Still guessing, I would say they found that so few use the epub upload feature that it's not worth expanding. (It's either that, or they've thrown their hands in the air and given up.)