Smashwords Formatting is terrible!!

[neilmarr]

Bedtime reading right now is the Smashwords paid version of a book by an author I've known personally for more than ten years and know to be highly pro both in his writing and tech abilities. Yet this SW ePub version a mess in its layout.

My own indie house had over eighty titles running with Smashwords. We stopped uploading new releases some time ago, have now withdrawn all titles from SW and spent a lot of time and money on legal fees to register our company additionally in the USA so that we could upload our own careful title-be-title, fully re-proofed formats to the major new ebook stores.

We do not trust auto-conversion; meatgrinder or otherwise (if there is an otherwise). The results we've been seeing on 'fully approved and premium category' uploads over the past year have been far from satisfactory. Sometimes downright embarrassing.

Cheers. Neil

[frostschutz]

Originally Posted by jhempel24

Everytime I seem to get a book from Smashwords, the book seems to be formatted pretty un-professionally

Most of the time the problems start with Word/OpenOffice, it's so easy to get errors in there without noticing (wrong font, slightly different font size, etc.), and when exporting to HTML/ePub, all that crap stays in there.

These errors become pretty obvious when you look at the HTML source of the end result, but most authors aren't that familiar with HTML (some may not even know that ePub is HTML?), so they don't ever even look at the source of what they're publishing.

Peeking into the source can often be quite entertaining, especially when authors don't use their real name but an alias to publish their books. When you look at the source, more often than not it reveals their actual real name like this:

PHP Code:

<meta name="GENERATOR" content="OpenOffice.org 3.0">
<meta name="AUTHOR" content="Real Name"> 


In the end, even professional authors aren't necessarily professional typesetters/formatters/computer experts. Like writing, that's just something you have to learn (or have someone else take care of it). I can live with minor formatting glitches and a largely typo free text. I've yet to come across a book on Smashwords that was formatted so horribly that I'd stop reading it.

Check out the sample before you buy...

[MrPLD]

Therein lies somewhat the crux of the issue. Using things like Word/OOo makes it highly likely that font/formatting quirks slip in by accident. The formats have an immense degree of complexity it's akin to using the space shuttle to hammer in a nail. The writer ends up having to spend a lot of time working on preening the formatting, something that shouldn't even need to be done if the original source is suitably chosen.

If one stays with a simpler core format (RTF, simplified-HTML, even plain text!) a lot of the troubles go away.

While I understand the choice of Word/OOo because of the ubiquitous nature and apparently there's some additional metadata that the MG uses (I'm not sure what), it's unfortunately leading a lot of writers to end up with less than satisfactory results.


My wife came to me asking today "My Kindle won't jump chapters like it used to!", turns out it's another poorly formatted eBook without an appropriate ToC, certainly not the first time.

I can appreciate that there are always going to be stylistic debates (nolines+indent vs no-indent + line break, and then how much does one indent, what about headings, etc etc) but right now I think the general standard is yet to get to the point where that's the main point of argument.

Paul.

[amoroso]

Originally Posted by jhempel24

Everytime I seem to get a book from Smashwords, the book seems to be formatted pretty un-professionally.

Do you mean books formatted according to the Smashwords style guide, or the unprofessional formatting you refer to is by authors who don't follow such guidelines?

[jhempel24]

Originally Posted by amoroso

Do you mean books formatted according to the Smashwords style guide, or the unprofessional formatting you refer to is by authors who don't follow such guidelines?

I've got no clue where it comes from, there have been a handful of authors that have great formatting, but others...

[L.J. Sellers]

I've heard so many complaints about Smashwords that I decided not to upload anything there. I prefer to have files professionally created, then only upload those versions. There are so many other options for wide distribution. And free is not always best.
L.J.
The Sex Club is now $.99!

[amoroso]

Originally Posted by L.J. Sellers

There are so many other options for wide distribution.

Any examples?

[Sandra Edwards]

I always follow Smashwords formatting guidelines to the letter. And even so, I'm not blown away by the end result.

[starrigger]

Originally Posted by Sandra Edwards

I always follow Smashwords formatting guidelines to the letter. And even so, I'm not blown away by the end result.

What sorts of problems do you notice?