By Mark Coker rev 12.26.11
Copyright Mark Coker 2008-2011
Smashwords Edition License Notes: This free ebook may be copied, distributed, reposted, reprinted and shared, provided it appears in its entirety without alteration, and the reader is not charged to access it.
Also by Mark Coker, Published at Smashwords: Smashwords Book Marketing Guide The 10-Minute PR Checklist - Earn the Publicity You Deserve Boob Tube
GETTING STARTED
Welcome to Smashwords! Do-it-yourself, or hire help? Good formatting examples What Smashwords publishes, what we don’t publish Five common formatting mistakes to avoid How Smashwords publishes books How Smashwords distributes books How ebook formatting is different from print formatting How we convert your book into multiple ebook formats The three secrets to ebook formatting How to avoid (and fix) AutoVetter errors Introduction to Meatgrinder conversion system Your required source file Understanding the different ebook formats
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS FORMATTING
Pre-Prep
Making Word Behave
Step 1: Make a back up Step 2: Activate Word’s Show/Hide Step 3: Turn off Word’s “AutoCorrect” and “AutoFormat” features Step 4: Eliminate text boxes Step 5: The Nuclear Method
Formatting
Step 6: Unify Manuscript around Normal paragraph style
Step 7: Managing and modifying paragraph styles, fonts Step 7a. How to choose the best paragraph separation method (first line indent or block?) Step 7b: How to implement your chosen paragraph separation method Step 7b-a: How to define a proper first line indent Step 7b-b: How to define trailing “after” space for block paragraphs Step 7b-c: Special tips for poetry, cookbooks and learning materials Step 7b-d: How to define proper line spacing
Step 8: Check your normalized text Step 9: Why you should never use tabs or the space bar for indents Step 10: Managing paragraph returns Step 11: Managing hyperlinks Step 12: Designating chapter breaks, page breaks, section breaks Step 13: Working with images Step 14: Text justification
Step 14a: Centering text Step 15: Managing font sizes Step 16: Style formatting, symbols and glyphs Step 17: Headers and footers Step 18: Margins, page sizes and indents Step 19: Add the Heading style to your Chapter headers (optional)
Building Navigation
Step 20: Building navigation into the manuscript Step 20a: Creating the NCX Step 20b: Creating the linked Table of Contents Step 20c: Advanced link building (Footnotes, Endnotes) Step 20d: Troubleshooting and testing
Front Matter
Step 21: Front matter Step 21a: Blurbs (optional) Step 21b: Title and copyright page (required!) Step 21c: Add a Smashwords license statement below copyright page
The End of Your Book
Step 22: The end of your book
POST-FORMATTING
Step 23: Preparing your cover image Step 24: Review requirements for Premium Catalog distribution
Uploading Your Book to Smashwords
Step 25: How to upload your book
Step 26: How AutoVetter works
Step 27: After you publish – check your work
Step 27a: Check for EPUBCHECK compliance (important!)
How to Market Your Book
Step 28: Read the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide
Helpful Resources Send Feedback About the Author
APPENDIX
Keyboard shortcuts
GETTING STARTED
Welcome to Smashwords!
Welcome. Smashwords is the world’s leading ebook publishing and distribution platform for indie ebook authors and publishers. The Smashwords Style Guide has helped over 30,000 authors and publishers around the world collectively release over 90,000 ebooks. By following this Style Guide, you’ll learn how to quickly produce, publish and distribute a high-quality ebook at no cost.
The Style Guide is written for non-technical readers. No prior experience with Microsoft Word is assumed or required. It presents simple, step-by-step instructions to help you format your book to retailer requirements.
Don’t be intimidated by the length of this guide. It has a lot of pictures.
Books formatted to the Smashwords Style Guide earn inclusion in the Smashwords Premium Catalog, which is what we distribute to major ebook retailers such as Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Diesel and others. Your book will also be available as a multi-format ebook at our own fast-growing retail operation, Smashwords.com, where customers can discover and purchase the book for enjoyment on any e-reading device.
All you need to publish at Smashwords is a finished manuscript, a computer, an Internet connection, Microsoft Word or similar word processor, and the time and patience to follow this Guide. Patience is key. If you try to take short cuts and skip over the sections that follow, you’ll only frustrate yourself and delay distribution.
To learn some simple, time-saving keyboard tricks before you get started, see the Appendix at the end of this guide.
Do-It-Yourself, or Hire Help? – If you don’t have the time, patience or skills to properly format your masterpiece to Style Guide requirements, or you find yourself cursing and swearing(never good!), consider hiring a fellow Smashwords author to help you. I maintain a list called “Mark’s List” with the names and contact information of several Smashwords authors who have volunteered to provide low-cost Smashwords Style Guide formatting services for around $25/hr and up. The list also includes low-cost cover designers. If you want a referral (we don’t earn a referral fee), send an email to list@smashwords.com and you’ll receive it via instant autoresponder. Please note: if you utilize one of these formatting providers, you’re hiring them, not Smashwords. By hiring them you will not receive any preferential customer support or fast-tracked approval. However, because they’re Smashwords formatting experts, they’ll give you a clean file that will usually earn you Premium Catalog approval on the first attempt.
Good Formatting Examples - Below are two examples of well-formatted Smashwords books. You can download the free RTF which you can open and view in your word processor.
1. The Mating by Nicky Charles
https://www.smashwords.com/books/download/10394/3/null/0/0/the-mating.rtf
2. The Unsuspecting Mage: The Morcyth Saga Book One by Brian S. Pratt
https://www.smashwords.com/books/download/1444/3/null/0/0/the-unsuspectingmage-the-morcyth-saga-book-one.rtf
This Smashwords Style Guide is a living document. As you learn formatting tips not presented in this guide, please forward them to Mark Coker at first initial second initial at smashwords dot com.
What Smashwords Publishes, What We Don’t Publish
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Smashwords publishes only original and legal works, direct from the author or the exclusive digital publisher. We do not publish public domain books. We also don’t publish incomplete or partial books, or books that appear elsewhere on the Internet under other authors’ names, as is common with Private Label Rights scams. If you write erotica, all your characters must be adults. And finally, we strongly discourage any book that advocates get-rich-quick “systems” for making money on the Internet. Smashwords is a professional publishing and distribution service for serious writers only.
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Five Common Formatting Mistakes to Avoid:
Improper Indents - Don’t use tabs or space bar spaces to create first line paragraph indents (instead, code your paragraph style to define a special first line paragraph indent: see step 7b-a below)
Repeating Paragraph Returns - Never use more than four consecutive paragraph returns (A.K.A. “hard returns,” created by hitting the ENTER key) to arrange text on the page (this creates blank ebook pages on small-screened e-reading devices)
Improper Paragraph Separation - Paragraphs require either first line paragraph indents or the block paragraph method. Otherwise your paragraphs run together and it becomes unreadable because your reader’s eye can’t distinguish where one paragraph ends and the next begins. Use one method or the other (indents are best for fiction and much non-fiction, blocks are usually only for non-fiction), but don’t use both. If you’re aiming for the block style, do not add paragraph returns between paragraphs on empty lines (to create the blank line). Instead, modify your paragraph style to add a 6 pt trailing “after” space following each the paragraph (see the Step 7 below, managing and modifying paragraph styles).
Font and Style Mistakes - Don’t use fancy non-standard fonts, colored fonts (colors often disappear on some e-reading devices), kerning, compressed or expanded fonts, large font sizes over 16pt, and don’t go overboard with multiple paragraph styles (makes your ebook look ugly, and amplifies odds of unexpected problems). Modify your paragraph styles so they don’t define fonts larger than 18pt.
Copyright Page Mistakes - Don’t forget to include the required “front matter” (required for acceptance into the Premium Catalog), described in tip 21b below.
How Smashwords Publishes Books:
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After you carefully implement the formatting instructions in this Guide, your book is ready to upload to Smashwords. Simply click “Publish” from any Smashwords web page and follow the instructions to upload your book.
Smashwords takes your original Microsoft Word .doc source file and converts it into multiple ebook formats such as .EPUB, PDF. .RTF, .PDB, .MOBI, LRF and TXT, as well as into online HTML and Javascript formats. By publishing in multiple formats, your book will be readable on any e-reading device, including the Amazon Kindle, Apple iPad, personal computers, the iPhone (via the popular Stanza e-reader app), Sony Reader, Kobo Reader, Android smart phones, etc.
From the Publish screen, you can designate a percentage of your book that you want to make available as a free sample. Most authors choose between 15-30%. If you don’t make a free sample available, your book will not be distributed to some important outlets.
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How Smashwords Distributes Books:
Smashwords distributes your book via two primary mechanisms:
Standard Catalog: This catalog contains all the books for sale at Smashwords.com. These books are also automatically listed in the native catalogs of Stanza on the iPhone, which is used by over 4 million people to discover and purchase ebooks; and Aldiko, an e-reading app for Google Android devices; and Word-Player, another e-reading app for Android devices. To qualify for distribution on Smashwords.com and in the Standard feed, an author or publisher is simply required to abide by the Smashwords Terms of Service and follow the instructions in this Guide.
Premium Catalog: This catalog is distributed to major online retailers and other distribution outlets. There’s no cost for inclusion, but your book must satisfy higher mechanical standards required by the retailers such as having a quality book cover image, good formatting, a proper copyright page, and other requirements clearly outlined in this Style Guide and on our Distribution page at http://www.smashwords.com/distribution. If you're a serious author or publisher, you want your books included in Smashwords Premium Catalog because it offers your book unprecedented exposure at no cost.
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How Ebook Formatting is Different from Print Formatting
Ebooks are different from print books, so do not attempt to make your ebook look like an exact facsimile of print book, otherwise you’ll only frustrate yourself by creating a poorly formatted, unreadable ebook.
With print, you control the layout. The words appear on the printed page exactly where you want them to appear.
With ebooks, there is no “page.” By giving up the control of the printed page, you and your readers gain much more in return.
Page numbers are irrelevant. Your book will look different on every e-reading device. Your text will shape shift and reflow. Most e-reading devices and e-reading applications allow your reader to customize the fonts, font sizes and line spacing. Your customers will modify how your book looks on-screen to suit their personal reading preference and environment.
By transforming your books into digital form, you open up exciting possibilities for how readers can enjoy them.
At Smashwords, our motto is “your book, your way,” and this means a reader should be able to consume your book however works best for them, even if that means they like to read 18 point Helvetica with blue fonts, lime background color, and triple spaced lines. Many e-reading devices and e-reading apps support some or all of these strange different tastes.
In order for us to prepare your words to be stirred up and reconstituted in this digital soup, it’s important your Smashwords source file is formatted to liberate the words in digital form.
The book’s formatting will be and must be different from its paper-based formatting and layout (for some works like poetry, the formatting is integral to the reading experience, and we can work with that too).
Most readers want your words, not your fancy page layout or exotic type styles. This is especially important for your ebook customers, because you want your work to display well on as many digital reading devices as possible so the reader can have their book their way. Some of your buyers may want to read on the Amazon Kindle, others may prefer to read on the iPhone or Sony Reader, or even read on multiple devices. Others may want to just read it on screen using one of the several e-reading applications, such as Adobe Digital Editions or FBReader.
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How We Convert Your Book into Multiple Ebook Formats
This Style Guide helps authors and publishers tweak their original source files to obtain the best possible reading experience across multiple ebook formats and e-reading devices.
Print publishing companies spend millions of dollars each year to convert their print books into digital formats. It’s a tough job, and often these conversions involve hiring hundreds of overseas cubicle laborers who painstakingly re-key and reformat texts into different formats.
At Smashwords, we operate differently. Our Meatgrinder technology automates the process. Because our process is automated, the book you publish on Smashwords may not be formatted as perfectly (or imperfectly - sometimes Meatgrinder actually improves the formatting) as you formatted it in your manuscript.
There are pros and cons to such automated conversions.
The advantage of this automation, especially if you carefully format your book to the Style Guide, is that Meatgrinder will allow you to instantly publish a good-quality, multi-format ebook, ready to be enjoyed on any e-reading device. This automation also allows us to offer this conversion and publishing service at no cost to you.
Meatgrinder does well with straight-form narrative, so we excel at fiction, narrative nonfiction, poetry and other books that are mostly words. Luckily, straight narrative comprises probably 75% of all books purchased by readers, and for most of the other 25%, with some proper tweaks and yes, compromises, flexibility and patience, many of these books can work as well.
Smashwords supports pictures and images, but here we lack the precision of print on paper. With some Smashwords formats, page breaks will appear where you don’t expect them. Images may not appear in the exact position you intended, or the print-quality image that looks great on glossy paper may not look so great on a black and white e-reading device, or a small cell phone. In other words, unpredictable things will happen. With patience, experimentation and an open mind, you can make it work. Remember, good quality is the goal, not perfection.
Some format outputs have limitations. For example, a picture book or manga that’s all images is impossible to convert into plain text (it wouldn’t be a picture book anymore!). Other books may look great in .RTF or PDF, but not so great on one of our online readers.
Meatgrinder has other limitations. It doesn’t support tables or columns. It doesn’t take full advantage of some of the capabilities of formats such as EPUB and .MOBI. We’re aware of the limitations, and you should be too.
In the meantime, the benefits of such minor compromises outweigh the downside. By giving up a little, you gain a lot by making your book accessible to millions of potential readers across our ever-growing distribution network.
Some folks who read the paragraphs above come to the conclusion that Smashwords wants a plain text book without formatting. Not true! As you read on, you’ll discover that Smashwords still gives you great control over formatting and styles.
We care about quality, and you should too. If you ever hear an author or reader complain that their Smashwords book looked like [insert your favorite expletive], it means the author didn’t follow the Style Guide. Take the time to follow the guide. You’ve invested years – possibly even a lifetime – to write your masterpiece, so take 30 minutes or an hour to study the Guide and learn how easy it is to create a good-looking multi-format ebook you and your readers will be proud of.
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The Three Secrets to Ebook Formatting:
Keep it Simple, Keep it Simple, Keep it Simple!
The secret to ebook formatting success is “Keep it Simple!” Unnecessarily complex formatting or layout will hinder the readability of your ebook. If you attempt to make your ebook an exact facsimile of your print book, you will cause yourself – and your readers – unnecessary frustration. It may also cause your ebook conversions to fail.
Re-envision your book as free flowing text with only the essential formatting. Restrict your formatting to Normal paragraph style for the bulk of your book, one paragraph return at the end of each paragraph, proper first line paragraph indents (see tips below on how to create), italics, bolds, a Heading style only for your chapter headings, and very few if any additional paragraph styles beyond that.
Simple doesn’t mean you can’t use formatting, or you can’t use styles. It just means that if your current formatting includes 15 or 30 different custom paragraph styles, you’re asking for trouble.
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How to Avoid AutoVetter Errors:
AutoVetter is Smashwords’ automated technology that inspects your book the moment you publish it and provides you instant feedback on potential formatting problems. You’ll find your errors documented in the Dashboard after you publish, underneath the “Premium Status” column. If the link reads, “requires modification,” click the link.
AutoVetter is your friend.
If you receive AutoVetter errors, fix them immediately. Otherwise, the errors will delay or prevent your book’s acceptance into the Smashwords Premium Catalog. The moment AutoVetter tells you about the errors, you can fix them and then upload a new version via your Dashboard’s “upload new version” link.
The following errors may prevent your book from gaining inclusion in the Premium Catalog:
more than 4 consecutive paragraph returns in a row (creates blank ebook pages)
tabs (eliminate all tabs, which you created by hitting the “Tab” key)
extra paragraph returns between paragraphs in an attempt to create a blank line
exotic fonts (instead, stick with Times New Roman, Garamond and Arial)
large font sizes (11 or 12pt is best, 14pt is a recommended maximum)
indents made with space bar spaces or tabs (the most common bad habit of all authors)
text in columns (we don’t support columns)
text in tables (ebooks don’t handle tables. Import tables as images)
text in text boxes (Ugh, the horror!)
multiple text or paragraph styles for your body (for example, don’t mix Normal style with Body Text style)
automatic footnotes (not supported, may cause the conversion to fail)
text wrapped around floating images (instead, right mouse click on image, click Format Picture: Advanced: In Line with Text, then use Word’s center button to center)
and finally, to avoid the copyright error, carefully follow tip 21b below
Introduction to Meatgrinder
We affectionately call our file conversion system Meatgrinder. In the last two years, we have continually enhanced it to produce high quality ebooks. The most recent upgrade was August 2010, where we made a series of great improvements to our EPUB and MOBI files.
Your source file, a Microsoft Word .doc document, goes in one end of the Meatgrinder and comes out the other end as multiple DRM-free digital book files for use on a multitude of e-reading devices such as the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble nook, Sony Reader, iPhone, iPod Touch, Apple iPad, a computer screen or virtually any other e-reading device.
If you ignore the formatting requirements of the Smashwords Style Guide, Meatgrinder will turn your book into hamburger. Please follow the instructions!
Your Required Source File
The file you upload into the Meatgrinder should be a Microsoft .doc file (the default). If you’re a screenwriter, scriptwriter and playwright and you work in a program called Final Draft, save your document as an RTF file (however, you will need to manually correct the margins), and then open it in Word, save it as a Word .doc, and clean up from there.
PDF Source Files (Not allowed): You cannot upload a source file as a PDF. If you only have your book in PDF form, here’s a free online service that will convert your PDF into a Word doc: http://www.pdftoword.com/ You upload your PDF to them and then they email it to you as a Word file. But be warned, the output it gives you will *not* be ready to publish on Smashwords. You will still need to perform clean-up. To save time, you’re better off contacting whoever converted your original manuscript into PDF and ask them to forward you the original source file, saved as either a Word .doc or .RTF file.
If You Only Have a Print Book: Many authors only have print copies of their books. How do you bring your book to life as an ebook? It’s easier than you might think. Consider this cool service called Blue Leaf Book Scanning, which uses optical character recognition technology to convert your book back into digital form. For around $25.00, they will scan your print book and send it to you as a Microsoft Word file. I’ve seen the raw files they produce, and they’re remarkably accurate. However, the service is not infallible. The Word file they send you will still require careful proofing, editing and reformatting. http://www.blueleaf-bookscanning.com/book_scanning_service_order.html
InDesign Source Files: InDesign is a common layout application used by professional publishers. Smashwords does not accept InDesign files. However, from InDesign, you can export your book to .RTF format. Once it’s in RTF format, you can reopen the file in Microsoft Word, save it as a Word .doc, and then remove all the garbage introduced by InDesign (you’ll have tabs in random places, and other ugly formatting). The fastest way to clean up an RTF from InDesign (or any file, for that matter) is to use what I call the Nuclear Method. With the Nuclear Method, you open your file in Word, copy and paste it into Windows Notepad (or some other simple text editor that strips out all formatting), close Microsoft Word, then reopen Word to a fresh new Word document, then copy and paste the book from Notepad back into Word, and then carefully re-apply the minimal necessary formatting by following the Style Guide.
HTML Source Files: We previously allowed HTML file uploads, but now we no longer allow them because most HTML files provided to us contained serious corruption as defined by the WC3 HTML Validator at http://validator.w3.org/check and as a result didn’t upload properly. If you only have your source file as an HTML file, follow these instructions: 1. Open the HTML document in a browser. 2. Copy and paste the entire document into a new Word doc by clicking "Edit: paste special" within the Word menu, then selecting "unformatted text" as the output. 3. From here, you'll find that you've got a consistent number of spaces, such as four spaces, making up your indents. This won't work, so do a CTRL+H (press the CTRL key and the H key at the same time) search and replace and search for ^p space space space space (a paragraph return followed by four taps on the space bar) and replace with only ^p. This will eliminate the leading spaces at the beginning of each paragraph. 4. Next, CTRL+A the document, right mouse click, click paragraph, and then under “special” do a first line paragraph indent of .25”. 5. Next, clean up the remaining minor issues, like manually removing the indents from your title and copyright pages, and, using Word’s center button, center those sections.
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Understanding the Different Ebook Formats
One of the important benefits of Smashwords is that we take your single file and convert it into multiple ebook formats. Why is this so important to the success of your book? Because customers read on many different devices, and the more formats you offer, the more books you’ll sell. In early January 2010, we did a survey of the most popular ebook formats for Smashwords customers. The results were interesting. Although PDF is the most popular ebook format, two thirds of customers preferred formats other than PDF. You can read the survey yourself at http://blog.smashwords.com/2010/02/most-popularebook-formats-revealed.html.
You should publish your book into as many digital formats as possible (even if certain formats translate less well than others) because this expands your potential audience of readers. Review the outputs of each format for acceptability after you publish.
Here’s a summary of the formats offered:
EPUB -This is your most important format! EPUB is an open industry ebook format. This is the format we distribute to Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Diesel eBooks, and others. If your book is available in epub, it can be read on the most popular ebook readers and ebook reading software applications (Like Stanza on the iPhone or Aldiko on Android devices), and will gain the widest distribution via Smashwords’ distribution outlets (EPUB is a requirement for inclusion in Smashwords’ Premium Catalog, and it’s what we distribute to every retailer except Amazon).
Mobipocket (Kindle) – Mobipocket, A.K.A. MOBI, allows your books to be read on the Amazon Kindle, so this is an important format for you. Mobipocket is supported on many handheld devices and e-reading applications. Mobipocket is a requirement for distribution to Amazon.