Jack Manley on Smashwords

One of my goals for 2014 was to get Jack Manley and the Warlord of Infinity published on Smashwords.  I accomplished this weeks ago, but for some reason I never got around to mentioning it on here.  It could have been during one of my hiatuses, or it could just have been a general lack of excitement on my part.  As important as it was to get my book out on some more platforms, it kind of paled in significance to its very first publication on Amazon, so I wasn't quite as gung-ho to share the news with the world.

For those who don't know, Smashwords is an e-book distributor that takes your work and gets it out there on a heap of different platforms.  Basically, if it ain't Amazon, Smashwords covers it.  I'll admit that I didn't do as much research on how the site works as I did with Amazon, so I'm pretty hazy on how they pay royalties and the like.  But I do think they provide a valuable service; if it wasn't for them, I dread to think of how many different ways I would have had to format the book.

As it was, the formatting for Smashwords was a bit of a nightmare.  It's understandable; they need a file that can be readily converted for use on a lot of different devices.  It makes sense that they ask for very specific formatting, but the process really was a bitch.

I followed the instructions provided, which recommended going for what they call the "nuclear option": cutting and pasting my novel into Notepad, then back to Microsoft Word.  What this did was get rid of every little bit of formatting that had already been done on the file, to make it easier to go through step-by-step and configure the document to the Smashwords specs.  Most of it was simple, if a little time-consuming: setting page margins, paragraph settings, etc.

My biggest problem came when I tried to format the indents at the start of my paragraphs.  I had originally done this with two whacks of the spacebar, but Smashwords instructed me to set it up as part of my paragraph settings.  To fix this I went through and erased every instance of a double space in the document.  The problem was that I also used a double space after every full stop, and those got erased as well.  I tried to solve this problem with the Find/Replace tool, adding a single space after every full stop.  This in turn caused problems with my dialogue, particularly where a full stop was followed by a quotation mark.  It was a long series of problems followed by solutions followed by more problems, and took me a few nights to properly sort out.  I even had to read the whole damn book again (one thing that writer never tell you is how many times you'll have to read your book over; it can get pretty excruciating).

Nevertheless, it's up, complete with a spanking new cover design.  Check it out!

 

PROGRESS THIS WEEK:

The Lightless Labyrinth: 2,080 words

I was on track for a cracking week, until some personal stuff came up and derailed me completely.  That's going to happen; life won't ever stop kicking me in the nuts, I'm afraid.

OTHER TIME-WASTING ACTIVITIES:

What I've Been Reading:

The CRPG Addict blog by Chester Bolingbroke
The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

What I've Been Watching:

Wrestlemania I

Resurrection

What I've Been Playing:
The  Dungeon (aka pedit5)
Rogue