When You Least Expect It

I'm too blitzed to be detailed with this. As of a few minutes ago I got the notification that Sweet Dreams Are Made Of Teeth was approved for the Smashwords Premium Catalog. They gave me a free ISBN and it will be going on Barnes and Noble, Apple, Diesel, Kobo, and Sony. Oh, and Amazon under Smashwords' publishing header whenever they get things worked out with Amazon. Soon KDP may be unnecessary, an interesting idea.

The upshot for others considering using Smashwords to self-publish: It takes about two weeks for a book to be reviewed for the Premium Catalog. After every revision, that two weeks starts over. Once it's approved, like it was tonight, it may take as much as three more weeks to actually go on those catalogs. I don't understand why it would take that long, since it's approved, but they 'ship' to publishers weekly and once received it takes about two more weeks to integrate the title into those publishers' catalogs.

Thank you all, and tip your waitress.

PS - Oh, and we learned that I was right about what was wrong with the book, and the previously mentioned formatting instructions did fix it!

Smashwords Premium Review - Revenge Of The Formatting

Sweet Dreams Are Made Of Teeth has been reviewed - after 12 days - for inclusion in the Premium Catalog. It was sent back to me because of an improperly formatted .ncx file. If you are saying 'Bwa?' right now, congratulations! You appear to be telepathic and are getting signals directly from my brain.
Turns out the .ncx file is made automatically and is not something you build separately, so don't worry about that. What they MEAN is that my Table of Contents was messed up. I'd tested my table of contents when I uploaded it, and it worked. The only oddity was that it showed an extra link to chapter 1, but since I hadn't put any other links in and the ToC worked just fine, I let it go at the time.
It worked out for the best. Because Smashwords really is pretty helpful, they pointed me to the specific part of the Style Guide involved. There were two things that I hadn't done. One, apparently your ToC absolutely must be in 'normal' style, not any other. Fine, I made it 'normal' style instead of 'heading', the other option that's allowable for chapter headings. But I don't think that was the issue.
The issue was Hidden Hyperlinks. You see, Microsoft Word hates you. It is not your friend, it won't call you in the morning, and it's badmouthing you behind your back to your friends. It is inserting 'hidden' hyperlinks the whole time you're working. It doesn't tell you, and it doesn't show them on the page, and they don't do anything useful for you whatsoever. It doesn't even show them on your hyperlinks list. Their ONLY purpose is to totally screw up an .ncx file. Fortunately, when you're adding your own bookmarks there's a button you can press to see them, and then you can erase them. DO THIS LAST. The absolute last thing before you save and quit. Why? Because Microsoft Word hates you so much it will keep adding them, and the only way to be sure they're all erased is to save immediately after they're deleted.
On the plus side, this gave me an excuse to fix a leftover typo someone spotted. I hate those. It's like giving a child legos. You will never, ever find them all. And after I reuploaded I checked the new versions and the ToC looks nice and clean.
I just wish it didn't take 12 days to review!
As a side note, do not ever, ever get so busy proofreading and preparing your work for publishing that you forget to do new writing of your own. You will curl up and die, left to be blown around by life like a dry and withered spider corpse.

Sweet Dreams Are Made Of Teeth

I am here to report that, if anything, publishing a novel with Smashwords is easier than a short story. I was #6 in the queue, and had it uploaded in moments. AutoVetter is reporting no errors, and now I await Premium Catalog evaluation and, with Keri's help, try to figure out how to get the world to know it exists.

Speaking of which... no, one more thing. For me, the formatting was easy. What took so long? Cover art. Take this as a lesson: Every writer will have slightly different resources and priorities, and you do the best with what you have. I know a number of artists, but I felt that the cover is my book's 'face', and I wanted a cover that was the best I could possibly get and suited the book itself. For my short stories a cover that is merely good will do. I was lucky enough to know Carolyn Laplante just well enough that she gave me a heavy discount on what you see below. It was well worth waiting and paying for.

And now, without further ado:

Sweet Dreams Are Made Of Teeth, by Richard Roberts
Available from Smashwords.

Have you ever had the nightmare of being chased by a beast? Then you've met Fang. He'll be the first to admit that he's a very simple nightmare. All he knows is hunting your dreams and dragging them into the Dark. He's not ready for his life to get complicated. He's not ready to be dragged into his best friend's schemes to make dreams so terrifying they break people. He's not ready to love, or to be loved, or to meet someone who makes him happy. He's definitely not ready for those to be three different girls.

He's not ready to grow up.

When he does, one thing will stay the same. He'll stay an artist, and he'll paint your dreams with fear until they're beautiful.

EDIT - And because I'm here to help other writers and not just sell myself, let me add a funny story! Always download and check your final file. I found out that the funny little fat . that was showing up in my .doc version was... well, I have no idea even now what it was. But in .epub it made every line of my table of contents a new page. I have no idea how it got there, but I reformatted that text from scratch and it's gone and life is good!

Adventures in Formatting - Part 2: Uploading, or Not So Fast, Pardner

The last time we left our intrepid heroine, er, me, I was telling the thrilling tale of uploading my first manuscript to the Smashwords Meatgrinder. What did we learn last time, kids? That's right: TABS BAD. And the space bar is not your friend, so ignore its siren call.

So we had a cover. We had a formatted file that contained a title page, "front matter" (that's your copyright, attributions for design, etcetera), a linked table of contents, the story, a short "about the story" feature, and previews of two upcoming novels that included covers, blurbs, and a sample first chapter. I wanted to really test the formatting by making it a complex file.

In studying about the different file formats Smashwords will provide you with, we learned that everything is not going to look exactly the same in every format. For example, some formats will not honor your page breaks. Ouch. This is a nightmare for the OCD-afflicted among us. Some people will go the route of formatting for each separate platform separately, but I found that I could get things to look good without going that route, so I'm just letting Smashwords create those files for me right now.

One thing we did decide to do, however, was to insert glyphs to indicate section breaks so that in the formats where page breaks vanish, everything would still look separate and organized. To do this we searched for free clipart gifs, found one we liked, saved the file, resized it to be small enough, then inserted it according to the instructions in the Smashwords Style Guide. Worked like a charm. The trick is to pick something simple, black, and distinct enough so that it still looks like what it's supposed to when it's tiny.

We went with the cat because it was still clear when reduced. The quill pen is cool, but became sort of abstract small.

So with that done, we uploaded all our stuff for the first story to the Meatgrinder and were put into the queue. A LONG queue. It took about 48 hours to finish. I clicked through on my Smashwords dashboard and was greeted with three AutoVetter errors. Oops. (And even though there a button saying "Submit for Review" after the error list that's just begging to be pushed, don't push it until you've fixed your errors.)

The three AutoVetter errors: tabs, spacebar, cover image too small. We went back through the files, and sure enough there was a single forgotten tab left in. Since we had combined several files into a single manuscript, there was a spot where we hadn't double-checked. Likewise an extra space at the start of a paragraph. We found them by turning on the formatting view and dispensed with them.

As for the cover being too small, that was a bonehead move on my part. When I'd "saved for web" on the cover, I'd forgotten to set my pixels to 800x1200. I just reopened the cover in Photoshop and changed the setting and we were good to go.

So we uploaded the single story again. This time it took about 24 hours, and the manuscript came through with a clean bill of health. We dutifully checked it out in every format. (You'll need Kindle for PC to check your .mobi file and Adobe Digital Editions to check your ePub file, but both are free downloads.)

I'm published! Yay! We submitted it for review to go into the Premium Catalogue and, using what we had learned, formatted the next three packages. While the first package had taken about 8 hours of work, each subsequent one took about 1.5 hours. (No doubt it will be longer with the novels, but not too bad.) At the end of the process, the next three short stories had no errors and went live. Success!

It's been a week now and, while I'm still waiting on admission to the Premium Catalogue, I've had over 200 downloads. No reviews yet (disappointing), but I'm looking at it as more than 200 people who have seen my name and been made aware of the novels that are coming soon. Most importantly, I found that I could produce a professional-looking ebook without spending a ton of money.

Next up - Adventures in Formatting - Part 3: Kindle, the Final Frontier

#8368

Last night, I published my first manuscript to the Smashwords Meatgrinder, and it entered the queue at #8368. That's right #8368. It's been about 12 hours, and I'm currently at #2274. That's a heck of a lot of manuscripts.

The manuscript we chose for the maiden voyage was a 3,500-word short story called "A Certain Doorway," and the manuscript package included a cover, a title page, the story, an "about the story" feature, sneak previews for two novels, and a "find me" page, so the package included images, a linked table of contents and links to social media sites.

For those of you doing DIY, here's a time breakdown for getting the story ready to go.

2 Hours choosing art elements and designing the cover
2 Hours writing/choosing bonus material and formatting it
6 Hours formatting the package meticulously to the Smashwords Style Guide

So after roughly 10 hours of work, I had a short story/promo package ready to go. I expect the time to be less the next few go arounds, because now we've got the basics down for Photoshop and formatting and are more easily able to make sure we've got all the right file formats ready to go.

Cost? So far, zip. The short story was previously published in Black October Magazine, so there was no copy editing. The cover image was a freebie from my Deposit Photo's trial. We designed the cover ourselves using Photoshop. My significant other hammered out the formatting to the style guide while I watched.

Now we just have to wait to see if there's anything wonky in the finished product before we publish the next three story packages to Smashwords and move on to the Kindle formatting. I'll be back to tell you how it went.  I'm at #2249!

Ereader Typesettting And The Single Novelist

And now the red-headed stepchild of this freakshow family steps in. Having utterly no business sense whatsoever and a long history of frustration with the traditional publishing industry, I am following Keri into this madcap experiment and praying we all see tomorrow. What I bring to the table is a motley array of every non-business skill imaginable, so today we will discuss typesetting and ereader formatting.

I was terrified by the exotic demands for file formatting I was SURE were right around the corner, but I have a lot of experience with word processors of all kinds and decided to strap on my Larnin' Boots and figure it out. What I discovered floored me.

It really just isn't that hard.

The unifying theme is that for ereader publishing you need to strip almost but not quite all formatting out of a document. The ereader's going to change page lengths, font sizes and types, all that stuff. If you're publishing general fiction without illustrations, this suits your needs just fine. Smashwords is kind enough to provide very, very detailed instructions at this page of how to do it. Extremely detailed instructions. The huge size may seem intimidating, but don't be scared. If you fall into our 'general fiction' category only tiny bits of that document apply to you.

To sum up what I did, I selected the entire book and set it all to be single-spaced 12 point in a generic font. I used search and replace to remove all indents that rely on tabs. Instead Smashwords showed me how to set (in Word 2007's bewildering command structure, no less) all of my paragraphs to be generically indented at the beginning. I was allowed to keep my page breaks, but told not to trust they'll still exist in all formats. I padded with a couple of blank lines between chapters, and made sure that I never had 4 blank lines together (that's bad, apparently).

And that's it. Their guide will walk you through all of that. They even have a bit telling you what they'd like to see for a title page and how to make a table of contents that links to your chapters and links your chapters back to it. I went crazy and did that and it seemed pretty simple. One thing to know there - a regular table of contents WILL NOT work, because page numbers won't be the same on an ereader and you'll be taking page numbers out of your manuscript anyway.

Now we get to what I thought was the scary part. Kindle Direct Publishing DUN DUN DUNNNN! Their submission guidelines seem quite terrifying, because they're not that well explained and they demand exotic file types. I dug down into the nitty gritty and discovered that they're just a less publisher friendly description of the same formatting Smashwords wants. I used Word 2007 to save my Smashwords formatted manuscript as an .htm file. Didn't change it in any other way. Downloaded 'Kindlegen', their freaky little command prompt program and ran said manuscript through it. This gave me a .mobi file. I opened that .mobi file in my Windows Kindle Reader and... behold! It works perfectly! Even the table of contents links!

Summary: Ereader publishing formatting sounds scary scary. It's almost entirely 'remove all the formatting'. Smashwords has a tremendously friendly guide. Kindle uses the same standards, but you have to make it an .htm file and run it through their Kindlegen program.

You may now resume your regularly scheduled word processing already in progress.