The Smashwords Style Guide has helped thousands of authors produce and publish high-quality ebooks. This free guide offers simple step-by-step instructions to professionally create, format and publish an ebook. It's required reading for any author who wants to distribute their book via Smashwords to major ebook retailers such as the Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Scribd, and Kobo. Smashwords also distributes ebooks to public libraries via OverDrive, Baker & Taylor Axis 360, CloudLibrary and Odilo.
The Smashwords Style Guide provides a great primer introduction on ebook publishing. Over 500,000 copies downloaded!
Updated September 24, 2014.
INSIDE THE SMASHWORDS STYLE GUIDE
GETTING STARTED
Welcome to Smashwords!
Do-it-yourself, or hire help?
Good formatting examples
What Smashwords publishes, what we don't publish
How to distribute books with Smashwords
How ebook formatting is different from print formatting
Introduction to Meatgrinder: How we convert your book into multiple ebook formats
Understanding the different ebook formats
The beauty and utility of simplicity
AutoVetter helps identify common formatting errors
Your required source file
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: Turn off Track Changes
Step 5: The Nuclear Method
Step 6: Hug a loved one
*Formatting*
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 7b-e: Managing font color
Step 8: Check your normalized text
Step 9: How to automate the removal of tabs and space bar spaces