Smashwords Style Guide: Smashwords Style Guide By Mark Coker

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, Oyster and Kobo. Smashwords also distributes ebooks to public libraries via OverDrive and Baker & Taylor Axis 360. 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 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 7 How to implement your chosen paragraph separation method Step 7 How to define a proper first line indent Step 7 How to define trailing “after” space for block paragraphs Step 7 Special tips for poetry, cookbooks and learning materials Step 7 How to define proper line spacing Step 7 Managing font color Step 8: Check your normalized text Step 9: How to automate the removal of tabs and space bar spaces Step 10: Managing paragraph returns Step 11: Managing external hyperlinks Step 12: Designating chapter breaks, page breaks, section breaks Step 13: Working with images Step 14: Text justification Step 14 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 20 Creating the NCX Step 20 Creating the linked Table of Contents Step 20 Advanced link building (Footnotes, Endnotes) Step 20 Troubleshooting and testing *Front Matter* Step 21: Front matter Step 21 Blurbs (optional) Step 21 Title and copyright page (required!) Step 21 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 27 Check for EPUBCHECK compliance (important!) Distributing Your Book with Smashwords Step 28: How Smashwords distribution works *How to Market Your Book* Step 29: Read the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide (how to market any book) Step 30: Read the Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success (best-practices of successful authors) Step 31: Watch our video workshops on YouTube *Helpful Resources* Send Feedback About the Author APPENDIX Keyboard shortcuts