Smashwords EPUB is ready!

Universe For Sale EPUB is now available on Smashword. And no, it wasn’t that easy.

I had attempted to get my book up on Smashwords several months ago, but kept getting tripped up on the EPUBCheck saying there were issues with the formatting of the manuscript. I spent three hours yesterday working on it. That’s probably a total of 10 hours between myself and my Bride trying to get an EPUB done…

According the style manual for Smashwords, one of the main issues that cause problems creating an EPUB is manual formating. So let’s say you have a paragraph that you want indented, because it’s a quote or something, so you highlight it, and play around with the manual settings until you get what you want. Problem is that this type of manual maninpuation of one paragraph doesn’t translate well into EPUB.

Another issue is the font. The main style in MS Word is “Normal”. The manual says if you highlight text in a paragraph with a Normal style and change the font, that the EPUB creation engine will likely change it back to whatever font is in Normal. Imaging highlighting all the text and converting it from Times New Roman to Arial. Then when you create an EPUB, it’s all Times New Roman. Confusing…

I copied the entire text into notepad and then back into word and reformated the entire thing from scratch only using Styles. No manual formatting, with the exception of italics.

The italics was the biggest pain, as it is not a style. So I had to put the new Word doc and the old one side by side and scroll through the old one looking for italics (characters thinking to themselves, etc.) and then italicise all the text in the new version. I know I probably missed some, but I did the best I could…

It finally uploaded around 1 A.M this morning and didn’t get any errors. So now it will be in the Premier program!

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/928985