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Did I pass the Meatgrinder?

680 Views 5 Replies 3 Participants Last post by  Aya Ling
Because Smashword's epub direct doesn't allow sampling or other formats, I thought I had better upload a Word doc, but as I'm such a lazy person to follow through the styling guide, I decided to send a Word doc I formatted with Scrivener first and see how it went.

Once the document was uploaded, it was 7th in queue. A few minutes later, the book was done being converted in pdf, rtf, mobi, etc. The book's page now shows "Single purchase gains access to all formats." But in the table below, there's only "Online reading (HTML, good for sampling in web browser)" and "Epub (Apple iPad/iBooks, Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo, and most e-reading apps including Stanza, Aldiko, Adobe Digital Editions, others)." I don't see the other pdf, rtf, or mobi formats.

So I'm confused...is my book now available on Smashwords in all the formats offered, or do I still have to wait for premium status approval?  ??? 
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I recently went through the same thing and did exactly as you did. Downloaded Coker's Smashword's Style Guide, started to read it and like 10 pages in I was like screw this I'll just compile in Scrivener for .doc. What could possibly go wrong? Well, it passed the meatgrinder (somehow) so I downloaded my book from Smashwords to make sure it converted right to the different formats and it looked terrible. Font was like size 20 and indentations were screwed across the board. I immediately unpublished and now I'm going through the painstaking process of RTFM'ing (which I should've done in the first place but at least no harm no foul; it was taken down before anyone saw it). I recommend you do the same.
Thanks, merryxmas, but may I ask how you downloaded your file? I can only view the full book online or access the epub direct file (which looks fine on my ipad). And what is "RTFM"?
Now that it is unpublished I can't remember exactly how but *I think* on the right hand side there was the option to download it. It said something like you own this book download it here or something to that effect. Incidentally, the .mobi and epub that I compiled through Scrivener and uploaded directly to Amazon and Pubit look perfectly fine.

And yeah, someone already beat me to the RTFM bit. sigh.... I feel your pain. Here is my awesome 150 page ebook on how I want you to strip away all the formatting you did in Scrivener and start from scratch! Seriously, get to the nuclear method and just laugh when you do it as you realize not only are all indents, margins, paragraph spacings done away with but all your italics and bold and such is too. Every single one. Every. One.

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It should be freely available for you to download your own book in any format it's available in on the book's own page. Just make sure you have the right software to read it in all those formats. A combination of Calibre, OpenOffice (my typing program), and Adobe Digital Editions is what I use for previewing.
Thanks for the advice, everyone. RTFM made me laugh ;D

But...before hitting the unpublish button (which is kinda scary, as Smashwords says that unpublishing will have long-term harm to sales rank), I still can't find the other formats available. I even generated a coupon code and got another account, but after "purchasing" my book, it's still the same--online reading and epub.

Here's the screenshot. Sorry it's so large--I tried resizing but then the words became unreadable.



I'm willing to unpublish, but I feel a bit uncertain since I'm not sure if my formats are really all messed up. Arrrgh! Now I know why everyone's complaining about Smashwords!
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