My First E-publication

Having seen George Angus’ review of the e-book publishing service Smashwords over at Tumblemoose Writing Services, I knew I just had to give it a try. E-books, while still only making up a very tiny percentage of book sales, are a growing industry. The proliferation of such gadgets as the Sony Reader and the iPhone’s Stanza application will only help the e-book industry to grow.

A free service that takes your Word document and converts it into various e-book formats, then, sounds very enticing. Especially to a writer like myself, trying to get into the industry beyond hobbies. I was itching to give it a try.

A Decision Had To Be Made

What, exactly, would I make an e-book out of? As a first attempt, I knew it best to follow George’s “An Inspired Query Letter” and make my ebook free. I didn’t, however, want any of my ‘real’ work to be readily available for nothing. So I had to decide on a subject matter.

I finally decided to compile an anthology of various roleplaying posts I had written. I did this for two reasons: Firstly, the content was readily available and required very little work on my part. Secondly, it would serve as a great way to display my writing ability.

So off I went, finding various roleplay posts from the two and a half years I’ve been taking part in the past-time. Organising them by date order, I made the rest of the content: An introduction to the e-book, and a small paragraph of background to each post.

The Process

I typed everything up in the Ubuntu equivalent of Notepad, then formatted the e-book as outlined in the Smashwords Style Guide. Or so I had thought (more on that later).

Registration was quick and easy, taking all of about three or four minutes including ‘account activation.’ The easy-to-use navigation gives a nice “Publish” link that, you got it, is where you publish your ebook. Allowing you to add a synopsis (400 or so characters long), tags, and categorisation the first page is nice and simple. You can also add an image to act as the front cover; something I opted out of.

Uploading your Word document is as easy as you’d expect: Browse to the relevant file, click okay, then click upload. Then your file is run through what is fondly referred to as the ‘Meat Grinder’ to be converted into the various e-book formats on offer. This took a couple of minutes for my 33 page e-book.

The Value of Proof-Reading

A greatly important lesson was taken from this little outing into the e-publication world: Proof-read, proof-read, proof-read!

I did have some initial formatting issues that meant the HTML Reader on Smashwords didn’t recognise any paragraph returns in my book; making it just a single block of text! This was my own fault, for not fully following the Style Guide, but I managed to fix it.

Then, the worst thing happened when I re-checked the HTML Reader (which thankfully was now working)! My actual roleplay posts, some of which were from as far back 2006, were riddled with various errors: Typographical, missing or added words, spelling errors etc.

I knew that none of my ‘new’ content in the e-book had any errors, and I had been sure that all my older stuff was proof-read back when I originally wrote them. Not the case. I had to read through everything once more to correct any mistakes, and then re-upload the e-book once again.

For this, it is really easy: There is an “Upload new version” option in your ‘dashboard’ on the site, and takes only a minute or so; needing only to upload the file and convert it - After all, the rest of the information is still there.

Finally, I’d Finished!

“Excerpts From Role Playing Endeavours” was at last published and suitable for being read.

Overall, the process was an enjoyable, and my own errors aside, the Smashwords service is fantastic. Simple, easy to use, intuitive and most all… Free to use! I expect that I will be using it again in the future. Perhaps to even publish some of my work non-free.

Thanks must be given to George, though, for sharing such a great discovery with us all.