Smashwords Formatting Cheat-sheet Follow the instructions for doing a “nuclear clean” in the Day Three lecture notes.
Make a back-up copy of your work. Title the one to be modified for Smashwords as
“Smashwords Version” or some-such obvious title.
Establish “styles” for your book.
Right click “Normal” under styles, and choose “modify” - define this as Courier New or
Times New Roman, 12, left justify.
Click the format button at the bottom and then choose Paragraph. Settings should be:
Indentation: 0” for both Left and Right
Special: First Line; By: .5”
Line Spacing: Single or 1.5; At: Blank
Spacing: 0” both Before and After
Right click “Heading 1” and choose to modify this - define as Courier New or Times New
Roman (whichever you did for “Normal”, 14, centered and bold.
Click the format button and then choose Paragraph. Settings there should be:
Indentation: 0”
Special: blank
Line Spacing: whichever you did for “Normal”
Spacing: Before 6p; After 3p
Do a control-A to highlight your entire text and then choose the “Normal” style. This will change your entire manuscript to Normal, but should leave any italics, bold and underlining intact.
Copyright Meredith Bond, 2012
Smashwords Formatting Cheat Sheet 2
Go through and change the style of your chapter names or numbers to the style
“Heading 1”.
Make sure all your italics, underlines and bolds are as they should be.
Make sure you don’t have any inserted tabs. All indents should be done through the style.
Change all tables to jpgs by copying the table and pasting it into Paint (or your favorite paint-like program) and then save as .jpg. You can then reinsert it into the text as a picture.
Pictures must be “In Line With Text” and not floating. If they float, you never know where they’ll end up after your book goes through the “Meatgrinder”.
From Mark Coker: “We’ve also found that images work best if you keep their dimensions small. If your current image runs the length of a 6 inch wide page, it may not display properly on the smaller screens of some e-reading devices. Restrict images to widths of 500 pixels or less.
Before you import images into your manuscript, use a photo editing tool such as Photoshop or a free utility such as Paint.net at http://www.getpaint.net/, Picasa by Google at http://picasa.google.com, [or Gimp at www.gimp.org] to reduce the dimensions and file size. If you insert an image that reaches beyond the left or right perimeter of your page margins, it may cause some of your conversions to fail, or your image may not display properly.”
Turn on the ¶ symbol to show all paragraph symbols. Delete ¶ when you have more than four in a row — they will create a blank page in an ebook. Smashwords doesn’t even like it if you have one or two, but it will deal with that. Best option is to put in a style which has extra spacing after the paragraph, or if you are creating space to demarcate a new scene, put in
“*****” or “#####” or some variation thereof. Smashwords Formatting Cheat Sheet 3
Make sure you have no section breaks from your document — they will cause problems in some ebook formats
For page breaks, but one hard return before and one after each page break because they are stripped out of some ebook formats as well.
Be sure there are no symbols in your text such as © or ™. They won’t get translated.
Best to type in the word if you can: copywrite, trademark, etc.
Remove all headers and footers. You also don’t want any page numbers in there because the page number will vary depending on the ereader.
If you want to a hyperlink table of contents – it’s not necessary, but if you feel you need it:
Type your table of contents in the beginning of your book in “Normal” style. Do NOT use
Word’s automatic table of contents creator.
Place a “bookmark” at the title of every chapter throughout your book. Under the Insert tab, choose “Bookmark”. Go through your document, and at each Chapter Start or Indexed item, highlight the words you want bookmarked, then select Insert: Bookmark. Name your bookmark corresponding to the Chapter/Indexed item and then click add. It’s very important to use the first word of your heading or the Chapter number you’re linking to, because later on, when you add the hyperlinks to these bookmark targets, Word displays the bookmark shortcuts in alphabetical order. Bookmark names cannot have spaces or odd characters. Use only alphanumeric characters (the letters a-z or the numbers 0-9).
Go back to your Table of Contents and highlight the words “Table of Contents” and bookmark that as TOC. Smashwords Formatting Cheat Sheet 4
Add hyperlinks to the listing in your Table of Contents:
Highlight the listing
Right click and choose hyperlink
Be sure “Place in this document” on the left is selected so that you can see the bookmarks you just created.
Select the correct bookmark and hit return or “add”.
Be sure to go through and click (or Control-click) on each link to be sure it works. And create a reverse hyperlink back to the Table of Contents.
Create “front matter”. For Smashwords it is required that you have a Title page and a copyright page (they can be the same page). Your copyright message must say that this is the
Smashwords version of this book. This is what I put in mine: This Smashwords edition is copywritten by Meredith Bond and may not be used by anyone for any purpose other than your own personal enjoyment. If you did not purchase this copy, please go to Smashwords.com to do so. January, 2012. (Smashwords recommends you put in that last part, or some variation thereof.)
If you have other books out you might want to add: Discover other works by this author:
Title #1: hyperlink to where they can get your book, but Smashwords requests that you don’t link to Amazon or B&N or other on-line retailers. Link to your blog or your website and from there you can link people to the other retailers. You can, of course, link to Smashwords.
Title #2: hyperlink Smashwords Formatting Cheat Sheet 5
If it’s only available in print, say that it’s available at “most on-line retailers”.
Don’t forget to put in hyperlinks to your Facebook page, Twitter, any other social media, and your website.