Smashwords Style Guide

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, and Kobo. Smashwords also distributes ebooks to public libraries via OverDrive, Baker & Taylor Axis 360, CloudLibrary and Odilo.

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 Meatgrinder: 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 7b: How to implement your chosen paragraph separation method

Step 7b-a: How to define a proper first line indent

Step 7b-b: How to define trailing "after" space for block paragraphs

Step 7b-c: Special tips for poetry, cookbooks and learning materials

Step 7b-d: How to define proper line spacing

Step 7b-e: 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 14a: 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 20a: Creating the NCX

Step 20b: Creating the linked Table of Contents

Step 20c: Advanced link building (Footnotes, Endnotes)

Step 20d: Troubleshooting and testing

*Front Matter*

Step 21: Front matter

Step 21a: Blurbs (optional)

Step 21b: Title and copyright page (required!)

Step 21c: 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 27a: 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)...