My wife and I self-publish our books through our company Logical Expressions. We've published 10 books so far using our Publishize method to sell books print-on-demand through our own online store and other online retailers like Amazon.com.
We recently decided it was time to get our books out into the market in digital form.
Susie and I are both rather technical, so the idea of creating e-books was not particularly daunting. We selected one book (Susan's Funds to the Rescue), and started working on it with the ultimate goal of creating a Kindle version.
Here was the original plan when we started:
- Export the book from InDesign in EPUB format.
- Convert the book from EPUB to MOBI using Calibre.
- Convert the MOBI version to Kindle using Amazon's Digital Text Platform.
Sounds easy, right?
The Reality of E-Book Publishing
Thirty frustrating hours later, I had a Kindle book that looked reasonably good, and I learned way more about the digital publishing alphabet soup (OPF, IDPF, NCX, EPUB, MOBI, XHTML, etc.) and e-reader software than I wish I had needed to know. Along the way I produced some pretty hideous looking output and greyed many more hairs.
The fundamental problem is that formatting requirements for content (text and images) in digital form are completely different from the requirements for print. I now understand why people complain that ebooks look terrible: they can't help it. Optimizing a book for a specific digital format takes a lot of technical knowledge and a lot of work.
After exporting a second book from InDesign and seeing an even a worse mess to clean up, I decided it was time to look for other alternatives.
The Smashwords Alternative
As you can probably guess, this is where Smashwords comes in. I had heard about them before, but decided to take a closer look after Dan Poynter mentioned that he uses them during his presentation at the Self-Publishers Online Conference.
Smashwords is the brain child of Mark Coker, a visionary who is still deeply involved in the day-to-day operations of the business (my first email to them was answered by Mark himself -- who was probably knee-deep in BEA at the time).
The idea behind Smashwords is simple: accept a book in a common and easy-to-produce format (RTF in this case), and automate the conversion to the various e-book formats. His "meatgrinder" technology provides the automation, and Smashwords publishes a style guide that helps you craft an RTF file that has a decent chance of looking good in the formats that the meatgrinder produces.
After my experiences with manual conversion, "automation" sounded pretty good, so I decided to try it out. After all, signing up with Smashwords is free, which is another draw: all I had to do was invest some time.
More than File Conversion
Keep in mind that, in signing up with Smashwords, you are getting much more than file conversion services. (In fact, they take it poorly if you do try to use them for just file conversion.) Smashwords also becomes your e-book distributor and retailer, which is where they make their money. They not only sell your books on the Smashwords Web site, but if you do a good job formatting your RTF file, you can get into their Premium Catalog, which is fed out to other online resellers as well. The Smashwords cut is 15% of the net proceeds from the sale. Visit the Smashwords Web site to learn more.
After reading all of the FAQ pages, the style guide, and everything else I could get my hands on about how Smashwords works, I felt ready to set up an account with them. In spite of that research, it didn't take long for me to get myself into trouble.
Signing Up as a Publisher
The Smashwords online account management tools were originally designed for an author to upload their own work for digital distribution. Last year (2009) they introduced "publisher" accounts, which lets a small publisher control the work of multiple authors. Great idea, but not so great implementation (sorry, Mark and Bill). The signup process is still very biased toward creating an individual author account, and you have to "upgrade" your account afterward to a publisher account. To be fair, I'm sure the majority of their users are individuals who just need an author account, so the bias makes sense.
In my zeal to get started, I entered the information requested, including First Name and Last Name, and then upgraded the account to a publisher account. That's when I realized that I had just created a publisher account under my author name, and that's not what I wanted at all.
If you want to set yourself up on Smashwords as a publisher, here's the right way to do it:
- First Name and Last Name need to actually be your company name. In our case it was "Logical" and "Expressions" respectively.
- Your "Screen Name" should match your publisher name. In my case it is "LogicalExpressions." This name is what appears on the URL assigned to your profile.
- Your "Profile Picture" should be your logo.
- All other profile information should relate to your publishing company.
- Add a "ghost" account for every author you publish.
- Add the books you publish under the appropriate author ghost account.
Great Support
Lucky for me, the folks at Smashwords were very helpful at resolving my initial mistake. I was able to fix everything myself except the screen name, which is not a profile element you can change (so get it right the first time!).
Unfortunately, I had already added Susan's ghost account (which I couldn't delete), so I could not follow their initial instructions, which were to just create a new account with the right publisher information. Instead, Bill Kendrick, their technical lead, stepped in behind the scenes and changed my screen name for me. [Thanks Bill!]
The only issue that remains unresolved is the fact that we have co-authored books. Smashwords does not directly support multiple authors attached to the same book, so they recommend you pick a primary author and mention the others in the description and keywords (aka tags).
So that's where I'm at right now. I had some trouble getting started, but I give kudos to Smashwords for their speedy and helpful responses.
Full Speed Ahead
The next trick is to prepare and upload one of our books. I'll let you know how it goes.