Can I Upload a Mobi File to Smashwords

Upload Your E-Book to Smashwords

Hurray!

You finally finished your book! You uploaded it to Createspace, maybe to Kindle, and you want to go it out to as many places as possible. How about putting information technology on Smashwords? What is that? According to smashwords.com:

"Smashwords is the earth'southward largest distributor of indie eBooks. Nosotros make information technology fast, free and piece of cake for whatever author or publisher, anywhere in the earth, to publish and distribute eBooks to the major retailers and thousands of libraries."

Smashwords distributes to Apple iBooks and Nook, which are of import retailers. Co-ordinate to Roger Gerald Scott, on the Authors Helping Authors web log:

"Estimates vary from person to person, but generally it's safe to assume that, at the present time in the USA, Apple's eBook marketplace share is approximately xv%, Amazon'due south is 50%, and Barnes & Noble is twenty%. This ways that by uploading your book to Smashwords, you'll be able to access potential buyers from Apple iBook and Barnes and Noble, thereby increasing your sales distribution past 35%."

Doesn't that sound practiced? Well, it'due south non quite that uncomplicated. Smashwords has some very complicated requirements for formatting your book. They do allow you to download their 117-page Style Guide for free, and if you're familiar with Microsoft Word, you won't find it also complicated. But many authors have plant the Style Guide complicated.

Author Jonathan-David Jackson writes in one of his blog posts:

"If yous have decent noesis of Microsoft Word, y'all can forget the Smashwords Mode Guide  and save yourself a couple hours of reading."

He provides a unproblematic list of the quickest mode to format your document for Smashwords. Basically, you use Word's style options, not private carriage returns, paragraphs, or spaces.

However, if you don't understand Discussion'due south various way features, download the Manner Guide and follow it to a "t." Otherwise your volume will exist rejected.

Smashwords is a cracking style to get your ebook distributed to a wider audience. And while Smashwords does a good job of making your work available to various sites, including Apple's iBook'south, Nook, Kobo, OverDrive, Scribd, and others, the competition is Amazon's KDP Select. Smashwords' website says that your book can also be distributed to Amazon; merely the truth is, you must be considered a "premium" author with over $2,000 in sales earlier your ebook is forwarded to Amazon.

Don't assume that everything will go hands once you get your book on Smashwords. In her commodity on how to format for Smashwords, Maggie Bonham says:

"One of the many bug that I've run into with the meatgrinder is that it is supersensitive to formats in Microsoft Give-and-take. Because I deal with a number of editors and authors who have their documents specially ready up, I can't guarantee that everything is how the meatgrinder likes information technology. Because of this, I spent many a night pulling out my hair trying to effigy out why something was corrupted, that doesn't show up in the document itself."

Here are a few points to think about Smashwords:

1. Don't upload your work to Smashwords until information technology is COMPLETELY ready for prime number time. Unlike Amazon'southward Create Space or Kindle, yous can't easily make changes once you set it upwardly in Smashwords. Information technology can take a considerable amount of fourth dimension to fix a trouble after y'all've initially uploaded your file, so cheque everything carefully earlier uploading!
2. If you uploaded your file to KDP Select, you tin't use Smashwords for 90 days. That doesn't mean you lot can't have a Kindle volume, just your digital book won't be eligible for all those special promotions from KDP Select.
3. If you don't use Word, you can use a professionally designed epub file. According to the International Digital Publishing Grade, "EPUB allows publishers to produce and send a single digital publication file through distribution and offers consumers interoperability between software/hardware for unencrypted, reflowable digital books and other publications." Believe me, if yous don't sympathise that judgement, you lot should hire someone to create an due east-pub for you. 😊
4. The all-time way to work with the Smashwords Way Guide is to download information technology as a pdf and print it and so you can refer to a hard copy equally yous're formatting your book. If this sounds kinda retro – it is.  And you'll observe it much easier to format this way, unless you're used to reading complicated instructions from your figurer, tablet, or phone.
5. Fortunately, the Way Guide has a lot of pictures, which will assist when yous're trying to figure out how to follow their instructions.
6. If your manuscript has gone through years of changes, multiple computers, etc., you may have a lot of unusual formatting in the document that you tin't see. The Smashwords Fashion Guide describes a procedure they call "The Nuclear Option." This is where you copy and paste your unabridged manuscript into Windows Notepad. Then you re-create and paste your entire manuscript back into a new Word document. This gets rid of all the extra character returns, formatting, etc.
7. DON'T FORGET TO Back up YOUR WORK Earlier UPLOADING. You lot don't want to "get nuclear" and so notice out you lot merely lost the latest copy of your work.
8. Advisedly cull the style you lot want for your volume before trying to upload the file. Do you desire to take the pages formatted and so they cover the whole page, or do you desire them left justified? Do yous want indented paragraphs or block text? Non certain? Check out the MacMillan Printing's guidelines – MacMillan should know, right?
9. When you've finally uploaded your manuscript to Smashwords, (and even if you determine to use Kindle instead) check out the free books offered by Smashwords creator, Marking Coker, Smashwords Book Marketing Guide and The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success. Both books have keen ideas about how to advertise your book to the public.
10. Smashwords sends payments to their authors quarterly.

Personally, I'm all the same working on taking out all those many extra spaces and wagon returns that came from years of manual typewriter use. Soon, I will be ready to upload my books to Smashwords.

Then nosotros'll come across how those marketing ideas actually work.

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Wendy Thornton

Wendy Thornton is a freelance writer, editor, and instructor who has been published in dozens of major literary magazines. Her memoir, Beloved Oprah, was published in 2013, her mystery, Bear Trapped, in 2015. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has been Editor's Pick on Salon.com multiple times. https://floridawendy.com

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Source: https://writersalliance.org/upload-e-book-smashwords/