Hello, Friends and Scribes!
I have put together a “how I do it” video to take the pain out of preparing your document for Smashword’s autovetter.
When I saw the manual guide to uploading, I raised my hands up and walked away. Thus far, but no farther!
TL;DR
At 1:00AM I was still awake, so I got up and did The Thing. I didn’t read all the manual. I skimmed it one or two sections, and my eyes glazed over. I winged it.
I did read the manual after the fact. It is well written and you should read it.
Fortunately, because my file was pretty basic and clean, the process didn’t take as long as it could have. My Word kept crashing for no reason (okay, maybe because my computer is crap and I had a dozen things open.) That set me back and by the time I finished, 3AM was waving hello.
My biggest piece of advice? Let Word do the work!
Use Find and Replace either manual or with a macro to automate the process of putting the formatting back in the document if you have committed an autovetter sin such as using headings, or changing your font from the toolbar, or using tabs (bad, very bad), or *insert stupid things word does here.*
I can’t say enough good things about the kitchen-sink-does-it-all Macro FREdit.
First: Disable Word’s stupidity
Second: Create a template with your custom styles
Third: Prepare your document for stripping
Fourth: Use Find and Replace to do the heavy lifting
Five: eat pie (or cake or cookie. Maybe a beer or glass of wine.)
Do this prepping once and the next time all you have to do is use your custom styles from the beginning and it will take twenty minutes next time you want to toss a book at Smashwords.
Addendum: FYI: To change everything back manually (italics, bold. underline) use Find and Replace put your nonsense in the find box like this with a star in between: nonsense*nonsense Turn the “wildcards” box. Select the font (italics, for example). Replace all.
QA Productions: Custom Book Production for Indie Authors (JW Manus)
https://jwmanus.wordpress.com/2013/05/02/quick-tip-tag-and-restore-italics-in-word/
CyberWitch: Smashwords Formatting
https://cyberwitchpress.com/smashwords/smashwords-formatting-part-1/
Archive Productions: Paul Beverly (FREDIT Macro — I can’t love this thing enough)
http://www.archivepub.co.uk/macros.html
Inquiring minds want to know:
Has autovetter scared you?
Tara Lee Davis -- A story begins one word at a time 