Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Stretching the Brain Muscle

I spent the afternoon yesterday formatting one of my out of publication books, FOXFIRE, to publish at Smashwords. Amazing how many things wind up incorrectly formatted in Word when you look at the coding. Honestly, I thought the file would be clean because it looked fine in print. Hah!

I spent at least four hours going line by line through the pages and removing tabs, and spaces before paragraph returns. Overall, the experience wasn't difficult. The hardest part was thinking in terms of one continuous flow instead of pages. Since Ebook readers are all different, you can't use page breaks. Also, it was different to look at single spacing. I have to look on it as a brain exercise. We all need to do that from time to time...stretch our brain muscles just like our body muscles.

Now all I need to do is create a book cover. Since, I love working with graphics that should be fun.

The experience taught me to be more cautious with future manuscripts. From now on, before I even send my work to an editor, I'll comb through for any unusual coding.

Any readers out there who have published on Smashwords yet? Care to share your experiences, insight?

Enjoy the day, and thanks for stopping by!

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