So, here I am, new published author, Follis Wood. My print book is en route from Amazon (published using Createspace and all is well with the world. In the past, when I helped my daughter start publishing, I put her ebook up using Amazon’s services as well, using Kindle Direct Publishing My daughter, the incomparable Kimia Wood, has since chafed at some of the restrictions on KDP, so she made her second major novel available through Smashwords. Eager for new experiences, I submitted my novel to Smashwords, sifting through their style guide as quickly as I could, only to have my archaic .DOC-formatted manuscript flung back in my virtual face.
Undeterred, I tweaked the already-functioning table of contents to meet Smashwords’ discriminating standards, but to no avail! This time, I was confronted with a quandary. The review at Smashwords told me that I had used mixed formatting for my “Normal” paragraph style, and it was causing some text to overlap or get crunched. Now, I don’t want to imply that the esteemed reviewer didn’t see some sort of text artifact, but there was no such faulty formatting in my document.
I considered my options. I have loathed Microsoft for decades, more because of working with their shoddy products than in spite of it. I do not own Microsoft Word, and I will not if I can at all help it. However, it’s possible that LibreOffice formats .DOC files differently than the dinosaur of Redmond does. I began consulting DuckDuckGo for answers and I found that the Smashwords approval process is referred to as the Meatgrinder. Great! My next search was for “alternative to Smashwords”.
And so, in the words of the Teacher, “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” (ESV) I found that Lulu has ebook distribution.
Lulu takes me back to that time before Createspace when my daughter and I tried to publish the novel that shall not be named. We submitted our PDF to Lulu and received an entertaining collection of copies filled with what my wife termed “Chinese”. It was gibberish characters from some flaw in the Lulu PDF engine, and resulted in several useless copies of the book. Combined with Lulu’s lack of free shipping (whereas, with Amazon and Prime we could get free shipping) I turned my back on Lulu, and seldom thought of it again.
Now, in my need for a digital publishing solution, I approached Lulu again. I found that I could submit my ebook in DOC, docx, ePub, and ODT(!). Wow, a modern file format!
To be fair, Lulu doesn’t have as wide a distribution as Smashwords does, but it does seem to get to the big retailers. I can’t comment on how many sales I might miss out on due to not using Smashwords’ distribution to some websites I haven’t heard of before.
I went ahead and modified my DOC that I had uploaded to Smashwords (changed `Smashwords Edition` to `Lulu Edition` and uploaded it to Lulu. To my disappointment, it was rejected. To my great glee, Lulu notified me within minutes, and gave clear instructions as to how to fix it. I ended up moving to an ODT and uploaded again. Again within minutes, I had the go-ahead, although now, I found a problem with the converted file. Back I went to LibreOffice and touched it up, uploading and getting feedback from Lulu within minutes.
Unfortunately I didn’t have immediate publishing joy with Lulu, either. Even after uploading a complete ePub I got some cryptic errors (although more complete information than what I was getting from Smashwords.) Dutiful searching through similar issues was unable to resolve the problem. I decided I would submit a docx instead. I went around this mulberry bush more than a few times, and finally decided that I would take my now “nuked” DOC back to Smashwords.
While it wasn’t as quick as my feedback from Lulu, the “nuked” DOC passed the Meatgrinder, and my ebook is now available through their Premium service.
What’s my lesson in all of this? I think, firstly, that competition is good for competitors and for consumers. Smashwords and Lulu do things differently, and although I eventually published with Smashwords, Lulu’s process was very attractive. It may also teach me to be a little more humble about my computer knowledge, since, apparently, there was something wrong with the DOC when I first submitted it to Smashwords. While it would be nice if they accepted more modern formats, it eventually worked. Finally, it’s a shame that none of these options fully accounts for the metadata possibilities of ebooks. Editing the ebook version in Calibre and Sigil was a lot of fun, but it was frustrating that even Lulu didn’t accept their output. (In the midst of all of this, I also created an account with Draft2Digital, and I may have to try them out further for my next book.)
Oh, there is one more lesson. It’s not always wise to start a rant before the end of the story. You can buy my ebook on Smashwords here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/724870
(Oh, but don’t buy it there if you bought the paperback. I’m working with Amazon Matchbook to give you the ebook for free if you buy the paperback!)