• Trapped by Love, a free novelette that has been downloaded more than 5000 times on Smashwords and has five 5-star reviews
• Dream or Destiny, a romantic mystery with a paranormal touch and a theme of domestic violence
• Stroke of Luck, a contemporary romance, five-star rated, featuring a disabled heroine
• Fern’s Fancies, a humorous contemporary romance with four 5-star reviews
• The Secrets of Fantastic Houseplants, an indoor plant care guide based on a small booklet I wrote for customers in my plant shop many years ago
• Finding the Information You Need: Research Tips for Your Family, Business, or Personal Pursuits, a short how-to guide to research, useful for writers as well as individuals and families
• Preserving Memories: How to Write a Family History, tips for writing a family history or memoir to share with family or to publish
• Creating Fictional Characters, my newest offering, based on a series on my blog—at least three of the posts rank among the top 10 in Google for the keywords “creating fictional characters” as well as among my most popular posts

All except Dream of Destiny and Stroke of Luck, which are published by a small press, are self-published and available only as ebooks through Smashwords. All my self-published ebooks sell for $1.99. In addition to my own books, my associate and I have published a dozen ebooks on Smashwords for clients, so I’ve been through the process enough to share a few words of advice.

The magic of Smashwords is the Meatgrinder, the system that takes a Word document and converts it to a variety of ebook formats for sale on Smashwords and other retailers across the Internet. Books in the Premium Catalog are distributed to Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Apple, Diesel, and Scrollmotion and will be distributed to Amazon when the two companies complete technical integration. While authors can upload ebooks directly to most of these stores, letting the Meatgrinder do the conversions and Smashwords do the distribution saves a lot of time and frustration.

Preparing a manuscript for Smashwords takes some time and occasionally causes some frustration, but when it does, the simple solution is to follow the Smashwords Style Guide. Mark Coker, Smashwords’ founder, has spelled out in detail exactly how to prepare your Word document (be sure to use .doc, not .docx) to make the AutoVetter (the technology that Smashwords uses to check your manuscript for formatting errors) happy. In my experience, when a file has been rejected by the AutoVetter, the reason is failing to follow the Style Guide exactly.

You don’t have to learn from your own mistakes when it comes to Smashwords. I’ll share my mistakes with you so you can learn from them. The following tips suggest things to do and not do—for details see the Style Guide.

• Do remove all formatting—even the hidden formatting you don’t know is there. Mark explains how to find and remove the formatting and how to normalize your text. When the Style Guide says to remove all formatting, believe it. Don’t think you can get by using that fancy font that you love so much. Stick with Times New Roman, Garamond, or Arial.
• Don’t mix a lot of different styles. Start with everything in Normal paragraph style, then add the variations you need for headers and font attributes such as bold and italics, but keep styles to a minimum. Elaborate formatting doesn’t translate well to most ebook formats.
• Don’t use tabs, paragraph returns to create blank lines between paragraphs, tables, columns, or text boxes. Instead use paragraph indents and set the “space after” to 6 point in your Normal paragraph style; convert tables, columns, and text boxes to plain text.
• Don’t use Word’s AutoCorrect, AutoFormat, or automatic table of contents creator. All of these features are apt to put garbage into your ebook. You may think it takes a little longer to create the table of contents manually, but, believe me, if you corrupt your file with an automatic table of contents, you’ll wish you had spent a little extra time initially.
• One simple rule for success: Do follow the instructions in the Style Guide. Mark Coker has provided step-by-step instructions that work if you follow them exactly. And if you still get AutoVetter errors after following the instructions, fall back on the “nuclear option” and paste your text into Notepad to remove whatever hidden formatting or corruption is causing the problem. Then start over following the Style Guide instructions.

Anyone can publish anything on Smashwords. As an editor, I have one piece of advice that isn’t a “how-to” but a “what-to.” Ensure that your book is ready for publication before you start formatting. Hire a professional editor or find a knowledgeable friend who can edit your book for you. Smashwords will produce a lovely ebook in nearly a dozen formats. Make sure the quality of the content is commensurate with the quality of the formatting.

I’ve been a fan of Joel Friedlander for a long time. As a long-time reader of his blog, The Book Designer, I had read most of the articles in this book, which is a compilation of blog posts organized and edited into a cohesive whole. Even so, I found the re-reading worthwhile.

If you’re looking for nuts and bolts details on self-publishing, this is not the book for you. You won’t find advice on choosing the best font (something Joel is expert at and covers thoroughly on his blog) or on what software to use to layout the interior. What you will find is encouragement, information on what self-publishing is and how it and the perception of it have changed in recent years, advice on why self-publishing might be a good choice for you and your book, and suggestions on marketing your book.

While much of the book is primarily aimed at nonfiction authors, anyone considering self-publishing fiction or nonfiction would benefit from reading it. Anyone who is already self-publishing will likely find encouragement and words of wisdom that will help them become more effective as a self-publisher.

View all my reviews

Disclosure: I purchased this book because I am a fan of the author and his blog. I have had some discussion with Joel regarding a guest post from him, and I hope that happens in the future, but that did not influence my review.

You can follow the conversations on the authors’ blogs:
Ebooks and Self-Publishing: A Conversation Between Authors Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath was posted on March 19, 2011 on both authors’ blogs:
Barry Eisler’s The Heart of the Matter 
Joe Konrath’s A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing

On March 25th, Dean Wesley Smith entered the conversation on his blog:
The Writings and Opinions of Dean Wesley Smith

The conversations are extremely long and some of the language is, shall we say, colorful. However, the dialogue demonstrates the dramatic changes taking place in publishing today.

If you are a writer wanting to better understand your publishing options, visit Lisa’s blog and read the entire series. They are all linked from my post.

In my Self-Publishing Primer, I differentiate between subsidy publishing and self-publishing, but recently the distinctions between the two are beginning to blur. Find out in the latest in my guest post.

Table of contents for Life Story

1. Case Study of a Life Story: Part 1 – The Beginning
2. Case Study of a Life Story: Part 2 – Writing the Story
3. Case Study of a Life Story: Part 3 – Turning a Story into a Book
4. Case Study of a Life Story: Part 4 – The Result and Recommendations

Now, long after Borge started recording his life story and a little more than seven months after his first phone call to me, Borge can hold his life story in his hand and share it with those he loves. Borge and Brigitte are traveling to Germany next April to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary with Brigitte’s family in the place they met, fell in love, and married. They will give a copy of the book to each family member who attends the party. Although many of them won’t be able to read the story in English, they will be able to enjoy the photos, and English-speaking members of the family can translate.

I recently asked Borge a few questions about his experience.

Lillie: After the time, effort, and money that you spent, how satisfied are you with the results?

Borge: I’m very happy with the book. It turned out really good.

Lillie: What advice would you give to anyone else considering writing their own life story?

Borge:  Go ahead and do it. I’m really glad I wrote my book. 

Lillie: Thank you for letting me use you and your book for a case study.

Borge: You’re welcome. I hope it helps other people who want to tell their own stories.

If Borge’s story has captured your attention, you can order My Life Story: Adventures of the Great Dane from Amazon.com.  You’ll enjoy a good read, and you just might get some ideas on how to tell your own life story.

Maybe you would like to write your memoir or autobiography but don’t want to spend the amount of time and money that Borge did. You have a lot of options.

Here are a few suggestions:

• Instead of dictating the story into tapes, write your story in a word processor on your computer. Or write it in longhand and get a family member or friend to type it for you.
• If you prefer to dictate, hire an administrative professional or even a high school student to transcribe the tapes at less cost than an editor would charge.
• Before hiring a professional editor, ask a friend or relative to read your story. This first reader should be someone who is good with grammar, punctuation, and spelling. The person also must be objective and honest with you. Submitting a well-written manuscript to your editor will reduce her time and save you money.
• Use the template provided by the print-on-demand company to lay out the interior of your book. You can do this yourself in Word. The result should be adequate for a non-commercial book.
• Rather than create a custom book cover, choose a fill-in-the-blank template provided by the POD company. The companies offer a variety of stock photos for cover art, and you can probably find something suitable for your book.

Following these suggestions will allow you to produce your book in a cost-effective way. The quality will be acceptable, and you will create a priceless  legacy for future generations.

You can find more advice about writing your memoir, autobiography, or family history in Preserving Memories: How to Write a Family History. I welcome your comments and questions.

Disclosure: I received compensation from the author for editing and formatting the book, creating the cover, and providing consulting and self-publishing services. The author did not ask me to write about his book. I asked his permission to share his experiences to encourage and help others who want to write their life stories. The links to Amazon.com are affiliate links.