pjulier
New Member
Posts: 3
Joined: Dec 19, 2013 19:08:25 GMT -8
|
Post by pjulier on Dec 20, 2013 9:20:45 GMT -8
Hi everyone I'm brand new to this forum and Smashwords. I've published E-books with Amazon for the kindle, and there you can preview your cover and book layout before you publish. Can you do this with Smashwords?
Thanks Pete
|
|
|
Post by Ted on Dec 20, 2013 9:50:57 GMT -8
Yes and No.
Yes, you can Publish your ebook then immediately download the ePub or mobi version to your computer, then Unpublish your work while you check for any ePub errors using the ePub Validator as explained in the Style Guide.
No, at this moment there isn't an automatic Preview on Smashwords that I know of.
It's better to download Calibre and check your various ebook formats first before uploading to Smashwords. That's what I do.
|
|
pjulier
New Member
Posts: 3
Joined: Dec 19, 2013 19:08:25 GMT -8
|
Post by pjulier on Dec 20, 2013 13:08:09 GMT -8
Thanks Ted, if I understand this correctly, I would upload my unpublished book from my Computer into Calibre ,view it as an Epub or other format and if it looks okay then upload it to Smashwords?
Thanks again Pete
|
|
|
Post by Ted on Dec 20, 2013 15:52:10 GMT -8
Hi, Pete.
Yes. I create a PDF of the unpublished work then use Calibre to convert the PDF to various formats, including an ePub which I send to the ePub Validator (the Smashwords Style Guide has a link to it) to check for any epub errors.
|
|
|
Post by garyweston on Dec 21, 2013 19:38:25 GMT -8
I tried calibre once, but it put unnecessary spaces everywhere. If I do an epub for myself, I use writer2epub, a nice and easy freebie that just works and looks great. It opens up on my P C sony ereader and looks great.
Once converted on smash, just download it back on your free P C Kindle or P C sony ereader (both free) to see that they look ok. If you are not happy with it, you can unpublish, make corrections then resubmit it.
|
|
|
Post by Ted on Dec 22, 2013 5:01:36 GMT -8
The latest version of W2E is much better and it works on both LibreOffice Writer files and MSWord doc files.
From Luke's page:
This is a partial list of unsupported features that can cause problems to W2E:
Text Frames: the text farames are ignored, and the content will be loose in the generated ePub. Sometimes a text frame can crash W2E. Please send to me any file that causes crashes.
Fonts Embedding: is planned for a future revision. The checkbox in the preference panel is inoperative at the moment.
Tables: images or some formatting of the text inside table is not yet full supported.
Free image positioning: due to a limit of the ePub standard, is not possible put an image freely along the text. Only images positioned on the left or on the right of the page are correctly displayed on the ePub.
Images: the images must be anchored to the paragraphs. If the images are not anchored to the paragraph, you can have problems in image displaying.
NOTE: All of the above are common issues across most epub converters, due to ePub limits at this time.
|
|