Suddenly my book is no longer okay for Premium Catalogue

[rnhaas]

My book has been published on Smashwords' premium catalogue for just under a year. A few weeks ago, I uploaded a new version to fix a single typo (an omitted word). I thought nothing of it. I went to look at my dashboard today and that version I uploaded (otherwise identical to the previous versions that were considered acceptable to the Premium Catalogue) requires modification in three ways that apparently it did not require modification for previously. They are:

• "Please keep links to external websites or services at the beginning and end of your book. Linking at the end of each section makes your book read more like a promotional brochure." - The links are primarily to appendices that I host online because Smashwords doesn't allow tables and because the book would be hundreds of pages longer with them included. The book itself (without the appendices) is 195 pages long and it's hard for me to understand how it could be misunderstood by anyone as a "brochure" given its length and subject matter.
  
• "Your book contains some possibly corrupt formatting. If you take a look at your EPUB you will see slight font size differentiations in your body text. This is caused by a mix of inconsistent on-screen formatting. One option is to do a CTRL-A and change everything to Normal style, then modify the style to enforce any individual characteristics you want." - But there is no identification of what is wrong beyond telling me that I pretty much have to re-format the whole damn thing all over again, pretty much a year after it was accepted into the catalogue. I have a few different font sizes in the book, deliberately, and they were acceptable previously.
• "I see your NCX (your EPUB's built-in Table of Contents) isn't formed correctly in the EPUB file. The updated Smashwords Style Guide's Step 20 has troubleshooting tips and screen shots. Common causes: Hidden bookmarks, improperly formed bookmarks, or bad or missing ToC hyperlinks. To view your NCX, download and install Adobe Digital Editions (free at www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/), then download and open your EPUB file. NCX files enable useful navigation for your reader. " - This makes me think an individual looked through the book and so would have been able to understand that "error" 1 was not an error. The table of contents was up to their standards all previous times I uploaded a new version.
  

My questions to you:

Does anyone know if there is any way to appeal any of this? I need those links to external sites. I don't have a choice about it because Smashwords does not allow tables.

Does anyone have any tips for diagnosing these latter two errors without doing everything all over again?

And does anyone know why my book was suddenly found lacking and why these errors weren't caught the other 5-10 times I uploaded new versions to fix typos?

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[jaydax]

These are probably items which were not caught the first time round. The links bit probably came from Apple. They don't mind links to the author's website but take a dim view of links to other retailer's sites. The EPUB errors have been caught by improvements to Smashwords meatgrinder - they are best fixed. Try using the Calibre editor to investigate the EPUB file. You can change links to point at your website (where they may redirect to as many retailers as you want). You can also delete any styles Word has added but not used, Look for the styles in your CSS file and run the file through Calibre's epub check. Once it's been corrected there it should be possible to save and submit the epub file to Smashwords.

[Julie Harris]

Sign up at D2D, upload your word document there, create the epub and mobi files using D2D's converter. At least you will have a contents that apple will like. Try uploading the epub that D2D creates and see what happens with the premium.

I find D2D epubs are a lot neater than Smash generated ones, but whether you get the different sized fonts is the big question. And also, tables seem to go through D2D's converter but the output is less than ideal.

[rnhaas]

Thanks

[Ted]

You can reply to Smashwords Support explaining as you did here. I've done that several times when I've updated older versions of a work and been rejected. The human vetters get hundreds if not thousands of works each day to review, and being human they can make mistakes.