What the Smashwords Style Guide Didn’t Mention

House of the Blue Sea CoverHave you experienced the “pleasure” of trying to create an ebook file for Smashwords? I had already created a nice, clean Word doc and uploaded successfully to Amazon, Draft2Digital, and Kobo with relatively few repeat performances required. But then (da, da, da) I met the Smashwords Style Guide.

When I read the instruction: “open your file in Word, copy and paste it into Windows Notepad (or some other simple text editor that strips out all formatting), close Microsoft Word, then reopen Word to a fresh new Word document, then copy and paste the book from Notepad back into Word, and then carefully re-apply the minimal necessary formatting…” I nearly cried. Minimal necessary formatting? I use italics throughout my novel for foreign words and characters’ thoughts, and I did not want to go through my 300-page book and reapply all of the italics in the right places once Notepad had stripped them out. Nope. No way. Not happening.

epub-fileWhen I read that I could upload an ePub file directly, I was thrilled! I already had an ePub file created through Draft2Digital. I uploaded it to Smashwords and it was perfect! What I didn’t realize, at first, was that this ePub file wouldn’t be converted to the other Smashwords file types and I would still have to upload a Smashwords-friendly Word document if I wanted Mobi or other formats.

Before making any changes to the Word file I’d used for every other ebook generator, I uploaded it to Smashwords and waited for the conversion process. Not surprisingly, the result was ghastly. The Smashwords output of the Mobi file had the font shifting style and the line spacing changing from paragraph to paragraph creating a very messy looking book. With a bit of sleuthing, I discovered that the font was changing whenever the paragraph contained italics or started with a quotation mark. The Smashwords style guide says that hitting the italics button should work just fine but…not so much in this case. And why the quotation mark was causing the font type to change … no idea.

Wordpad-iconI almost gave in to the lengthy and tedious strip everything out and reformat process, but then I decided to try Wordpad instead of Notepad. I copied the text from my Word file and pasted it into a Wordpad file. The Wordpad file looked identical to my original, italics right where they were supposed to be. I copied and pasted the Wordpad text into a new Word document, uploaded it, and voila!, the pesky problems were gone, no more fluctuating font style and spacing, and the rest of my formatting was intact.

Happy publishing!

Exploring Place – Part V

In November of 2014, I flew to Los Cabos and spent nine days exploring the southeast corner of the Baja Peninsula researching the location for my novel House of the Blue Sea. Below is the fifth and final segment of the what I learned list:


Take time to smell the flowers! And any other aromatic items in your setting.P1040739


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Exploring Place – Part IV

In November of 2014, I flew to Los Cabos and spent nine days exploring the southeast corner of the Baja Peninsula researching the location for my novel House of the Blue Sea. Here’s part four of what I learned:


Keep a little space in your luggage for that thing you just have to take home. Is a hat, a mug, a stone or some other item key to your story or your inspiration? In my case, it was a small piece of heart-shaped coral, just a little keepsake of the Baja beach, until it turned into part of my cover art.20141113_074305 Continue reading

Exploring Place – Part III

In November of 2014, I flew to Los Cabos and spent nine days exploring the southeast corner of the Baja Peninsula researching the location for my novel House of the Blue Sea. Here’s part three of what I learned:


Check out the local architecture. You don’t have to travel very far to find people living and working in structures much different from what you’re familiar with. Take note of what buildings are constructed of, their size, shape, colours and style.20141108_160741 Continue reading

Exploring Place – Part II

In November of 2014, I flew to Los Cabos and spent nine days exploring the southeast corner of the Baja Peninsula researching the setting for my novel House of the Blue Sea.

Here’s part two of what I learned:


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Department store display in San Jose del Cabo.

Whether you’re travelling to another city, another country or another continent, pay attention to what’s different from where you live. And it doesn’t hurt to take note of things that are the same, like Yoda and reindeer.

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Exploring Place – Part I


House of the Blue Sea CoverIt’s been an exciting journey from a story idea formed in a snowy field in February of 2010 to a novel release scheduled for February of 2016. Six years … of writing, learning about writing, attending conferences on writing, talking to other writers about writing, revising writing … so yes, a lot of writing.

And, in addition to all of the above, a bit of research. Merriam-Webster defines research as “the collecting of information about a particular subject”. That about covers it and, luckily for me, in some cases this means walking beaches, watching sunrises, and drinking margaritas. Continue reading