After a few days of wrestling with formatting issues and such, I finally got The Sweet Sixteenth up on Smashwords for sale. The Amazon version is still being worked out, but it should be available in a few more days. In comparison, so far, Smashwords seems to be the faster service, but it also requires a bit more formatting.
For Smashwords, the less formatting you have the better. They offer your book in so many different formats including Nook, iPad, Kindle, Sony Reader, PDF, HTML and even Java. For me it was not such a huge problem because I write in very basic formatting. I don't use different paragraph setting, I like everything uniform. The only real problem I had, was that I had page numbers on my document, and they are no good for Smashwords. For some reason removing them did not work, as Smashwords was still reading the page numbers as text boxes, so I had to go nuclear and blow out all formatting.
Smashwords and Amazon both require you to use page breaks, and not multiple returns to set paragraph spacing. So if you are doing that five returns after a paragraph deal, get out of the habit and use page breaks for Word.
The cover art is another animal... but it is the more simple process because you can upload another image easily enough. If you don't have any graphic arts experience it might bode well to hire someone, even if it's just a college kid. It will make a difference to have a good cover that catches the eye, just like in print books.
All in all, it's been a fun experience so far. If I actually sell anything that will be another story...err...blog post.
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