Location: Canada
Member Since:
Sep. 28, 2011
B P
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Smashwords Style Guide
on Dec. 16, 2011
The guide is very Windows and Office 2007-centric. You'll have a hard time following along if you use a Macintosh and any other version of Office. Not only that, beware that the staff of Smashwords may be enforcing the content of the Style Guide a little too rabidly. I'm a professional typesetter. I managed after a great deal of experimentation to produce a very good epub which everyone says looks spectacular, and which passes epub verification with ease, but Smashwords has so far rejected it from the Premium Catalog because I use "too many font sizes" (I use four: title page, chapter headers, body text, and a smaller indented body text for quotes such as poems and newspaper articles – trust me folks, this is perfectly legitimate formatting in the real book world, and it looks great in an epub), but some Smashwords newbie fanatic employee has rejected it, probably because somewhere in the guide it says you should only use one or two font sizes. In principle, I agree that this is a good guideline for amateurs, but for pros this is a ridiculous rule. Mark Coker – you need to hire people whose skill is in aesthetics, not counting. One other thing – why the heck don't your staff respond to support queries? I've sent three over the last 10 days and received zero replies.