by Kellemora » 14 Jul 2012, 17:33
Hi three
Yes, Smashwords, is in my opinion, one of the best choices out there.
Why? Because they cover all or most of the e-reader formats and pdf, etc.
They have excellent distribution, which is continually growing.
I was a little disheartened with some of the venues he allowed there, but I think PayPal put a stop to those questionable venues.
Although they now have a little better engine for converting documents into the various electronic formats, they still require all manuscripts be provided in a proprietary format. Conversion programs that change formats into that proprietary one, has caused many problems in the past, although they seem to have worked out some of those issues.
I do understand why they do this, because most folks think all text files are the same, when in reality, most of them are non-standard proprietary formats. So they chose the most widely used proprietary format over plain text. Programs like Windows Notepad or Word Pad do NOT produce Plain Text, so a lot of folks would be submitting manuscripts under several different text formats called text that couldn't be converted.
When Mark first opened his web site a few years, I thought it was the cat's meow (pardon the antiquated expression), but there was a glitch in either OOw's conversion to doc or his conversion program and the output was always messed up. A problem I never encountered with Amazon. Even if I doubled checked my doc file on a Windows computer using Word2003, it looked A-OK, and I did find that if I use the Save As button and save the file under another name, then his conversion would work OK after that. But that's all water over the dam, as his conversion engine seems to work great now!
Smashwards was an excellent choice, and I hope you are doing well there!
TTUL
Gary