The other day, after I used my Facebook credentials to create a Scribd account in order to download The Shadow Girl of Birch Grove, the fact that I created an account was shared to my Facebook friends—and a number of them subscribed to my Scribd feed. This was news to me, as I had not actually contemplated putting anything on Scribd for subscribers to read.
But on the other hand, now that I had a Scribd account, it presented an opportunity to try it out. So I took a couple of the stories I wrote for the “Paradise” setting on Shifti.org, converted them back from wiki into DOC format, and uploaded them to Scribd.
It was an interesting and remarkably easy experience—I actually had more trouble reformatting the DOC files than I did uploading them to Scribd. All I had to do was click an “Upload” link, select the file, and edit the metadata. Not only were the files automatically published to my Scribd profile, but they were announced to my Facebook list. (There is also an option for linking a Twitter account in, but Twitter was down when I tried it so I haven’t gotten around to that yet.)
The documents look much the same on Scribd as they did in OpenOffice Writer, down to keeping the same page formatting and section separators. One slight problem is that, using a 10-point font, the text is rather small on the screen since Scribd by default shows a full page at a time. But it is possible to zoom in and see the text larger, or to download it in PDF, DOC, or text format.
At the moment, Scribd lists 34 total readers for my two stories, but the only comment is one I left admitting that I wished I could do something about the quotation marks in the story I uploaded. I wonder whether anyone actually has bothered to read them yet, and what those 34 views represent?
At any rate, uploading to Scribd turned out to be quick and easy, and its integration with social networks makes promoting your work to your friends easy. I can see how and why it’s becoming such a well-known solution for self-publishers, and its new HTML5 interface works great. If I get a good response from these posts, I might just have to put a few more things up.
