I somehow missed seeing this when it came out a week ago, but Smashwords founder Mark Coker announced that Smashwords is going to begin accepting more e-book formats in 2012. At the moment, the site uses an automated document converter called Meatgrinder that accepts DOC files and processes them into that multiple formats it sells. However, as with any automated conversion tool, the results can be inferior to what is possible for those who prefer to design these formats from scratch.
Coker writes:
To accommodate the books from these ebook design pros, we’ll offer a Meatgrinder bypass option called Smashwords Direct by the end of 2012. That means it’s coming but it’s not immediately imminent. Even when we offer that service, I expect most authors will still choose the Meatgrinder route because it’s faster, cheaper and, well, simpler.
The announcement seems to be garnering some positive reactions so far, such as this one from The Passive Voice.
The announcement did not mention whether Smashwords Direct will have different pricing than Meatgrinder. The “cheaper” phrasing seems to suggest it might, but on the other hand it could just be talking about the expenses required for someone to create his own pre-formatted e-book (buying the formatting software, and so on). Regardless, it certainly does seem to give the “your ebook, your way” slogan from the logo a bit more of a ring of truth.
It’s about time. Mark’s been talking about this — and I’ve been hounding him on it — since Spring of 2010.
It’s nice to hear smashwords is trying to improve since it has a wonderful content base, but seriously, they have much, much larger problems and flaws to improve:
1. The website is very slow.
2. The search function is one of the worst I have ever seen. There needs to be an advanced search that allows us to search certain fields like title, author, keyword, tags AND search within results to narrow down to the content we want to get to.
3. The book formatting produced by meatgrinder is often very flawed, leaving epubs/formats with nasty coding and poor formatting. Not sure if this is because the underlying book is poorly produced or the conversion is broken. In the end, it doesn’t really matter to the customer because all they see is the poor quality product.
Sorry for sounding like a broken record here, but these issues have been brought up before in feedback. These problems need to be fixed if smashwords really wants to improve.
Good news. SW is a great platform that I could never be part of because I’ve formatted my ebook using InDesign. I’ve purchased 3 SW ebooks and I was NOT impressed with the formatting at all.
From what I’ve read from other SW authors, I think a lot of problems with SW publsihed works is that too many authors are not follwoing the SW Style Guide. IMO.
I took the time to learn the system and Smashwords produced for us many excellent results. I have even helped and plan to help other authors. SW is by far one of the best options for authors, my final products look great on Kindle and others. If you are willing to put some work in it you should get very good results, if not garbage in garbage out. SEO and marketing methods are also enhanced, for example search my name. (One aquaintance spent $5000. on some other option and basicly flopped. My time has been well spent with SW and I am looking forward to exploring the new offerings.)
Wishing what every good dog already sees in you, the Best!
Victor Brodt and JacktheDog
Well, as Smashwords says, they’re small potatoes compared to Amazon. I too did the Smashwords as part of an effort to cover all e-book bases. But 99% of my sales are still from Amazon; the beauty of which is once your book starts climbing into the upper 10% of your catagory, Amazon starts promoting you… that kind of promotion is worth thousands of $$ and something I sure couldn’t afford on my own and it was something my publisher never did. Also, newest info is that Amazon is now taking over publishing… yes, as in hard cover paper books to be distributed to brick and morter stores, paying advances to the successful e-book authors instead of letting NY publishers grab them up. Makes sense, doesn’t it?
RP Dahlke
http://tinyurl.com/6hdg3bf
Woo-hoo!!
Cheper, hmm?
I wonder about that too. ’cause those ebook creation tools like Notepad and Windows built in zip support are so expensive…
Or you spend the big bucks and get Sigil if you want WYSIWYG… oh wait, that’s free too…