Some digital reporters just cover eBook formatting. Over at our digitally obsessed sibling eBookNewser, editor Craig Morgan Teicher will actually format a eBook of his stories in a series of blog posts.
Here’s an excerpt from his latest installment: “Over the last few days, I’ve been looking into Smashwords. After last week’s post, Smashwords founder Mark Coker contacted me to let me know what Smashwords has to offer a publisher like mine, BOA Editions. Coker pointed out that over 100 small presses are using Smashwords as their eBook platform, and he sent me the Smashwords Style Guide, which he wrote, and which gives very accessible instructions for how to prepare a manuscript for uploading to Smashwords. After looking into it for a week, I concluded that Smashwords isn’t quite appropriate for a press like BOA (I’ll explain why later), but that it offers some very cool functionality, and real ease-of-use, that makes it a very handy way for as aspiring author, or an all-eBook press publishing longform prose, to make their books widely available.”
Later, Teicher wrote: “From what I saw, it would indeed take only about an hour for a reasonably computer savvy user. Here’s how Smashwords works: when you upload a book to Smashwords, you use a system the company calls ‘Meatgrinder,’ an affectionate and humorous allusion to the fact that it takes documents and rapidly churns out eBooks in various formats, including EPub, Mobi (for Kindle), PDF, RTF and others.”
Intrigued? Read the rest of the post at eBookNewser.