Posted on 3 Comments

The Fight Against Smashwords’ Meatgrinder

Book Fight

Wohoo!

Finally I can say that Silent Sound is going to be available via retailers like Apple, Barnes and Nobles and Sony before long! Which means I won the dirty fight against the terrible monster Smashwords likes to call ‘the Meatgrinder’…

To those of you that don’t know, Smashwords is an ebook distributor, and in order for them to ship a book to their retail partners, it has to meet certain criteria. And that would be fine, if it wasn’t for one thing: The Meatgrinder.

The Meatgrinder is the automated process Smashwords puts your book through. They make you upload a Word document and the Meatgrinder cuts it into pieces and spits it out in all the different ebook formats. In theory, it should be a very time-saving process, but that’s not actually the case. Apparently, the conversion makes several mistakes appear, none of which could be found anywhere in the original document (I study IT, I know how to test for hidden errors, and I really couldn’t find them!).

The most prominent problem was the ePub. My Word document had the same paragraph formatting through the entire book. The ePub the Meatgrinder spit out did not. Every once in a while, a paragraph would have a different font size and I still can’t figure out how that happened…

But I won’t bore you with the details of this fight. All I will say is that I now have about 15 different versions of the Smashwords file of Silent Sound on my computer, and that’s almost how many new uploads it took for me to get it through their check.

The good news is that it now won’t be long before you can get an ebook copy of Silent Sound, even if you don’t shop at Amazon or directly at Smashwords!

To see all the places you can purchase Silent Sound, check out this post