Today is the day that I released my first book to the public. It was a trying weekend, trying to get the formatting down and making sure to find as many errors and typos as possible. This leads me to today's post about my publishing experience.
I chose to publish my book on both Smashwords.com and Amazon for reasons I mentioned in a previous post. Over the last week, I worked on getting a preview up on Smashwords so that my readers would have a chance to look at the book before they bought it. Before that, I was testing the book on kindle and iBooks to test the formatting. I've come to realize that the two are not the same.
Smashwords will include a table of contents if you set up the text properly (use a header 1 format). Amazon will not. I had to include a table of contents for that one to show up. Also, Smashwords was able to make my chapters start a new page, Amazon did not. I had to manually add page breaks for those to work. All this is the curse of the newbie novelist. It didn't help that I set a deadline that was fast approaching.
To say the least, it was stressful. I urge you to learn from my mistakes and make sure that you test all of this far in advance of your book's release date. It will only help things go more smoothly. Good luck and keep on writing!
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