This may say more about us than about Smashwords, but we were very excited to see the Smashwords Author/Publisher alert in our email box today. Smashwords has finally listened to us and many other users and implemented a direct epub upload feature!
This is amazing news for us and many others who professionally build ebooks in epub format.
Since the launch of Smashwords, they seeming aimed their service more at the DIY market of small-time authors who are not necessarily tech savvy enough to code a proper ebook. Instead they developed a system that accepts Word documents made according to specific guidelines, which with a bit of guidance and practice can be created by most people who know how to use MS Word.
Here’s the deal though – Smashwords is a great publishing outlet even for people with more tech knowledge because it allows access to Apple iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc. Some of these outlets are otherwise hard to get into if you’re not US based.
So obviously we wanted in, but our standard approach for ebook creation does not involve MS Word, instead we prefer to code ebooks in their native format. This allows for more features and better control over the end result.
And that’s what makes this new feature so great. We no longer have to create two different copies of our ebooks; now we can just build the epub file and upload it directly without messing about with MS Word only for Smashwords.
But this isn’t just great news for us as formatters and publishers, it is also brilliant for our customers. There is no longer any need to pay extra for a Smashwords version of your book, simply upload the epub file you’ll receive with any of our standard formatting packages!
