Just when I thought I had typesetting all figured out, I decided I wanted to release a novella (well, really, a series of novellas) that doesn’t meet the Amazon terms of service due to the fact that it has “Daddy” in the title and in the text. Fortunately, Smashwords is okay with DD/lg in titles and text as long as no laws are broken (which there aren’t), so I’ll be releasing the Detective Daddy series on Smashwords instead.

Typesetting for Smashwords is very, very different than typesetting for Amazon. I spent almost two hours last weekend working on a document that meets Smashwords’s standards, and it is… well, it’s not super easy. I’m sure that, with time, I’ll get used to it, but I’m so used to Amazon’s standard document that it’s going to take me some time to get accustomed to doing it a different way.

Typesetting is not an easy task in any sense of the word. Sure, it may just seem like throwing your book into a Word document, but there’s a lot more to it than that. There’s learning the right way to do a table of contents, the right way to break pages, the right way to format the text, and of course the whole “you really shouldn’t link directly to other sellers if your book is going to appear on multiple platforms” rule. And then, if you’re going to do a printed copy, you have to go through the entire process again, except you have to use a different base document, a different set of styles, an actual font that you like (digital readers have the ability to change fonts, but that doesn’t happen in printed books), and all of the page numbers — which is more annoying than you might think it is.

Still, on the bright side, anything can be learned. I learned Amazon; I can learn Smashwords. I just have to remember which document is which.