Review: Appropriate for creating books in MS Word
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 15, 2012
The Smashwords Style Guide is, it seems, the only style guide available if you want to publish your ebooks through Smashwords.  Smashwords only accepts documents styled in MS Word and while you may use other programs like Open Office, Apples Pages, or Wordperfect and export or save documents in MS Word .doc format, the formatting results you get may be mixed - and you may find that your table of contents, or hyperlinks doesn't work properly or that you need to fix other glitches.If you just want to create simple ebooks of Kindle, and you're using Mac, Apple Pages has ability to export files in epub format, which makes the entire process quite easy.  And for greater control over your ebook, if you need to fix glitches by editing html pages, then using epub html compilers like Sigil (it's free) may come in handy.Depending on how much formatting you want to do with your ebook, and how do you want to distribute it, formatting your ebook may be a piece of cake or you'll have to deal with dealing with different kinds of challenges.  And again depending on what do you want to include in your ebook, the material in your book may look better and more to your liking in some eReaders than in others.Smashwords style guide shows you how to set up styles in MS word for normal text, paragraphs, headings, insert images, create a linked table of contents, manage hyperlinks, troubleshoot and test your ebook for validity and compliance.  It also suggests what additional materials you may want to include in your ebook.  At the end of the book you'll find helpful resources, including a link to a free "Smashwords Marketing Guide" and also to a free ebook "The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success."