The First Whiff of Shit

I’ve said before that what scares me from electronic self-publishing is wading through the inevitable morass of utter odoriferous shit.

I’ve noticed something that–for me, and discerning readers like me–will quickly become a dealbreaker. It’s obvious the difference between a carefully-created epub novel and one that was run through one of the free epub creators or just dumped through Smashwords. The professional ones have clean pages, with nicely-spaced lines and uncommon-yet-elegant fonts. They have nice covers, and when you touch through the first several pages you feel as though you’re paging through a paper book.

A Smashwords book is usually poorly formatted, with odd line breaks and a larger, more tightly-spaced linespacing.  They don’t look bad, necessarily; they just look less elegant.  They look like a book just thrown together–because they are.  That’s the strength of Smashwords, and while I’ll probably use it at least once, I’ll want to find the right tools and develop the right skills so that when I load my epub up on the iPad it’ll look comparable to the type in one of Robert B. Parker’s Appaloosa novels, or the pages of the epub Generation Kill I just bought the other night.

You’re a fool if you think presentation isn’t important.

Do you want your readers looking at the words on the page and thinking “damn, this is a good story, I can’t wait to turn the page,” or “damn, I can’t wait to turn the page because this one hurts my eyes and I hope the next one will be easier to read?

June 3, 2011 | Categories: Original, Writing | Tags: dumbassedness, epubs, Writing | 3 Comments »