I got an email a little while ago from a reader asking how I put my e-book “A Trifle” together. I’m not sure if they got my reply or not, but I thought I might reproduce some of what I wrote in reply to them in case anyone else was planning on trying the same thing.
First, the usual caveats – please remember you are aiming for a professional work. Rigorous editing, no spelling mistakes or infelicities. Self-publishing is not a reason to be lazy. You are cultivating vanity, remember? (And this does not necessarily mean “vanity press”!) You take yourself seriously as a writer and an artist. This is a business.
(And this is where I insert a shameless plug and point to “Services” over on the right hand side – or you can bribe a friend to do it but at the very least get them a bottle of decent plonk!)
Bearing that in mind, I wrote to the reader thus:
I made my ebook “A Trifle” using a platform called Smashwords.com. I had a word document, a friend did up a picture, so it was simply a matter of editing the Word doc to conform to the format.
It’s very rigorous – they allow NO fancy fonts or spacing, no page breaks, no tabs (very important) and paragraphs must be formatted using the paragraph format box to specify no space between paragraphs and first line indented. It took me several hours to get it right.
There is also a blurb you need to put in at the beginning – effectively you are specifying that you own the rights and you are assigning Smashwords as your publisher. The rules are pretty straightforward but you need to pay a lot of attention to them or else the validator in smashwords will fail and your book will not be shipped to the online ebook stores (this happens within a few weeks of upload – mine is approved but I am still waiting for it to go through.)
Since Smashwords performs a service in converting your ebooks to proper formats, they take 15 per cent of the selling price. The one real pain is the tax laws – they are a US company so they have to obey those laws. You only find this out once you’ve gotten past the approval stage 
I hope this helps and good luck!
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