I recommend Jutoh Ebook Editor

If you’re familiar with the business of ebooks, you’ve probably heard of Smashwords. Smashwords sells ebooks, but it also acts as an ebook aggregator, which means it provides ebooks to other online stores to sell. Apple’s iBookstore is probably the most prominent example. You can put books into the iBookstore yourself, but the software for doing so runs only on a Mac, so instead of shelling out, at a minimum, $600 for a Mac, I use Smashwords.

The tricky part is that Smashwords requires a custom-formatted Microsoft Word file, which it then converts into the various ebook formats. Creating this Word file is, to be perfectly candid, tedious work. I use a free program called Sigil to build my ebooks in EPUB format, and another free program called Calibre to convert the book to MOBI format for Amazon, but I would build the Smashwords Word file by hand, because Smashwords has a bunch of specific requirements and I couldn’t automate the process. (In fact, Smashwords has so many specific requirements that Smashwords has an entire book on its formatting process.)

But I had been hearing good things about a program called Jutoh Ebook Editor, and I was having formatting troubles with GHOST IN THE FORGE, so I decided to give it a go. It’s designed to comprehensively manage ebook creation from beginning to end – you create a project file, and then the program produces MOBI files, EPUB files, and – most importantly to me – a Smashwords-ready file. But it lets you import files, and I was able to import my old EPUB files and convert them to Smashwords-ready DOC files.

They uploaded and converted flawlessly. It even helped fix a consistent formatting problem with GHOST IN THE STORM I had never been able to resolve.

The program cost $39, and in the amount of time and hassle it has saved me, it was well-worth the money. If you use Smashwords a lot, I recommend Jutoh.

Now if I could only find a way to automate CreateSpace book creation… 🙂

-JM