Smashwords Style Guide Translated to Italian (Guida allo Stile Smashwords)

The Smashwords Style Guide is now available in an Italian translation, Guida allo Stile Smashwords.

The Italian translation is thanks to the generous volunteer effort of Giuseppe Meligrana, an Italian publisher at Smashwords. Giuseppe is also planning to translate the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide.

The new Style Guide will make ebook publishing and distribution more accessible to thousands of Italian-language authors. As one of a handful of authorized global Apple aggregators, we're pleased to distribute Italian authors not only to their home country's Apple iBookstore, but worldwide as well.

As we announced October 24, Italy is among the 26 new iBookstore countries now served by Smashwords distribution.

Prior to these new stores, Apple operated in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany and Australia.

Of the 26 new stores added by Apple, the Italian store was the top performer by unit sales for Smashwords authors and publishers for the week ending November 20.

Two fun facts about the Italian language, per Wikipedia:

1. Italian is spoken by 55 million people in Italy, and 6.7 million outside the country
2. Between 120 and 150 million people worldwide use Italian as a second or cultural language

The release of the Italian Smashwords Style Guide follows the recent release of French and German Style Guide translations. Additional translations are in process for Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and Bengali.

If you're a Smashwords authors or publisher and you'd like to translate the Style Guide into your native language, please see the instructions here.

Smashwords Style Guide Translated Into French and German

Ebook publishing is now more accessible to more writers around the world thanks to new French and German translations of the Smashwords Style Guide.

Guide des Styles Smashwords and Der Smashwords Formatierungleitfaden are now available for free download at Smashwords, and will soon be available at Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Diesel and Amazon.

Translations for Spanish, Italian and Portuguese are in the works (Update: Dutch and Bengali translations are now in process as well).

My thanks to Anne-Sophie Gomez in France for translating the French version, and Annemarie Nikolaus in Germany for the German version. Both of these authors volunteered their time and effort to help their fellow writers. Anne-Sophie and Annemarie are also both experienced formatters on my "Mark's List" list of low-cost formatters, so you can hire them for formatting jobs if you don't have time to do it yourself (send an email to list at smashwords dot com to receive the list via instant autoresponder).

The original English version of the Smashwords Style Guide has been downloaded over 130,000 times. I'm hopeful these new contributions by Anne-Sophie and Annemarie will help thousands of French and German writers achieve their publication dreams as well.

Ever since our launch in 2008, we always intended for Smashwords to serve as an ebook publishing platform for the world's writers. These new translations move us one step closer to fulfilling that goal. Today, over 30,000 authors, many of whom are outside the US, have taken advantage of our ebook publishing and distribution tools to publish over 85,000 titles.

If you're a Smashwords author and would like to help translate the Smashwords Style Guide to your native language, please leave a hyperlink to your Smashwords author page in the comments below (no email address necessary) and I'll contact you. The pay is horrible (no pay), though you will receive translation credit plus the admiration and respect of the thousands of authors you will help. Languages I'm most interested in at this time (corresponding to the 32 Apple iBookstore countries to which we now distribute), in alphabetical order, include: Bulgarian, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Greek, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Maltese, Norweigan, Polish, Romanian, Slovakian, Slovene, and Swedish.

Smashwords Style Guide Updated; Downloaded 100,000+ Times

We updated the Smashwords Style Guide today to include improved instructions for building linked Tables of Contents, controlling your NCX, building intra-book links for footnotes and endnotes, and troubleshooting. The new instructions are included in an expanded Step 20. Download the latest Style Guide here.

Over the last three years, we've made continuous enhancements to our Meatgrinder conversion engine, backed by over 50 updates the Style Guide where we capture our best practice recommendations for producing high quality multi-format ebooks.

Today, the ebook production quality possible through Smashwords rivals that of many hand-coded books that would cost the author hundreds of dollars were they to hire a professional ebook designer. We still have a ways to go, however. Our support for bulleted and numbered lists needs improvement, for example.

Thanks to the flexibility of our Meatgrinder conversion engine, we also make it possible for you to update or upgrade your book at any time without expense.

Separately today, we reached an exciting milestone. Today, the 100,000th copy of the Smashwords Style Guide was downloaded at Smashwords.com. Thousands of additional copies have been downloaded through our retail distribution network and Amazon.

New Smashwords Style Guide & Meatgrinder Blades Take Smashwords Ebooks to New Level

I released a new revision to the Smashwords Style Guide that makes it easier to produce, publish and distribute a great-looking multi-format ebook with Smashwords.

In parallel, in the last 30 days we developed, tested and introduced new EPUB and MOBI Meatgrinder conversion blades that give authors and publishers better control over the final look and feel of their ebooks.

The new Style Guide marks the 42nd and most significant update to the Style Guide since we first released it in November 2008. Our last major revision was in April, which is when we first introduced new guidelines for paragraph construction and linked Tables of Contents.

The new Guide draws upon our experience helping over 8,500 authors publish nearly 20,000 books at Smashwords. We analyzed the most common formatting problems and then enhanced the Style Guide's instructions to make it easier for authors to use Microsoft Word to create higher quality source files.

Here's a summary of some of the most significant enhancements:

• More screenshots - We added more images to make it easier than ever to understand how to control the look and feel of your ebook's formatting


• Samples of well-formatted books - The Style Guide now contains links to two examples of well-formatted books. Download their RTF files for free.
  


• Faster formatting - Dozens of time-saving tips help you clear out hidden corruption and create the cleanest, highest-quality formatting in the least amount of time.
  


• Paragraph construction - The bulk of the most important Style Guide enhancements fall under this category. New instructions show how to manage and modify paragraph styles to improve readability and formatting quality. Learn how to modify your line spacing, code for first line paragraph indents, control fonts and paragraph styles, or code for block paragraphs.


• Hyperlinked Table of Contents - Updated instructions make it easier to create clickable ToCs, footnotes and endnotes using Word's bookmark feature.


• How to check your work - Learn how to use use Adobe Digital Editions and Kindle for PC (or Kindle for Mac/Linux) to troubleshoot your EPUB and MOBI files.


• How to pass EPUBCHECK - If your EPUB file doesn't pass EPUBCHECK validation, we can't distribute your ebook to Apple. New tips show you how to repair problems in your source file so you produce EPUB-compliant files. I expect we'll continue to update these tips as we learn more.
  


• New fast-track tips - Learn how to reduce the time it takes for your book to earn inclusion in the Smashwords Premium Catalog, and gain faster and more reliable distribution to our growing retail distribution network.


• Keyboard shortcuts - A new section provides a refresher course on how to use keyboard shortcuts and Word's FIND AND REPLACE feature to reduce formatting time and errors.

Access the new Smashwords Style Guide here.

I'd like to thank the thousands of Smashwords authors and publishers who have entrusted Smashwords to produce and publish their ebooks. In the last 2 1/2 years, we've worked to continually improve our Meatgrinder file conversion technology based on your feedback. As a result of your feedback, the files we produce today are dramatically better than what we produced just a few months ago. With your support, we'll work to improve it further in the months and years to come.

Smashwords Ebooks Support Live ToCs

Smashwords authors can now add enhanced navigation to their ebooks with linked, clickable ToCs.

This is good news for our 4,992 authors (we should reach 5,000+ by tonight or tomorrow!) and their 10,943 books.

The lack of live ToC support has been one of the biggest, most glaring holes at Smashwords ever since we launched two years ago.

For fiction, it was a tolerable omission for most readers because people read fiction serially, from word one forward. For our non-fiction authors, it was more problematic because readers interact differently with non-fiction. For some non fiction, navigation is essential to the reading experience.

The newly updated Smashwords Style Guide, which now sports a sporty ToC of its own, went live this afternoon with step by step instructions.

Special thanks to Smashwords author Cheryl Anne Gardner for volunteering the fancy finger work to test different approaches for creating ToCs. Cheryl Anne sent me some some great step-by-step notes which I incorporated directly into the Style Guide along with some additional tips from own my testing.

Turns out our Meatgrinder has supported ToCs for at least a couple months. We didn't make any deliberate changes to Meatgrinder to support this. It's possible the support arrived serendipitously in the last few months when we started doing a series of Meatgrinder conversion blade upgrades.

The secret to good intra-ebook hyperlinking with Smashwords lies in using Word's bookmark feature. As Captain Kirk might say, we're boldly taking Microsoft Word where it has never gone before.

I tested the new Style Guide with Stanza on my iPhone (screen shot at left) and the ToC works well. You just tap your finger down for about a second until the link turns yellow, then you lift your finger and it jumps to your page.

I also see we're supporting forced page breaks in front of Headers. This is another feature I didn't know we supported until a Smashwords author blogged about it or told me about it, I forget which. I'm always learning from you guys.

Although I haven't tested this yet, the bookmarks can also be used to create fully linkable footnotes, endnotes and indexes.

The links appear to work well in our EPUB, MOBI, PDF and RTF formats, though they don't work for our two online-readable formats - our HTML Reader and Javascript Reader. We're not going to worry about that for now.

The addition of navigation gets us one step closer to completing our integration with Amazon so Smashwords books can be distributed directly into the Kindle store. We've incorporated other recent changes too, such as new guidance in the Style Guide to help authors do better first line paragraph indents and construct better block paragraphs. These changes not only accommodate Amazon but will also improve the overall formatting quality of our books.