It occurs to me that many of y’all probably don’t know what goes into formatting an ebook for a specific sales platform such as Amazon, and you are probably wondering why I can’t just stick my Amazon ebooks up at Smashwords and Google Play. Lemme ‘splain.

My ebooks contain a lot of links. There’s the Other Works page that has links to all of my books, and if the ebook is in a series I have a Series page right up front that lists all the books currently in the series. This is for marketing purposes—ideally a reader will love my book so much that they want to read something else I’ve written. So they’ll check out the Other Works page or the Series page, click on a book that appeals to them, and ideally buy it from whatever ebook retailer they use, thereby allowing me to keep a roof over the J Crew’s head.

The problem is, those ebook links need to be specific to the platform where the ebook is published. For example, I have an Olympic Cove series page in Storm Season that contains links to all of the OC books and short stories. When I publish Storm Season on Amazon, all those links point to the Amazon pages for the OC books (because if someone buys Storm Season on Amazon, chances are they’ll want to buy the rest of the series on Amazon and I want to make that as easy as possible for them).

When I publish Storm Season on Smashwords, which distributes the book to Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a whole slew of other ebook retailers, I have to adjust the links on the Olympic Cove series page so that they point to a Books2Read universal landing page (since I have no idea where a reader may buy the Smashwords ebook version from—could be B&N, could be Apple, could be Walmart, who knows). From that landing page, the reader can then choose what retailer they want and hopefully go on to buy the other books in the series. I do the same thing to my Other Works page—each link points to a universal landing page for that ebook, and the reader can choose the retailer where they want to buy it. I also have to use a slightly different copyright page for a Smashwords book—it’s part of their rules.

When I publish Storm Season on Google Play, I do the same thing all over again—the Olympic Cove series page links have to point to books on Google Play, as do all the links on my Other Works page.

So in order to put all of my ebooks wide, I need three versions of each ebook; one for Amazon, one for Smashwords, and one for Google Play. I use Vellum to format my ebooks, and it makes creating these versions a lot easier than it used to be, but it still takes a fair amount of time because I need to check each book and make sure no formatting weirdness has crept in (which has happened, thus my checking).

Anyway, that’s the process for formatting ebooks for multiple retailers. Print books are a whole ‘nother ball of wax.