And every one’s a bitch. ::sigh::
So here’s the skinny – I’ve been cranking out books and ebooks this year. I’ve been using OpenOffice as my business suite for several years now. I love it – I really do! Anything I output directly from any of the programs works great. I’m no wiz on any of the progs – I use the word processor the most – but everything I do seems to work great, as long as I keep it in-house.
A few months ago, I got a Chromebook which doesn’t actually run progs on the hardware, but lets you use browser-based software. Of course, it defaults to Google Docs, so I’ve been playing with that as well.
So, here’s where we get back to the books and ebooks. The publishing program I use to lay out print books is Serif PagePlus. I’ve been using their software for almost 2 decades. As far as ebooks go, so far I’ve published only Kindle versions, but I’ve also looked into Smashwords.
Smashwords states unequivocally that their publishing software is based around massaging Microsoft Word files into ebooks, and they’re not going to accept any other types of files. Amazon also takes Word files, but will accept other types of files as well, including HTML.
Before today, I’ve been using OpenOffice and Google Docs. I also grabbed a copy of a “document processor” called Scrivener. It’s more about arranging/rearranging content than it is about writing, although you can do that with Scrivener as well. I grabbed it because I thought it would help me as I laid out my books during writing.
I also edited a couple of my clients’ books, written in MS Word but edited before me in I-don’t-know-what. As long as I’ve been the only person to touch a file, it’s required minimal massaging to get to work as a Kindle ebook. Minimal, but I’ve still needed to wrestle with them.
Today, I bit the bullet and signed up for an account on Office.com. And that means I will once again be using some version of MS Word to write with. I originally moved away from MS products because of an aversion to being under the thumb of an 800 lb gorilla, but it became an aversion to paying big bucks for stuff I could get for free. And often the free stuff has been better.
But Office.com allows me to use true versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, plus they give me a bunch of storage space on the web, and I get that all for free.
I signed up for an Office.com account so that I can take my end product (whatever book or article I’ve completed) and just plug that directly into Kindle or Smashwords or WordPress – whatever I need to export it to. At some point, when everyone else is bowing down to the 800 lb gorilla, you have to do the same thing if you want to work with them. And that’s what I’m doing, dammit.
::sigh::