Publishing E-Books For Dummies

Fixing a Disaster of a Manuscript by Reformatting the Entire Document

Perhaps you’ve written a novel in different types of files (such as Word documents, plain-text documents, and e-mail messages that you’ve sent to yourself) and you’ve gathered them all into one huge document. It’s a mess of different fonts and different types of formatting.

In this case, you might choose what Smashwords refers to as “the nuclear option,” which is a slightly scary way of saying “stripping out all the formatting from your document.” This operation is most easily performed on an e-book that consists mainly of text, without much formatting. Novels are usually in this category.

Before you remove the formatting from your document, save a backup copy (or print the document). Highlight all formatting in the backup (or printout) — including all italics, bold text, large text, and bullet points. These will be lost when you take the next steps, so it’s important that you can refer to them on paper or in the backup of your original document.

Follow these steps to save your document as a text file:

1. Click File in the upper-left corner of the screen, and choose Save As.

The Save As dialog box opens.

2. Select Plain Text (*.txt) from the Save As Type drop-down menu.

3. Click OK to save the file.

Close the document (it should have the .txt file extension) and then reopen it in Word. (Otherwise, Word may ...