So! On the advice of my lovely friend Lofnbard, I decided to make a page dedicated to letting people know where they can purchase my book. Great idea! So I made one, and it looks nice. That’s not the problem.
The problem is, I went to Smashwords to retrieve the link for my book on their site and discovered that there were some formatting errors that caused my book to be rejected from their Premium Catalogue, namely, that the table of contents isn’t working for some reason.
What does that mean? Well for one thing, it means that if you poke a chapter heading in their version of my ebook on your ereader, it won’t take you to that chapter. This is weird because when last I saw it, I verified that the table of contents was in proper working order. In fact, it’s fully functional on both the Kobo and Kindle so if you’re using either of those devices, you’re absolutely fine.
The other thing it means is that, since December, they haven’t been distributing to all of the channels they were supposed to (ie: Sony, Barns & Noble, Apple, etc) and did not think to tell me about this. To be clear: When last I checked, it was available via all the distributors it was supposed to be and everything was fine. Smashwords neglected to notify me that there was a problem.
Not cool guys. I can’t fix things if you don’t tell me.
Another thing that I find very strange is that I uploaded my book to Kobo and Amazon independently of Smashwords. These two copies of the ebook (the .epub on Kobo and the .mobi on Amazon) are working fine. This leaves me wondering why the very same file suddenly doesn’t work the same when I upload to Smashwords. How frustrating!
I’ve sent an email to Smashwords asking them what’s up. I’ve gone through the file again, reuploaded the perfected version, and tested it in Adobe Digital Editions. Still having functionality issues with the table of contents for unexplained reasons. Hopefully, they will get back to me soon.
I apologize for this inconvenience. I will get it fixed as soon as I can. It would have been rectified already had I been aware of the issue.
Man, it would be really great to just focus on producing good literature for all you nice folks instead of having to constantly run around checking that everything is still working.