All I can say is “Wow”! I have learned so much this past week about formatting and have taken lots and lots of notes, hoping I will never repeat my mistakes.
There is a ton of information out there on the internet about the best ways to format an ebook for Smashwords, Amazon, etc. but a lot of it is contradictory. There are also a lot of differences in how an ebook shows up in the reader of your choice. I especially noticed a great deal of difference between the readability of my ePub in Calibre and Adobe Digital because Adobe had lots of blank pages and Calibre had none. How in the world can I know exactly how my ebook will look once it is available to the public?
I guess being a control freak brings a lot more pressure to the process but I believe that anyone who buys my book (Death of The Fairy King) deserves a proper format without any distractions.
I am finally happy with my Smashwords version and correct font, paragraphs, etc. was not the problem – everything passed through the Autovetter quickly. I finally (I think!) fixed the problem of blank pages by taking out 2 paragraph returns at the end of every chapter before the page break.
I would love to know if other authors had this problem!
Tilted Tree Publishing 
Jun 26, 2014 @ 09:27:28
This was very useful I will keep Smashwords in mind for future use. Could you explain the problem of blank pages some more?
Shakti
Jun 26, 2014 @ 11:53:24
When I uploaded my book in the recommended microsoft doc. format and reviewed it, the previewer showed blank pages between certain chapters! I went back in to check that the formatting was correct and it was. In order to make sure that the page and/or section breaks were properly obeyed, I had added 3 extra carriage returns. I went back in to my document and removed 2 of these returns and the blank pages were gone.