Formatting E-books - wow it takes a long time!

We're just about ready to publish the anthologies from The Wittegen Press Giveaway Games now, having spent a few months editing the short stories that went into the month-long games. Sooo, that means it's formatting time and I have just spent a day doing just that.

31 days in July meant there were 32 (yeah the last day had two stories) stories or story parts to compile into different anthologies. We thought we'd do more than one anthology since the stories are in a wide variety of genres and we wanted to offer different purchase options. Thus, there are 8 different anthologies:

• The complete anthology for those who want all the stories
• Tasha's stories in case there are some folks who are just ready Tash
• My stories, as above, except reverse it :)
• Horror stories - these are real horror stories, ghosts, gore, monsters and mayhem.
• Science Fiction and Fantasy stories - yes we grouped sci-fi and fantasy together and we could call it speculative fiction I suppose, but not everyone knows what that is.
• Young Adult stories - we have a mixture of genres in here, but they're all focused around teens.
• Paranormal stories - vampires, wereleopards and ghosts feature in these stories 
• Erotica stories - the title speaks for itself, these are explicit romances, some m/m and some m/f.

I'm currently compiling the first anthology, since all the others are just subsets of that one with some titles being changed. We've added in author's notes at the front of each story to give our readers some background on how we came up with the ideas, which we hope will be interesting, and with those added in, the full anthology is running at 250K wds. Thank heavens for word macros to help with the inserting of html tags (and the check list my sister wrote the first time she created an ebook, which I always check)! I've finally finished the formatting of the html version, which is the one we use to generate the .prc file for Kindle, but now I have to do the word document for the Smashwords version. The only pain is the table of contents, because word does enjoy inserting bookmarks when they're not needed.

After that, I'm just waiting on the covers, which Tash is creating (I have one that Tash did as proof of concept and it is great, sneak peak below) AND coming up with titles - Horror Anthology and the like do not really inspire someone to open a book, so we want to come up with titles for each anthology. Anyone who knows me knows I have issues with titles, so this may take a while!

Anyway, onwards to Smashwords formatting! :)