Other Formats for My Books

If you would like to have any of my free books in a format not offered at Smashwords, or have trouble getting a copy from there, let me know. I’ll do what I can to produce a version in any format I can manage. There are lots of free tools for this stuff and I’m willing to try almost anything so you can get the message.
Smashwords is a better distributor than a publisher. I’m having some trouble, and I’m not sure I want to keep using it. On the other hand, I may not have much choice. I started this whole thing simply because I wanted better exposure for the message, wanted more people to have a chance to see it. If I had the money, I’d use another service. I’m not angry, just disappointed by the hype when the product falls short.
Did some reading last night and there are several articles and blog posts which confirmed my suspicions. People who know a lot more about ebooks formats than I do have examined the headers of the files coming out of the Meatgrinder process. From what I gather, Meatgrinder runs on some sort of Unix machine. The files submitted in Word DOC format are opened with OpenOffice, then converted to HTML. The file is checked by Tidy; I’ve used it before, and it’s okay. Then the files are sent through Calibre and converted into multiple formats.
So far as anyone can tell, all of these are running several versions behind the current one. I have a copy of each of these tools on my computer, but it appears Coker would rather check each book coming out of his shaky and unreliable process rather than check the books people could submit in the proper format. Coker uses these tools but discourages submitters from using them, which is downright crazy.
I submitted my last book and, for the first time, felt the need to include some bulleted and numbered lists. The review claims they didn’t come out right. I understood the error and went back over the file. I also double checked my copy of the ebook Meatgrinder produced. There was nothing wrong with the file. Whatever the review found, it’s not an error in the epub version, so I’ve asked for an explanation which book format produced the errors. The tools to fix this exist, but Coker refuses to accept that. That is, I could probably figure out how to correct the flaw in whichever format has the problem, but Coker insists I have to start from scratch and resubmit through his creaky Meatgrinder process.
In other words, Coker refuses to make room for people who know more about it than him. There are people out there who can code all the formats by hand or using better software, but he only just this month began accepting finished epub books. He refuses to accept any other format and refuses to offer a conversion process, despite having the tools right there on hand. I’m not saying he’s evil, nor even lazy. I’m sure the volume is high, but I suspect this is the only way he can afford to offer books by people like me who don’t want to charge for them. He makes no money having authors like me.
At any rate, my latest book is available, but it appears it won’t make it into the premium catalog, so it may not reach the wider audience. If something as simple as Word’s own bullet and number list formatting can’t be processed, I don’t know what to do. Coker makes no room for any give and take for people like me. So the least I can do is offer to covert my books into any format readers request.