We at ReAnimus Press think Smashwords is great, and use it to distribute the ebooks we produce for our authors. However, we know (firsthand!) that Smashwords' formatting rules can be a bit challenging. Sometimes a .DOC file has tricky problems that require what Smashwords calls the "Nuclear Option" — wiping out all the formatting & styles and starting from scratch. This page is meant to help decrease the pain of that.

The biggest drawback we've found to their Nuclear Option is that it requires manually re-marking all the italics, which can be numerous and really time-consuming to find and restore. So for our in-house use we've designed numerous tools, and this page gives you access to one of them:

It performs a Nuclear Option format removal, AND it leaves the italics in the output.

We've found that's a real time-saver. Here's how it works: