Christina Sng's Official Poetry Website

I’d been very thrilled with how I finally got the formatting right for my 3 ebooks on Smashwords. Last I successfully published on Smashwords, the Meatgrinder conversion took a whole day, with me starting at #2000+. I heard it hit #3000+ just last week before the upgrade, which today was an awesome 2 minutes! 2 minutes! I was #2-7 in the 8 attempts I made to correct the Word document, none of which succeeded.

I had just corrected a line in Dark Dreams, which was an acknowledgement to the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 18th Annual Edition for the poem The Art of Weaving, which earned an Honourable Mention in 2005. When I uploaded it in like 1 minute (!), Autovetter approved it, but it generated this error:

ERROR: dark-dreams (6).epub/toc.ncx(15): assertion failed: different playOrder values for navPoint/navTarget/pageTarget that refer to same target
ERROR: dark-dreams (6).epub/toc.ncx(15): assertion failed: different playOrder values for navPoint/navTarget/pageTarget that refer to same target

I verified it with Smashwords’ recommendation for a free ePub checker.

So I went through Mark Coker’s Styleguide again about NCX and tried a few things that didn’t work:

1. Check for TOC errors (but since it is a poetry ebook, there is no TOC so to speak but a list of poems).
2. Ensured there is no mention of “Chapter” in the document (because Meatgrinder apparently generates a TOC from there).
3. Finally, cleared all formatting and reformatted it (nuclear method).

When I check the epub in Adobe Digital Editions, the NCX seems to have added the words “Second Half” under the title under the left navigation. They are the only two lines. Looks rather odd really. When I click it, it stays on the first page, just as it does when I click “Dark Dreams”, the title.

Anyhow, I think, based on the fact that an earlier approved file is now found erroneous, it may have something to do with Meatgrinder’s NCX conversion process.

Thankfully I have one version sent to Apple already (minus the acknowledgement) so even if I fail to ever correct this, there will be a version of Dark Dreams for sale on the Apple store. Apple is the only vendor that requires this strict 100% compliance so I should really not fret too much about it since it is already available for sale there.

For now, loving the super conversion speed and thanking Mark Coker and his team for this amazing upgrade. Hoping the NCX errors will be fixed for the next upgrade as many eBooks don’t use a TOC.