Many thanks to all who replied. This is very useful information. It is actually the print book formatting that mainly concerns me, as ebook formatting isn't that hard. I simply convert the doc to html, then make mobi and epub files in Calibre, to get an idea what it looks like before uploading to Amazon etc.. I've not looked at Smashwords as yet, but my partner has self-published on there with no problem.The book I'm specifically working on already has that part done. I'm simply looking at a paperback edition in the near future.
Regarding the need to do large books in smaller chunks, to prevent Scribus from crashing... I have recently edited a huge collection of stories (5 x 60s/70s paperback collections in one omnibus volume. OCR proofing is such fun!) for a small publisher who uses InDesign. Now I'm pretty certain he has an older version of the software, as I doubt he's paying a monthly fee, but this particular book was so large that he was forced to split the pdf into 3 parts. So it's certainly not just Scribus that has this issue. Dave Brzeski
