ebook table of contents

JWNelson

JWNelson
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Began reading Amazon's publishing guidelines on this topic and just confused myself with three and four letter acronyms. What's the scoop? Is preparing a TOC in my Word doc file necessary? Thanks in advance!
(If more details will help, my chapter headings are just numbers generated using heading1 style, there is a page-break at the end of each chapter, and paragraphs and spacing are all "styles" driven.)
 

merrihiatt

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I believe if you your chapter headings are simple, Chapter One, you don't need to do anything. The conversion will create the chapter links for you. Don't quote me on that, but I know I have never made a table of contents, but they appear in my e-books.
 

JWNelson

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I believe if you your chapter headings are simple, Chapter One, you don't need to do anything. The conversion will create the chapter links for you. Don't quote me on that, but I know I have never made a table of contents, but they appear in my e-books.

Many thanks! I did notice in the Kindle Previewer that my TOC links to chapters did function, but if I can avoid worrying about lining up every darn one I'll be much happier.
 

J. Tanner

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I think you don't have to worry technically about whether the book will be rejected or is basically functional if the TOC is functional in Previewer.

But it sounds like maybe it's got some flaws in presentation by your description and I generally think you should make every effort possible to make a professional presentation.
 

JWNelson

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I think you don't have to worry technically about whether the book will be rejected or is basically functional if the TOC is functional in Previewer.

But it sounds like maybe it's got some flaws in presentation by your description and I generally think you should make every effort possible to make a professional presentation.

Thanks, J.! I copied the prc file to my Kindle and it looks "clean" to my eye as I proof-read it. Same as when I used Kindle Previewer (which is how I previously proof-read it a few times). I will probably test the Kindlegen process with a no-TOC copy later this week and see what happens.
Naive as it sounds, I am now noticing how different the work looks in "book format" as opposed to in the word processor. In other words, "holy moley, that's a huge paragraph!"
 

merrihiatt

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"Huge paragraph syndrome" hapens a lot in e-books and makes it very difficult for the reader to read. It's definitely something to be aware of. I shy away from long paragraphs in general. They usually alert me to some kind of information dump.