Quote:
Originally Posted by RbnJrg
Hi Hitch;
I understand your problem and your position. Just a thought; did you try to set the TOC at the END of the book (that also has logic)? In that case, the SRL, by force, has to be BEFORE the TOC. By doing so, if the SRL must be AFTER the TOC, then Amazon will have to change not only the start reading but also the layout of the book and this would be to exceed the author's will.
Rubén
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Rubén:
No offense, but I don't think you understand Amazon at all, firstly, and secondly, it's expressly against Amazon's Formatting guidelines to put the TOC at the back of the book, as this utterly bollixes up the SRL and the page "count" for all the other features that authors desperately want, like the BYG ("Before You Go"), which, erroneously, everyone thinks shows up in every book (doesn't). I don't have a "position" in this; I'm saying that I spent several weeks--nearly a month--in back-and-forth discussions via email and phone with my Tech Acct. Manager at Amazon, and this is the net result; you cannot be certain that a SRL set in the frontmatter will work, until after you've published the book on Amazon.
It's not
my problem; this is simply what Amazon has done to create SRL's for the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of self-published authors that could not figure out how to set a bookmark in their Word manuscript.
As far as going against their formatting guidelines, I think that individual self-publishers can, to some extent, go against that. Those of us listed by Amazon really can't, not without consequence.
And, yes, we've put TOC's at the back of a book. It doesn't "force" Amazon to do anything
whatsoever vis-a-vis the SRL. They just put it at Chapter 1, or they put it at the Cover. It's not reliably consistent. We have a little over 2,000 books currently produced that are up on Amazon, so...yeah, we've tried a few things. When we have a client that wants the "JP" Toc, we put a mini-TOC at the front of the book, so the "go to" works to the front, as mandated by Amazon, and we put the "full TOC" at the back (linked from the front). This seems to keep the whole BYG feature from being completely bollixed.
Hitch