[Hitch]

Originally Posted by raizscanlon

Thanks Hitch - that one had me rolling in the aisles! Goodness I feel your frustration.

Well, if it provided you with amusement, it was almost worth the angst. ;-)

It's hard enough being a DIY publisher with only two Kindle books right now, though both top-sellers, one of them made #1 in the entire Top 100 free, not that it made any money, but that's a LOT of folks not getting the experience I *thought* I had so cleverly designed - though not as clever as your treasure hunt clue. Nice.

Not my cleverness, honestly--all the publisher. I'm just de printer, mon.

I really appreciate you sharing that info about their workflow. What the bleeding point of having a "preview file" then? Grrrr. I can tell you, even though I *can* buy our own books to check, you then have to go through the tortuous process of requesting the forced update (which always seems to take TWO emails from KDP to do it. Like Microsoft, they insist on asking "Are you SURE?"). So it is by no means instant - and if it still doesn't fly the way you want it ... then there goes another 24-48 hours minimum going through the same process.

Well, YES, it's bloody STUPID! And worse, what about a book that has to be made and remade? We have tons of those, albeit, that's 99% in our process, not once it's been released into the wild, but I just had one today, where a guy missed something, utterly, and only noticed it when he uploaded. So, fix ePUB, remake Mobi, yadda. Can you imagine what I--the producer, mind you, not the publisher--would have to go through to get an updated version of the "new" upload on sale? I mean, as the publisher, you have to ask twice; I'd either have to keep buying it or wait some ungodly period of time to get a "true" version.

And, no matter what, 800 books +/- times anywhere from $2.99 to $5.99...that adds up; ranging from $2400 to $4800 annual or thereabouts. Sure, we'd pass it on to our customers, but when you look at it at first glance, it seems like a petty charge, doesn't it? (Until you do the math, figure out all the brain-damage involved in getting the "new" "real" file, post-PW, etc.), and worse, wouldn't it say to you, were you the poor non-tecchie client, that this booberoo firm doesn't know what it's doing? ("Well, gosh, Amazon screws around with the files, so we HAVE TO buy the book to be SURE it looks like what you approved?" OMFG! I can't even imagine how I'd spin that to sound remotely non-incompetent!).

It certainly has me re-thinking structure - and I'm of the same view as you, that putting the TOC first looks like amateur hour. I do agree there is no need to "force" the reader through Author Acknowledgments, Copyright etc, so we've taken to putting those at the end now anyway. But in non-fiction at least, I think there are plenty of times where it is justified to have content before the TOC - but in my opinion, this should always be the publisher's choice and subject to the ultimate arbiter, the reader, who will quickly say if they hate it.

Ditto. It should always, always, always be the publisher's choice. No matter how daft, dumb or crazy. Customer is always right, and all that.

One thing I've thought of is to have a"mini-TOC" at the start, correctly tagged as the proper TOC, then another full-TOC where I want it.

Then the SRL can come after the first TOC.

Would that work do you think?

Or look even more amateur!

Tnx for the added info, and ... I enjoyed the rant!

No: I like this idea. Maybe it's the future. A mini-TOC, right after the full title page (so: Cover, TitlePage, mini-TOC), then the rest of the frontmatter and the half-title, then the first chapter. Put the "full" TOC at the back, simply linked from the main TOC. The problem is, the reader using the "go to" menu mid-book. I guess we could set the go to in the ncx for the "full" TOC, and leave the mini TOC (something like "Cover, Start Reading") in the front? That might be viable. James Patterson actually does it this way, and we have made a few books like this for clients of ours who are determined that if JP does it that way, well, bygod, so will they.

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Thanks for the details, Hitch. Goodness, that's stupid.

What on earth are they doing, touching the files after the preview stage in KDP?
What on earth are they doing, fiddling with start of text when it's been deliberately set to something?

I sympathise with your frustration at the lack of clarity.

Thanks, pdurrant.

I can't say how crazy-making it's made me (my staff could probably tell you tales at length, though...). I mean: bearing in mind that for all intents and purposes, I owe my entire business to Amazon, because it was when they listed us as a Professional Conversion House that we just...took off like crazy. Moreover, like it or not, they patently drive the self-publishing tsunami that washes up on all our shores. Imagine what it takes to get me to the point where I pick up the phone, and rant at The, not "a," but THE, Veep of Digital Products and Operations.

To be fair, this was also in conjunction (time-wise, not issue-wise) with a KQN (Kindle Quality Notice) issued for one of our superstar authors, for--wait for it--TWO typos (one real one, one a Brit spelling/usage difference) in a book with 256,000 (yes: TWO HUNDRED FIFTY-SIX THOUSAND) words. I nearly blew a gasket. I forget the real math now, but I worked out that it was a one-tenth of one-one-millionth of 1 percent error rate, or something like that, and read them the riot act about that, too. Given the absolutely unreadable drivel that is posted there daily by untrained writers, uploaded in Word, not proofread, not edited, and barely something that would get a passing grade in a Freshman High School (in the US, this is age 14, basically) Creative Writing class, to send a KQN to one of our clients--someone who's made hundreds of millions of bucks publishing books, over TWO TYPOS? I just flipped out. And this was from a SCAN. 2 errors, out of a quarter-million words? Crap, man, I'll take those numbers ANY day.

So, sorry, I've really been the UberRanter today. I'll shaddup now, but...long and short of it, don't plan on your SRL working. ASSUME it will go wonky if it's not Chapter 1, or at least, a page of text AFTER the TOC. If you make a book that's different than this, ensure you buy it, dl it, and check it.

</rant>

Hitch