Is it my imagination, or are there more indie Kindle books than there used to be without cover or table of contents?
Cover art is not essential. I personally like to have a "proper" cover - a good one can give you a feel for the story and the author before you begin, but I can see that none at all might be better than a poor one. Still, these books always manage to have a cover on their Amazon page, so why not in the book itself?
A table of contents, I would have thought, is essential (unless you have no chapters at all). At the moment I am reading a historical novel which does have a contents page, but bizarrely no hyperlinks. This is especially annoying because there are several appendices and a list of characters which I would like to refer to while I am reading. Tracking them down and bookmarking them is a real pain.
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Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines are clear that cover image and TOC are mandatory (though inevitably Amazon do nothing to enforce this - if only...). Are authors starting to use formatting systems that do not provide them, or are they just being lazy?
