Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The uploader determines what percentage of a book is available as a sample, so it's their responsibility, not Amazon's, to ensure that the percentage they choose allows a reasonable sample of the "book proper" to be seen.
|
Actually, not true. Amazon has a basic percentage THEY use for every ebook. For print books they are more flexible and the publisher can determine what he wants sampled when he submits his pdf.
https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A25WS075EUM6NF
"KDP takes the first 10% of your content and creates a sample that customers can view before purchasing the Kindle Edition of your title.
The 10% is 'rounded up' - this means that if your content consists of five images, for instance, the sample would consist of one image (it wouldn't cut off half the image). "
For ebooks, it ends up being on the shoulder of the formatter/publisher in terms of: The author/formatter/publisher must decide what he wants to do. He can lessen the front matter, make some of it back matter, which is what I do. For folks like you who like to see the TOC, it can be placed in the front. As a person who formats his own books, I've tried to get more of the sample available by having less froth matter. My books generally start with a Welcome Page. On that Welcome Page are 4 or 5 links. A link to the ToC, a link that says Start Reading that IMMEDIATELY jumps to the start of the book, one to the maps, another to my newsletter, and another to a list of my other books. After that page may or may not be Acknowledgments, then my maps, then the first chapter. A lot of books have twice that amount of stuff at the start.
As for jumping chapters, I'm certain there's code that could be added, the same way I add code to tell the book where to start on the VERY FIRST time the reader opens my book, which is on that Welcome Page. Whether Amazon would code something separately just for samples would take some work.