[Hitch]

Originally Posted by spike1

KDP's supposed to do the brunt of the work.

I don't know who fed you that, but that's bollocks. KDP does nothing more than finalize the eBook content that you upload. It's not doing any bloody heavy lifting.

If it wasn't for the lack of a logical table of contents, simply uploading the doc file would be enough.

Which you could have solved by simply using heading classes for your chapter headings, etc. and building the linked TOC and then uploading that, in DOCX format, to KDP. That's all that's needed; KDP bends over backward to make it easy for the not-tecchie like you.

Unfortunately, the lack of TOC is the issue. I've not done ANYTHING different from the old version of sigil, unless the indents are causing the problem?

No, you must have done something else. Indents will absolutely NOT make your eBook fail.

That can't be it, can it?

No.

You keep mentioning programs but I've got no idea if they're even available for Linux. I know for a fact KDP create isn't. I did run it through calibre and that seemed to fix the upload issue but then when I opened it, formatting problems. A chapter heading at the top of one page, the rest blank and then, the chapter itself on the next.

With all due respect, if you wish to be a commercial publisher, then you may have to bite the bullet and use programs that are suited for the purpose. You're kludging along, using Linux and then OO/LO, and then doing this and that--you've flatly stated you are unwilling to dive into the HTML and CSS, but you're using a program that is meant to be used by people who DO work in HTML and CSS. Sigil is not Pages for eBooks, or Word for eBooks. It's not meant to do the work for you, I'm sorry to tell you.

I'm a writer, not a web designer, Jim.

No--you're a PUBLISHER, no longer a writer. You were a writer when you wrote the book. Now you're a publisher and to do that job successfully, you need to use the right tools, or learn some HTML and CSS. That's just the bottom line. If you can't deal with those things, try Draft2Digital which will try to format the ebook for you.

I'm trying to abide by the publishing guidelines by HAVING a logical TOC.
If I junked that idea, I could just upload the word file direct to KDP and have done with it.

Did you use paragraph styles and headings for your manuscript? If you didn't--which is the right way to manage any manuscript, any document typed in LO/OO or Word or Pages or any word-processor--you're creating the problem for yourself. If you are not familiar with styles and headings, take an hour or two, learn what they are, use them and then build a new properly-created TOC that is built by OO/LO, because you used the Heading classes. Upload that as a Word (docx) file and it will build the NCX for you.

As for lack of error messages, that's amazon being deliberately opaque.

No, it's not. All the instructions--everything I've said here, outside of my comment about what Sigil is, or isn't--is in the KDP HELP pages, in the KDP University pages, in Amazon's videos, etc. The lack of an error message is simply because your manuscript/ePUB won't build. If it won't build, even badly, that means it has a critical error. As KevinH said, just opening some HTML file exported from a word-processor is not going to build a proper, formatted, ready-for-publishing ePUB. For it to look and act like a professionally-published eBook, you're going to need to do some work on it--in the code.

Hitch