Adventures in indie publishing: TOC

The table of contents for my ebook mystery drove me crazy. It would be an exaggeration to say it took as long to figure it out as it took to write the story. It just seemed that way at the time. Struggling with the characters was far more interesting than struggling with the proper format for an ebook’s TOC.

Frequently asked question during those hours: why does a 33,000-word mystery even need a table of contents? I’m still not sure it really does need one. I use the TOC on nonfiction, but don’t remember ever using it to navigate through a Kindle novel while I’m reading.

I never did get it to work in Word. Instead, I remembered the copy of Scrivener I bought with a NaNoWriMo discount. It still took some fiddling (and, yes, cussing) to figure out how to import the file, split up the chapters and get them to display the chapter numbers as headings and in the TOC, but Scrivener was a blessing. I used it to create an epub file with a table of contents, opened the epub in Calibre to make it into a mobi file for Kindle, and previewed it on my Mac with Amazon’s Kindle Preview tool. Just to be sure it looked OK – and because I couldn’t resist – I also loaded the mobi file onto the Kindle app for IOS and moved it to an iPad.

Once I had the mobi file, the rest was simple. In fact, I was startled when Yankee Swat turned up on Amazon just a few hours after I hit the publish button on Kindle Direct Publishing. I thought it would take at least 12 hours, maybe a few days. I’m not sure exactly how long it took, but my account still listed it as under review when I discovered that it was already for sale on the Amazon site.