Guesswork

I’m not that old, and I say I’m even younger, yet I’m very technology illiterate. I grew up with the internet and computers and cell phones and whatnot, but that doesn’t mean I’ve ever had an in-depth understanding of them. I know I need to make this site look nice and pretty, but my thoughts on that are generally “do that later.” I like that there’s a bunch of free themes available, I just doubt my capabilities to spruce up my layout.

I even used to have a WordPress site, though it was infrequently updated.  Maybe that’s what’s throwing me off. If I’ve never been somewhere, I happily follow my GPS and get where I’m going. If I’m familiar with the area, I think I know what I’m doing and drive around in circles.

At first, I couldn’t even figure out how to change the site title.  I’m sure this is an easy, normal task for most people, but it quickly descended into madness with me. I ended up searching for “how to change the fucking site title.”

Where it said Kelly Whip, it used to say Say Title. It mocked me. I tried to click on it and couldn’t, and nothing in my profile or account settings helped.

I found a page with old information, which didn’t help. I also saw something that said doing this small task was fucking ridiculous, so that made me feel better. I made educated guesses, I clicked randomly on things, and then I eventually tried to customize the theme. From there, it’s choices galore! You can click where it says “You are editing site title” or “site identity.” So, I clicked on site title and it actually let me change it that time. Success!

“This isn’t very accessible,” I thought. Then I realized I couldn’t even find the follow button at first. So maybe the user was the problem.

Putting chapters in e-books

Amazon has a guide for publishing Kindle books that is very helpful, but I’m technologically illiterate. When looking at the instructions to put in chapter links, my eyes glazed over. I saw something about how a table of contents (TOC) will convert if it’s done in Word. I understood the words “table of contents” and “Word,” so I went off experimenting

In most of the books I’ve read with Kindle, there’s not a TOC. A TOC might not be needed with a short story but is helpful when you’ve got a long book or a bundle. Maybe it’s author preference to not include one, or maybe some people like me were just confused. I managed to figure it out, so I’ll share what I learned.

Inserting a Table of Contents

The TOC goes after the disclaimer section but before the body of the work (obviously.) You can create a new page or just insert a page break after you get the table.

1.Highlight the text you want to link, and a little box will come up. (I’m using real technical terms here.) Select Heading 1, 2 or 3. Put all the necessary text in one of these headings.

2. Don’t insert a table, instead go to references and select Table of Contents. There’s a couple automatic ones and one manual. With the automatic ones, the text just has to be in one of the designated headers. After you select one, hit the update table button, then update entire table.

3. Delete the dots and the page numbers, since they aren’t used in KU.

That’s all there is to it!

When using this method, you can’t edit the text as far as I know, so you can’t align it differently or change the font or the color of the heading. There’s probably different ways to insert a TOC, but this simple way works for me. You can test it by holding control and clicking on one of the lines in the TOC. This transfers over when uploading your book to Amazon, and you can test it again in the book previewer if you’re OCD like me.