I’m having two problems.
ONE: The “Go To” command on my Kindle shows “Front Matter” as an option, instead of cover, title page, dedication, which looks odd.
TWO: I wasn’t sure how to add the afterward, about the author, other books by author, so made each one its own chapter. And the “Go To” function shows them as:
CHAPTER ONE: Afterward
CHAPTER TWO: About the Author
etc.
Where did “CHAPTER ONE” come from? How do I get rid of it? Why doesn’t it just say Afterward?
Thanks in advance.
You’re doing the right thing putting these sections into their own documents, but there is one thing you need to do to tell Scrivener that these shouldn’t inherit the default naming prefix, which is generating the "CHAPTER <$W>: " bit. In you compile settings, right below Formatting (where title prefix is set up) you should see a “Title Adjustments” pane. Right about in the middle, look for “Do not add title prefix…”. That controller lets you select items from your draft that should not use the prefix and suffix. Use the drop-down to select each front matter document so that they have checkmarks before their names. Now try compiling again and see if that works better.
Regarding the “Front Matter” entry in the Kindle’s navigation list, I believe that’s just a somewhat newer feature of the Kindle. If I recall correctly, my older Gen2 Kindle doesn’t show this, but for the same e-book file on the Paperwhite I do see it.
“About the Author,” “Other Books by…” and “About the Publisher” are not Front Matter items, if that makes a difference. I made each of them a chapter of its own at the end of the book.
I wonder if by eliminating “Front Matter” and simply doing the same with the cover, dedication, etc., only making them chapters at the beginning of the book, I could eliminate the “Front Matter” from showing up in the ToC or “Go To” menu.
Also, is there a way to “set” where you want the book to open to the first time someone opens it?
Thank you!
Yeah, I figured as much, but the technique I demonstrated doesn’t really care where the item in question falls. It can be in the middle of the book, or the end, it simply turns off the automatic prefix system for that item, wherever it may be.
Again though, there is nothing Scrivener can do about the newer Kindles bundling stuff into a Front Matter section. It shouldn’t be confused with our feature (at least in technical terms, naturally in publishing terms they both address the same function). Now, our feature does generate what Kindle will lump together as front matter—which should be okay, that is what Amazon wants you to do. Anything you stash into the Front Matter folder will be tucked away in there. The start point of the main matter will be the first document in the Draft that isn’t a dedicated table of contents file. That’s where a newly purchased book will open it—typically chapter 1, but if you put other stuff before chapter one in your Draft that is where it will start. So that’s how you set that.
It’s impossible to make the Kindle abandon this feature though, as far as I can tell. It will at the very least put the HTML table of contents in there, even if you completely disable Scrivener’s front matter folder and insert nothing but the first chapter at the start.
You also wouldn’t want to try and make your own cover page. The cover page is a special thing that must be defined separately. If you remove the image from the Cover compile option pane, and try to make your own in the editor, you could end up with a book that doesn’t have a thumbnail.
So it’s an Amazon/Kindle thing that won’t allow it to open to the cover, and there is no way to change that?
Curses.
Thank you for all of your information. As always, it’s extremely helpful.
No, I know of no way to make a Kindle select the special cover document. I should clarify that you very well can change where a new book should first open. I meant that there is no control for that in Scrivener. It is recommended that a book start on the first page of the main matter so that a reader can get straight to it, but if for some reason you need to do otherwise you can set the start position to any section in the e-book. You’d have to get your hands dirty messing with the guts of the thing though. Easiest way to do that is to turn on the source file export option in the KindleGen compile pane. This will output a folder beside your .mobi. Go ahead and delete the .mobi as you’ll be making a revised one. Go into that folder and edit the ‘my_book_name.opf’ file. This XML document describes the “spine” of the book, it’s how Kindle generates a nice navigational system for it. At the bottom of the OPF, change the reference element within the guide element that has an attribute value of ‘title=“Start Here”’. The href attribute is what document the Kindle will use to open the book when it is first viewed. It’ll probably be something like ‘body4.xhtml’. The stuff before it are potentially your dedication section, preface, table of contents, and title page—front matter basically. If you changed it to ‘contents.html’ then you’d have the reader load up the book at the ToC. Changing it to ‘body.xhtml’ would likely change the default to the title page, or maybe the copyright page, whatever is absolutely first.
Like I say though, the cover is not an actual web page that you can specify here. It’s a special value more like meta-data is. It can’t be “linked” to. So what I have seen some publishers do is create a second cover page and link to that. It’s kind of messy, because if the reader goes back a page they’ll see another cover image, and it’s two big graphic files where one should ordinarily do, but that’s how it can be manually done. You can’t do anything with Scrivener though (other than making the dummy cover document, of course).
Once you’ve modified the OPF code, save and close the file, you’ll have to use the command line to execute the kindlegen UNIX program, specifying this .opf file. That will spit out a .mobi file if all goes well. Give it a try in Kindle Previewer and it should open wherever you want. You can set it to open in chapter 8 if you want. 
You just got far more complex and technical than my brain can follow but I’ll copy it and share it with somebody who might be able to help me with that. I thought maybe it was just me, but in a very unscientific poll every person I asked on Facebook but one said that they prefered the book to open to the cover. Some even go to the Cover so they can page forward. (I do.)
I’m not sure, we’re just following the standard. Most e-books that you buy from Amazon these days open at chapter 1, so it makes sense to follow suit. I’ll admit to preferring that myself as an opinion, though. Whenever something opens somewhere else I use the ToC to get to chapter 1. Sometimes books open at page two or three into the chapter though. It’s like nobody even bothered to check!
But yeah that should give your friend enough to go on. Anyone with a level of familiarity with HTML should be able to edit the OPF file safely and figure out which section file they should be pointing it at.