The Importance of a Hyperlinked Table of Contents

I've just published my second eBook on Smashwords.com. I’m concerned because, when I published my first eBook on their site, I had the devil’s own time of it, especially because of the difficulty in formatting, bookmarking and hyperlinking all of the elements of the Table of Contents. The whole point of the exercise is to enable the reader to switch easily back and forth from the table of contents (ToC) to a specific chapter and back again to the table of contents.

After the third or fourth failed attempt at it, I really began to debate the sanity of such an idea. So, I reviewed again why Smashwords felt was advisable or even necessary to include a hyperlinked table of contents in the book.

Since my book was a work of non-fiction, organized into named chapters, Smashwords advised a hyperlinked ToC because it added value to my book by making it a lot easier for the reader to find something in a particular chapter by enabling them to jump from one chapter to another. (Apparently, eReaders have the technology to detect automatically my linked ToC in their ePub, Mobi and PDF readers.)

So, convinced that I had no other choice in the matter, I studied all the harder how to build a hyperlinked ToC that would perform as it should in the eReaders. As usual, I had no problem with bookmarking and hyperlinking the chapter names in the ToC to the chapter headings in the text. It was getting the reader back from the chapter to the ToC that wasn’t working for me.

Then, on this final go around, I discovered something that I’d been overlooking before: “Some authors prefer to link their chapter headings back up to the Table of Contents. Other authors prefer to insert other text, such as, “Back to Top.”  I chose “Back to Contents.”

The results became my recipe for eBook Table of Contents formatting success:

1.         Type the Table of Contents

            Immediately after your title/copyright page and before your other pages, type your table of contents, using Normal paragraph style, left-justified.

2.         Bookmarking Individual Chapter Headings

            a) Highlight the first chapter heading.

            b) In MS Word, select “Insert”, then “Bookmark.”

            c) Click “Bookmark.”

            d) In the Bookmark window, type in the name of your first bookmarked chapter heading, without spaces or punctuation between words.

            e) Click the “Add” button.

            f) Repeat this procedure for each succeeding chapter heading until all are bookmarked.

3.         Return to the Table of Contents Page

            a) Highlight the “Table of Contents”  heading at the top of the table of contents.

            b) Select “Insert”, then select “Bookmark.”

            c) Name this bookmark “TableofContents”, “Contents” or “ToC.”

            d) Click the “Add” button.

4.         Hyperlinking to Chapter Heading Bookmarks

            a) In proper order, highlight each chapter heading in your ToC.

            b) Click “Hyperlink”

            d) In Word’s hyperlink menu on the left side of the “Hyperlink” window, click “Place in This Document” to see the ToC chapter heading bookmarks in the main window’s right-hand side.

            e) Select the appropriate bookmarked heading in the main window.

            f) Click the “OK” button.

            g) Repeat this procedure in sequence for each chapter heading in your ToC. Be sure that each heading in the ToC turns the color blue and is underscored.

5.         Linking the Chapters Back to the Table of Contents

            a) On the line at the end of each chapter, type “Back to Contents” or “Back to Top” in the Normal parargraph font, and format it as 10 pt, right-justified.

            b) Highlight it

            c) Click on “Insert”, then “Hyperlink”.

            d) Select the small “Place in this document” window in the “Hyperlink” window.

            e) Select the “Table of Contents” heading in the main “Hyperlink” window.

            f) Click the “OK”, then check to see if the “Back to Contents” legend has turned the color blue and is underscored.

            g) Repeat this same procedure at the end of each chapter, applying the “Table of Contents” name to each.

6.         Troubleshooting Tips

            a) After all links are found to be underscored, before you test them, click Insert: Bookmark, then uncheck the box that displays “hidden bookmarks” to discover any unwanted bookmarks. Delete all the unwanted bookmarks to make your ToC work more reliably.

            b) Carefully test each each link to see if they’re operating properly

            c) If you edit names of bookmarks or the linked text, you might damage the viability of your links; if you have edited any, be sure to remove those former intra-document hyperlinks and re-apply them.

            d) Do not use Microsoft Word’s automatic Table of Contents generation feature!!

6.         Testing Your Links

            a) Check to see if all links are underlined

            b) Ctrl+Click each link to make sure that each goes where it is supposed to go.

           

Here is the ToC I was working on:

Table of Contents

Preface: “Fleshing Out” the Life of Jesus

Part 1: A Portent of Things to Come

Chapter 1: Mary’s Conception of Jesus

Chapter 2: Jesus’ Birth and Childhood

Part 2: Jesus’ Public Ministry

Chapter 1: The Baptism of Jesus

Chapter 2: The Temptations of Jesus

Chapter 3: Jesus Calls His Apostles

Chapter 4: Jesus Begins His Public Ministry

Chapter 5: Jesus, Teacher

Chapter 6: Jesus, Healer

Chapter 7: Jesus Rejected in His Hometown

Chapter 8: Jesus Feeds Thousands

Chapter 9: Peter Confesses Faith in Jesus

Chapter 10: The Transfiguration of Jesus

Chapter 11: Jesus’ Entry into Jerusalem

Chapter 12: Jesus Cleanses the Temple

Part 3: Jesus’ Passion, Death and Burial

Chapter 1: Jesus’ Last Seder, First Mass

Chapter 2: Jesus’ Agony and Arrest

Chapter 3: Jesus’ Criminal Trials

Chapter 4: Jesus’ Torture, Crucifixion and Death

Chapter 5: The Burial of Jesus’ Body

Part 4: Jesus’ Glorification

Chapter 1: Jesus’ Resurrection

Chapter 2: Jesus’ Later Post-Resurrection Appearances

Chapter 3: Jesus’ Ascension to His Father

Here's the format I'm using to return the reader from the chapter to the ToC:

Back to Contents

Chapter 2: Jesus’ Birth and Childhood

It is spring, nearly six months since Mary’s return from the home of Zechariah and her cousin Elizabeth. Mary is well into her third trimester. Recently, Roman soldiers had come to Nazareth to announce to the townfolk there the decree of the Emperor Caesar Augustus, proclaimed byPublius Sulpicius Quirinius, who was sent by 

I thank the Holy Spirit for His inspiration to the solution of this problem. It enabled me to have my first eBook accepted into Smashwords’ Premium Catalog, which permits distribution of my book worldwide to many more online booksellers. With His continued help I hope to be able to do it again.

Why I Published My First eBook

In November of 2007, I began work on a manuscript. It was to be about the teachings of Jesus, and what they mean for the twenty-first century Christian, particularly, the Christian baptized into the Catholic tradition. It was to trace Jesus’ instructions to His apostles and disciples through the four gospels, gleaning from them the paradoxical Wisdom of the incarnate Word of God, the Son of God, “the kingdom of heaven” here on Earth.

Over the ensuing months and years, as new ideas — some, no doubt, prompted by the Holy Spirit — came and went, it morphed into Jesus’ Six Keys to a More Perfect You, a step-by-step recipe designed by Him to make us holy by showing us how to seek and find the Father’s will for us, and convert it into loving, merciful action on behalf of the less fortunate, whom Jesus called His “little ones”.

The more I read the gospels, the more I began to get the message. In His short ministerial span of three years, Jesus gave us, in His sayings and parables, everything we needed to know about how to do the Father’s will for us in order to prepare ourselves for His return when — as He explained in the parable of the Last Judgment — He would judge us according to our merciful works toward others and admit us or not admit us into the everlasting rapture of participation in the loving comradery of the Father, the Word/Son and the Holy Spirit. That’s when it all came together, and, finally, I finished the manuscript.

Then came the hard part: selling it to a publisher. Three or four times, I prepared book proposals, and sent them off to Catholic book publishers; three or four times, I received polite emails of rejection. It was depressing. So much hard work, so little appreciation.

Not long ago, a writer friend gave me the one-word solution: “Kindle”, she said.  She had discovered the joys of self-publishing online at dtp.amazon.com, and her computer-savvy husband helped her to upload her manuscript onto the site and voilà!, the Amazon people processed it, and an eBook was born.

I, too, with the help of her husband, uploaded my manuscript, and waited not so patiently for less than a week until I was notified that I was the proud author of a new eBook. Jesus’ Six Keys to a More Perfect You was a literary reality! God be thanked and praised!

If you’d like to see my eBook on the Amazon.com site, just click the link “Jesus’ Six Keys to a More Perfect You”  under the heading “MY BOOK PAGES” at the top of the right-hand column of this page.

About My First eBook

Jesus’ Six Keys to a More Perfect You presents Jesus’ teachings on the six keys to living an active, relational spirituality through merciful service to needy others in this time and place. Each key demonstrates how to transform yourself, step-by-step, into the effective agent for positive change in this world that your Creator designed you to be.

Developed and taught by the greatest authority on positive world-change, Jesus’ Way will inspire you, as it has inspired untold billions over the past twenty centuries, to grow in Christ-likeness for the betterment of humankind and the extension of His Father’s kingdom on earth.

Additional features of this book include practical ways in which you can serve the less fortunate right in your own community, contact information for specific charitable organizations and suggestions about further readings on these six keys to your own spiritual perfection.

DDDD

In ensuing posts, I’ll get more into the details of formatting and publishing eBooks. It’s not as easy as I expected, especially when I was publishing on three different sites, each with formatting requirements unique to its eReader(s). And then there was the headache of performing all the editorial, publicity and legal tasks usually handled by the staff of a print book publishing company.

Once you get the hang of it, though, it is well worth the effort.