How do you set, or make sure, that every time someone opens a Vellum formatted book for the first time, the book opens at Chapter 1?
Hi Hasse,
The answer unfortunately isn't a simple one, so I'll try to explain in two parts: how Vellum declares the start page for your book, and how that declaration may change through Amazon's publishing process.
You may have discovered this already, but for those who haven't, Vellum uses the Elements in your book to determine what to declare as the
Main Text, and therefore the start of your book. (More on this can in our
Element Types help page.) Typically Chapter 1 is declared as the start, but it may be earlier if your book has an Introduction or a Prologue.
The best way to test what Vellum has declared as the start of your book is to load the file generated by Vellum
directly into your ereader of choice, and then use the
Go To > Beginning command within the Kindle App. The Kindle App for Mac is a quick way to do this, though we have instructions for other devices on our
Proofing help page.
For iBooks and Nook, this is the end of the story, as publishing and proofing these versions won't affect the start page. For Amazon, though, steps in the publishing process may alter the start page that has been declared.
The first way the start page can be altered is by using
Send to Kindle feature or by downloading the
Preview version of your ebook from the KDP dashboard. These converted versions will often have the start page set, inexplicably, in the middle of the Table of Contents.
This can certainly be alarming, but as far as we know, it only is the case for these versions. In most cases, the published version of your book as seen by readers will use the start page that was originally declared. We have heard of some cases where, as a result of the publishing process, the start page is altered again to instead be the Title Page (though only on some devices). We have yet to see a published book starting in the TOC.
So to summarize, we'd recommend loading your mobi file directly to see that the declaration is what you'd expect. If it is, we'd recommend ignoring how this can be altered via the Send to Kindle feature, as this is not representative of what the start page will be for published books.
Hope that helps,
Brad
Edit: After receiving a few more questions about this, we added a new page to our documentation:
http://help.180g.co/vellum/start-page/