Adding Guide Items

Ebooks have “guide items” as a way to jump quickly to various parts of the book. At the
least, you need to have three guide items: the cover “cover”, the Table of Contents “TOC”, and where the content  starts “beginning” or “start.”  My experience was that the “cover” guide item is added automatically by the conversion program, as long as you upload a jpeg
cover image when asked. (And you should – more about cover images later.)

The ‘TOC’ and ‘beginning’  bookmarks should be added to your Word .doc file BEFORE YOU START THE CONVERSION.  I wasted a lot of time because I did not understand that. April L. Hamilton’s book guides you through the process of adding bookmarks to the .html data of your file, but that is no longer necessary.  Just position the cursor properly in your manuscript, (on a blank page between two page breaks for the TOC, and before the first word of the first chapter for the beginning), then use the Word “insert
bookmark” feature and give your bookmark the proper name (‘TOC’ or ‘beginning’).
When the conversion program asks for the guide item file name, put in the
book’s file name followed by a hashmark (#) and the name of the bookmark.

I think you can add more bookmarks for front matter pages, appendices, etc., but not for an index.  At this time ebooks don’t do indices (probably too much hyperlinking required since the book doesn’t have page numbers.) Those bookmarks would also need to be added in the Word file before uploading to the conversion program, and the file names specified in the conversion program’s dialogue box where it says “add a guide item.””