UPDATE 12:51 pm EST, April 20: I just now redownloaded the Kindle edition of Fortune’s Favors from Amazon to my phone. When tapped, it presented the cover, briefly, then flipped to CHAPTER ONE. It could be that the fix is in.
All righty, then! Saturday Fortune’s Favors report:
1. Amazon did not get back to me (as promised) yesterday, with either (a) a fix or (b) news that the techs needed more time. Kindle editions of Fortune’s Favors downloaded from Amazon continue to open 25-ish% of the way into the book at “Interludes,” which is a section of the story that falls between the first and second chapters.
2. Reports from the field indicate that Kindle editions of Fortune’s Favors downloaded from, say, the Baen site, work properly, in that they open to the cover of the book.
3. Reports from the field indicate that all other electronic editions of Fortune’s Favor, save Kindle editions downloaded from Amazon, work just fine, and do not share the “Interludes” glitch.
4. The paper edition of Fortune’s Favors, available only from Amazon, is formatted correctly.
I’d like to thank everyone who has left a review of Fortune’s Favors at the venue of their choice. Please do feel free to share the news of the new book to, well, everybody!
Unfortunately, the current documentation seems to say there’s nothing you can do about this.
https://kindlegen.s3.amazonaws.com/AmazonKindlePublishingGuidelines.pdf
(Under revision notes)
Updated 5.3, Guide Items, to clarify that the start reading location is defined by Amazon
5.3 Guide Items Guide items are an optional feature in the EPUB format but are highly recommended. Kindle provides support for the cover, TOC, and start reading location (”Go to Beginning”)guide items.You can define guide items for the cover and TOC as described in section 5.3.1. The start reading location is defined by Amazon. If you choose not to include guide items for the cover and TOC, these list items will still appear in the Kindle menus, but will be grayed out and not selectable.
There’s actually good reason for Amazon to insist on setting the “Start Reading Location” for Kindle Unlimited books itself (and skip over any verbiage most readers will just page through without reading.) Not so much for ordinary books.
If there’s nothing we can do about it, that’s Life. Amazon would earn brownie points by being polite and telling me so themselves.
And, yeah, the Kindle Unlimited folk are paid by words read, and! If ours were in the Kindle Unlimited program, I’d been pissed as heck to find that they’d robbed me of 4500 words-read.