I will try your suggestion tomorrow as it's getting near the end of the day here.
However what I did with each chapter is the following.
1. went to add a pages. then to chapter, and then to chapter text. I did that for all 14 of my chapters.
I created each and everyone of my chapters and then when I was done I went to place images in the TOC.
The photograph that I use has always in the past fill the spot that was put in the TOC. I never worried about the size of the image cause I've never wasn't issue in the first version of iBook authors.
I also checked and this issue has been going on now for the last two years and I have yet to find a solution for the last two years on this forum. It looks like this may be an Apple issue.
Are you able to create a book with several chapters that allow the TOC to have a different photograph for each of those chapters?
The next solution I was going to do is start from scratch and add everything like I didn't my first book and see if I can add a table of content photograph as I go along and see if that makes a difference. I seriously doubt that it will. I think this is a software flaw when they updated to this latest version.
I'm one of the biggest Apple fans out there. But I think Apple blew it again this new version of their software as they did with Pages as with iMovie. I hope they see the light and fix these problems because this is a wonderful program and I will see how this is going to work unless they do update that fixes the problem with the software.
I seriously hope that I'm wrong and that you or some other smarter person has a workaround solution as I would be happy to use it if it actually would work.
My two books were some of the first books published a month after this program was initiated when it first came out. This was never a problem with that first program. Could possibly be that I'm working with this in OS 10.8.5?
I have no plans to move to Maverick at this point simply because I have some other issues that have to be worked on with third-party software & hardware.
In any case I'll wait for some further wisdom on this perplexing problem.