The sample, and what it is selling
A reader who is interested but not yet convinced does one thing: they open the free sample. It is the last piece of persuasion you own, and almost nobody designs it. Authors rewrite the blurb four times and never once read their own preview.
The sample is a proportion, not a chapter
Stores do not give away "the first chapter." They give away a slice measured from the start of the file — a proportion of the whole, in most cases, so a long book gives away more pages than a short one.
How much varies by store, and it can vary between the ebook and the print edition of the same title. Do not trust a figure from an article, including this one. After you publish, open your own listing and read the sample yourself. That is the only reliable way to know what a stranger is shown, and it takes two minutes.
The mechanic underneath is consistent everywhere: the slice starts at the front of the file, so everything at the front is inside it, using up the allowance.
What eats it
Here is a normal, entirely reasonable front matter stack for a novel:
- Half title
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- A map
- Acknowledgments
- A foreword
- A prologue
None of that is wrong. Every one of those pages has a reason. But stacked together they can run to twelve pages or more, and they all arrive before a single line of chapter one. If the sample is short, the reader's free look is a copyright notice, a quotation from a poet, your thanks to your writing group, and then it stops.
The acknowledgments are the worst offender, because they read as a list of names a stranger does not know. They are also the easiest to move: they belong at the back in almost every published book, and nobody has ever missed them there.
The fix is order, not deletion
You do not have to cut anything you care about. You have to know the order it appears in, and keep the front light.
- Front, always. Title page and copyright page. Short, expected, skimmed past in seconds.
- Front, if short. A one-line dedication, an epigraph of a few lines. These cost almost nothing and set a tone.
- Back, usually. Acknowledgments, the author's note, about-the-author, the also-by list, anything promotional. The back of the book is where your next sale is covers what earns its place there.
- It depends. A map, a family tree, a cast list, a glossary. If a reader needs it on page one, keep it in front. If they only need it by chapter four, it can go behind the text, or in both places.
- Watch a prologue. A prologue in another voice or another century spends the sample introducing people the reader will not meet again for eighty pages. That is a story decision as much as a layout one, but know what it costs here.
What goes in the front of a book, and in what order has the conventional sequence in full.
In the Interior Formatter. Front and back matter are built from fields rather than typed into the manuscript, so moving your acknowledgments from the front to the back is a setting you change, not a re-typeset — and the print PDF and the EPUB both follow it. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
Make the first page do real work
You cannot control where the sample stops. You can control how much sits in front of it, and what the reader meets when the story finally starts.
The first page of chapter one is the page to rewrite most. It should establish a voice, a person and a situation quickly enough that a reader turning the page is doing it because they want to, not out of politeness. An opening that spends its page on weather and furniture is spending your only free page on scenery.
The cut point is not yours to place, but the shape of what leads there is. A book that raises a real question early ends the preview somewhere with tension in it, wherever the cut lands. A book that is still clearing its throat ends it on nothing at all.
Non-fiction sells from the contents page
For practical non-fiction the sample often does its persuading before the prose starts. The reader opens the preview, goes straight to the contents, and reads it as a promise: does this book answer my question?
That makes the chapter titles a sales asset. "Chapter 4" tells a buyer nothing. "Chapter 4: What to do when the invoice is ninety days late" tells them the book is for them. Descriptive titles cost nothing in the text and do most of the work in the preview. Does your book need a table of contents? covers when to build one at all.
Read it as a stranger would
When the book is live, open the listing on a phone. Read the sample from the top without skipping, the way someone who has never heard of you would, and notice where your attention stops.
Then ask whether each page before chapter one earned its space. Usually two did not — and moving them is an afternoon's work that changes what every browsing reader sees from then on. Check the listing the way a stranger would is the wider version of the same habit.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Check the listing the way a stranger would · More: What goes in the front of a book, and in what order · The back of the book is where your next sale is · How to write a blurb that sells the book