Epigraphs and dedications
Two pages in your book will hold fewer than thirty words between them, and you will think about them longer than you thought about any chapter. The dedication and the epigraph are short, conspicuous and permanent, which is the combination that makes authors circle for weeks. Here is how each is set, who it is for, and which of the two can cost you money.
The dedication is one line
It gets its own right-hand page. Alone, with nothing else on it. No page number is printed and no running head appears, the same as the half title and the title page — the page is counted in the sequence, but its folio is suppressed. What goes in the front of a book, and in what order shows where it falls in the run.
Set it small, and set it high or centered. A few lines down from the top of the text block, or optically centered on the page, at or just below body size, often italic. No heading: the word "Dedication" does not appear above it.
Keep it to a line. For Martha. For my parents, who read everything. The discipline is the whole point. A dedication that explains itself has stopped being a dedication and become a speech, and a speech delivered to one person in front of every reader you will ever have reads as performance. The short ones land; the long ones undercut themselves in the second clause.
No gloss, no in-joke that needs unpacking. The reader is not meant to understand it, only to see that somebody was named. Whatever the private meaning is, it belongs between you and the person, not on a page with an ISBN behind it.
Who gets one
One person, usually, or one small group: a spouse, a parent, a child, the friend who read the bad draft, someone who died before the book was finished. A dedication to a category of people — a profession, a town, a generation — works when it is meant and reads as decoration when it is not.
What does not belong here is the list. Your agent, your editor, your beta readers, the friend who fed you in March: that is the acknowledgments, and in modern trade books the acknowledgments sit at the back. See The back of the book is where your next sale is.
Keeping the two apart protects both. The dedication stays a single gesture; the acknowledgments can run three pages and thank forty people, because nobody reads them expecting weight. Two names on a dedication page is fine. Six is a list, and a list goes to the back.
The epigraph, and where it sits
An epigraph is a quotation chosen to set the tone. It has two homes.
For the whole book, it takes its own page after the dedication, before the contents. Recto, alone, folio suppressed, like the dedication it follows.
Per chapter, it sits under the chapter title and above the first paragraph, separated from both by clear space. Chapter epigraphs are an all-or-nothing decision: a book with one on chapters 1, 2 and 7 looks unfinished, not selective. If you cannot find a good one for every chapter, use none.
How to set one
- Narrower than the text block. Indented from both margins, or centered, so it reads as a quotation from its shape alone. Set as a block like this, it takes no quotation marks.
- A point or two smaller than body text, with the leading reduced to match, and often italic. Smaller and set in, not bigger and bolder — an epigraph is a held-open door, not a headline.
- Attribution on its own line, below the quotation, either ranged right or aligned to the quotation's own indent. Set the name in roman even when the quotation is italic, because the attribution is not part of what was said. The title of the source work is italic within it: an em dash, the name, a comma, the work.
In the Interior Formatter. The dedication and the epigraph are fields rather than pages you lay out — enter them once and they are typeset in the right place, in the right order, and carried into both the print PDF and the EPUB. Start your interior → · about the Interior Formatter
The part that gets authors in trouble
An epigraph is somebody else's writing, reproduced in the most conspicuous position in your book: alone, credited, easy to find. That is not the same situation as a short prose quotation inside a discussion of the work it came from. An epigraph is decorative rather than necessary, and decorative use is the kind that gets the least sympathy.
Poetry and song lyrics are the classic trap, and the reason is proportion rather than length. A short work means a short quotation is a large share of the whole, so four lines can be a quarter of the thing you took it from.
Nothing here is legal advice, and the rules vary by country — including every country you sell into, not just the one you live in. What to check: whether the work is still in copyright everywhere your book goes, who holds the rights (usually a publisher's permissions department rather than the writer), and what a grant actually covers — print and ebook, all editions, worldwide. Quoting other people's work in your book walks through the process, and anything substantial is worth an hour with a lawyer who practices publishing law where you are.
Two practical rules follow. An epigraph you cannot clear is one you cut — the book survives without it, and permission can take months. And public domain sources are the reliable route: work old enough to be out of copyright, quoted from an old edition rather than a modern translation or an edited text, which carry rights of their own.
Both pages move the page count
Add a dedication and you have added a recto plus, often, the blank verso behind it. Add a book epigraph and you have added another pair. The text after them re-flows, the final page count changes, and that count is what sets your spine width on the cover — so decide about these pages before you order a proof, not after. See Changing your page count on purpose.
Typeset your book
The Interior Formatter is free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript, and it sets real pages you can read before you commit to anything. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Quoting other people's work in your book · Also in this guide: What goes in the front of a book, and in what order · The back of the book is where your next sale is · Blank pages, recto and verso, and why the count is even