What goes in the front of a book, and in what order

Open a book from a major publisher and the story does not begin on page one. It begins eight or ten pages in, after a run of pages most readers turn past without registering. That run is the front matter, and getting it right is one of the cheapest ways to make a self-published book look like it came from a publishing house.

The order below is convention, not law. Nobody will stop you putting the dedication first. But it is the order a reader's eye expects, and a book that departs from it without a reason reads as amateur before the first sentence.

The conventional order

Half title. The title alone — no subtitle, no author — on the first right-hand page. It survives from the days when books were sold unbound, and it stays because it gives the book a quiet opening beat.

Frontispiece, or a blank. The back of the half title. Traditionally an illustration facing the title page; in most modern books it is blank, or lists the author's other titles.

Title page. Title, subtitle, author, and the imprint if you have one. Right-hand page. This is the formal statement of what the book is.

Copyright page. The back of the title page, so always a left-hand page. More on what it must carry below.

Dedication. Short, on a right-hand page, alone. "For Martha" does not share a page with anything.

Epigraph. A quotation that sets the tone, with an attribution. Be sure you have the right to reprint it — a stanza from a living poet is not free to use because it is short.

Table of contents. Essential in nonfiction, where readers navigate rather than read straight through. A novel with numbered, untitled chapters does not need one, and most printed novels don't have one. Include it if your chapters have titles or the book is a collection. An ebook should have one either way, because e-readers build their navigation from it.

Foreword. Written by somebody other than the author, usually somebody whose name lends weight, and signed with that person's name. If you wrote it, it is not a foreword.

Preface. The author talking about the book: how it came about, what changed, why this edition exists. It is about the making of the book, not its subject.

Introduction. Part of the book itself — the first thing the reader needs in order to understand the rest. If a reader could skip it and lose nothing, it's a preface.

Acknowledgments. Either end is defensible, but the back is more common in modern trade books, and it is the better choice for fiction: a list of names is a poor way to open a novel. Academic and some serious nonfiction still run them in front.

Then the text.

Recto, verso, and deliberate blanks

Right-hand pages are rectos and always carry odd page numbers. Left-hand pages are versos and are always even. That never changes, in any book.

Certain pages are always recto: the half title, the title page, the dedication, the first page of the text, and in most houses every chapter opening. When the preceding section ends on a recto, the verso after it is left blank to push the next element back onto the right.

Those blanks are deliberate. They are the most common thing authors "fix" in their own files, and deleting them is what makes a page sequence feel wrong without the reader being able to name the reason.

In the Interior Formatter. Enter your copyright details, dedication and epigraph once, and the front matter is built in this order — rectos, blanks, suppressed folios and roman numerals included — into both the print PDF and the EPUB. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter

Numbering

Front matter is numbered in lowercase roman numerals — i, ii, iii — and arabic numbering restarts at 1 on the first page of the text. That is why chapter one of a printed book opens on page 1 rather than page 9.

The numerals are normally suppressed, meaning counted but not printed, on the half title, title page, copyright page, any blank, and usually the chapter-opening pages.

What the copyright page has to carry

Practically, not legally — nothing here is legal advice, and a lawyer where you live is the person to ask about anything that worries you. But a copyright page missing any of the following looks unfinished:

The holder — you, or your imprint if you publish under one.
An edition or printing line — "First edition," "Second printing," or the traditional descending number line.
The ISBN for this exact edition and this exact binding.
Any credit a license requires. Some typefaces oblige attribution. Stock images and Creative Commons art usually do. Cover art by somebody else should be credited whether or not the license demands it.

One ISBN per edition, per binding

A paperback, a hardcover, an ebook and a large print edition are four separate products, and each needs its own ISBN.

So the copyright page is not something you copy and paste between versions. The ISBN changes every time, the edition line often changes with it, and a large print edition carrying the paperback's ISBN is a real problem at the retailer rather than a typo. See The large print edition most authors never make.

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.

Start a book →

Next: The large print edition most authors never make · Also in this guide: How to format a book interior · Margins and gutters · Choosing a trim size