Parts, sections and the pages between chapters
A short novel needs chapters and nothing else. Past a certain length — three hundred pages, four hundred, a nonfiction book with three distinct arguments in it — chapters alone stop being enough structure, and the book wants a layer above them.
That layer is the part title, and it comes with its own furniture: a page of its own, a blank facing it, suppressed running heads, and a real cost in paper. None of it is difficult. All of it is worth deciding on purpose rather than discovering in the proof.
What a part title actually is
A part title is a right-hand page carrying the words Part One, usually with a title under it — Part Two: The Long Winter — and sometimes an epigraph or a short standfirst below that. Its back is blank. The first chapter of that part then opens on the next right-hand page, as chapters do.
So each part title occupies two pages: the recto that carries the words and the verso nobody ever sees.
That is a page-count decision, not a design flourish. Six parts is twelve pages. On a KDP paperback printed on white paper, which bulks at 0.002252 inches per page, twelve pages is about 0.027 inches of spine — small, but real, and it lands on the same spine you were about to set type on. Add parts before you finalize the cover, not after.
When parts earn their pages
The book has genuine movements. Not a tidy grouping imposed afterward, but a book that changes gear — a before and an after, a journey out and a journey back. If you can name what changes at each division in one clause, the division is real.
Nonfiction with distinct arguments. A book making three separate cases, or moving from problem to evidence to remedy, is easier to hold in the head when the structure is visible. A reader who is consulting rather than reading straight through navigates by parts first and chapters second.
Time jumps or multiple points of view. A novel that moves between 1943 and 1998, or between three narrators, uses parts as a contract with the reader: this block belongs to this thread. It saves you from writing the explanation into the prose.
When they are decoration
Parts are decoration when they are grouping for the sake of grouping. Four parts of five chapters each, titled Beginnings, Middles, Complications and Endings, tell the reader nothing they could not see for themselves. The same is true of a part title used to pad a thin book — twelve pages of paper for six pages of white space, and a reader who notices.
The test is whether removing the part titles would cost the reader anything. If the book reads identically without them, they are furniture you are paying to ship.
In the Interior Formatter. A map or a plate can run as a full-page image or across a two-page spread, checked against its real printed size, and the final composed page count flows straight to the Cover Maker so the spine follows every page your structure added. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
The smaller breaks
A section break inside a chapter is the other division you will need, and it is a different thing entirely: no new page, no new heading, just a gap in the text, often with an ornament sitting in it. It marks a shift of scene, time or viewpoint within a single chapter. It is worth getting right because it is far more common than a part title — see Chapter openings and scene breaks.
An epigraph page is a quotation set alone, before the text or at the head of a part. It works because of the silence around it, so it wants space and small type, not a display size. Be sure you have the right to reprint what you put there.
A map or family tree belongs at the front of a fantasy or historical novel, after the front matter and before chapter one. If the map is wide — most maps are — set it across a two-page spread rather than shrinking it to fit one page, because a map printed too small to read is worse than no map. A family tree is the same problem in a different shape: give it the width it needs or cut it down to the names that matter.
The blanks. Because chapters start on the right, roughly half of them are preceded by a blank left-hand page. Those blanks are not errors and not waste. Deleting them is the single most common thing authors do to their own files, and it moves every subsequent chapter to whichever side happens to come next.
Make the loudest page quiet
A part title is the largest type in your interior and the emptiest page in the book. Both of those pull toward overdoing it, and the correction is always the same: use less.
Set it in the same typeface as your chapter openings, scaled up. Do not introduce a face that appears nowhere else — a part title in a third typeface reads as a different book bound in by mistake. Keep the words high on the page rather than centered vertically; a part title sitting a third of the way down looks composed, one floating in the middle looks accidental.
And suppress the running head and the folio on it, exactly as you would on a chapter opener. A page carrying two words in 36-point type does not also need the book's title across the top and a number at the foot. The rule is general: any page that is mostly white space loses its running head. See Running heads and page numbers.
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: Quoting other people's work in your book · Also in this guide: What goes in the front of a book, and in what order · Running heads and page numbers · Putting images inside a book