Does your book need a table of contents?
Answer first. Most nonfiction needs a table of contents. Most novels, in print, do not. And almost every ebook needs one regardless, for a reason that has nothing to do with what readers see.
That split surprises people, because they assume the contents page is part of the book the way the title page is. It is not. It is a navigation tool, and whether you need it depends entirely on whether your reader will navigate.
In print
Nonfiction: yes. People do not read a nonfiction book front to back and then shelve it. They look things up, skip to the part they bought the book for, and come back a month later trying to find that one section. The contents page is the map, and a book without one is harder to use in a way readers feel immediately.
A novel with numbered chapters: no. A list reading "Chapter One … 1, Chapter Two … 9" tells a reader nothing they did not already know. It is a page of noise, and most printed novels from major publishers do not have one.
A novel with named chapters: maybe. Titled chapters are content. Seen together they form a sequence that can work like an overture, and readers of literary fiction do read them that way.
A novel with multiple points of view: often yes. If your chapters are headed with character names, or dates, or locations, a contents page tells the reader how the book is built before they are lost in it — and gives them a way back to "the chapter where Ruth goes to Lisbon."
Collections and anthologies: always. Short stories, essays and poems are individually findable things. A collection without a contents page is broken.
In an ebook, always
An EPUB has no page numbers to thumb through and no thickness to judge by. The contents is the navigation. It drives the "go to" menu on a Kindle or Kobo, it is what a store's preview uses to let a browser jump around, and it is what a screen reader reads aloud when someone asks what is in the file.
It is also a validation and accessibility expectation, not a nicety. An EPUB with no navigation document is an EPUB that fails checks and, for a blind reader, is a single undifferentiated wall from cover to end.
So the correct answer for a numbered-chapter novel is often: no contents page in the print PDF, full navigation in the EPUB. Same book, same manuscript, two right answers.
In the Interior Formatter. The contents page is optional in the print PDF and you decide per book, while the EPUB 3 it produces always carries proper navigation with chapter numbering and accessibility metadata. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
What to list
Chapters, and parts if the book has them. That is the whole answer for most fiction. Going deeper in a novel — listing scenes, or sections within chapters — clutters the page and helps nobody.
Nonfiction can go one level deeper. If readers use the book for reference, second-level headings in the contents are what make a specific subject findable. A how-to book benefits enormously. A narrative history usually does not.
Front matter is not normally listed. Nobody looks up the copyright page. The dedication, epigraph and the contents page itself stay off.
Back matter usually is. An appendix, a glossary, reading group questions, an index — these are exactly the things a reader goes looking for, so list them. A foreword or introduction by somebody else is listed too.
Page numbers in print, links in an ebook
A printed contents page carries page numbers and depends on them. An ebook contents page carries links and has no page numbers to carry.
This is why a screenshot or a page image of a printed contents page, pasted into an ebook, is worse than having nothing. It is not clickable, so it fails as navigation. The page numbers it shows do not correspond to anything in a reflowing file, so it actively misleads. And to a blind reader it is a blank rectangle — a picture with no text, sitting exactly where the map should be.
Ebook contents must be real text with real links. There is no version of this that a picture solves.
The entries have to match, exactly
This is the most common contents error, and readers do notice.
If the contents says "The Long Way Down" and the chapter page says "The Long Way Back", something is wrong with the book and the reader now knows it. The same applies to subtler mismatches: a subtitle present in one place and missing in the other, a number spelled out in the contents and set as a numeral in the text, "Chapter 7" in one and "Seven" in the other.
It happens because a contents built by hand is a snapshot. You type it once, and then you rename a chapter in week eleven of revisions, and the snapshot is now a lie. Every subsequent edit widens the gap. By the time you are checking proofs you are comparing two lists by eye, which is precisely the kind of job people are bad at.
The fix is structural, not a matter of being careful. A contents generated from the book's own chapter structure cannot drift, because there is only one source for a chapter title and both places read from it. Rename the chapter and the contents changes with it.
In the Interior Formatter. The contents is generated from your manuscript's real chapter structure rather than typed out, so the entries match the chapters and the page numbers come from the composed book. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
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: Preparing your manuscript · Also in this guide: The back of the book is where your next sale is · Front matter order · Accessible ebooks