What belongs on a copyright page

The copyright page is a data page dressed as prose. The librarian cataloging your book reads it, the retailer matching it to a record reads it, a rights buyer reads it. It is also the fastest place for a self-published book to give itself away.

What goes in the front of a book covers where the page sits and its minimum contents. This is the long version.

The copyright notice

Use the year of first publication of this work — not the year you wrote it, not the year of this printing. A second edition with substantial new material shows both ("© 2023, 2026"). Fixing typos does not earn a new year.

The name is whoever actually holds the rights: you, personally, unless you have assigned copyright to a company you own. An imprint is a name you publish under, not automatically the owner of the work.

Protection is automatic on creation in most countries, so the notice does not create the copyright. It makes ownership legible without anyone asking.

"All rights reserved"

It states that you have granted nobody permission to reproduce the book. That is all it does: it adds no protection you did not already have, and does not override the exceptions your country's law allows for quotation, review or teaching.

Print it anyway, usually followed by a longer sentence about reproduction and permissions. To grant something instead — classroom use, a Creative Commons license — say so here, precisely.

Edition and printing

Two facts, often confused.

Edition is the content. "First edition" until the text changes meaningfully; a second edition is a book somebody who owns the first might buy again.

Printing is the physical run, shown traditionally as a descending number line — 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 — whose lowest surviving digit is the printing you hold. Print-on-demand has no discrete printings, so the line is decoration. Use it if you like it, but don't claim a tenth printing.

The ISBN for this edition, in this binding

Print the ISBN of the exact book in the reader's hands. Not the paperback's number in the hardcover, not the print number in the ebook.

It is the most common error on the page, because the page looks like boilerplate you can copy between formats. A paperback, a hardcover, an ebook and a large print edition are four products with four ISBNs, and a large print edition carrying the paperback's number is a live data error in every system that reads it.

Listing every format together, each labeled, is fine and often more useful. Do you need your own ISBN? covers where the numbers come from.

In the Interior Formatter. Fill in your copyright details once and the page is built and placed on the correct verso — and because the ISBN is a field, the large print edition gets its own number instead of inheriting the paperback's. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter

Publisher, imprint and place

The publisher's name with a city and country. If you publish under an imprint, that name goes here — see Should you invent a publisher name?. If you don't, your own name is respectable; omitting the line is what makes a book look like it came from nowhere. A website is useful, a street address is not.

The fiction disclaimer

For novels, one near-universal paragraph:

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

It is not a force field: it will not save you if you have written a recognizable real person doing things they did not do. It establishes intent, and costs four lines. Memoir often carries the opposite note, that names were changed.

Credits, permissions and acknowledgments

Some licenses oblige a printed credit, and this is the page it goes on.

Typefaces. Several widely used font licenses, open ones included, require attribution wherever the face is used. That credit is mandatory, not courteous. The Interior Formatter prints whatever your style's license requires.
Stock images and cover art. Most stock licenses require a credit line; Creative Commons licenses specify its exact form. Read the license, not the marketing page.
People. Cover designer, illustrator, editor and typesetter are credited here as a matter of course in trade books.
Quoted material. Clearing song lyrics, poetry or a long passage almost always comes with exact wording you must reproduce. Print it as given, or at the back if the list runs long.

Short prose quotations with attribution are usually fine. Lyrics and poems are not, at any length, because one line can be a large fraction of the work.

The last few lines

Country of printing. "Printed in the United States of America" is conventional. Print-on-demand books are made wherever the order lands, so a global title is better off omitting it than printing something false.

A contact route. An email address, a website, or a rights contact, so a translator, an audiobook producer or a reader who found an error can reach you. Use one you will still read in five years.

Optional extras. Cataloging data, the printer's name, liability boilerplate: none required, and a fabricated catalog block looks worse than none at all.

What people actually look for

Retailers check the ISBN against their record. Libraries want publisher, year and edition. Rights buyers want to know who owns the book and how to reach them. Readers, when they look, check the edition and the year.

The rest is convention worth following because it reads as professional. Those four facts are the job.

This is not legal advice

None of it is; this is how books are normally put together. If your book has anything unusual attached — co-authors, an estate, licensed content, work you were paid to write — an hour with a lawyer is cheap next to guessing.

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: Should you invent a publisher name? · Also in this guide: Do you need your own ISBN? · What goes in the front of a book, and in what order · Barcodes, and the price code beside them