Glossary
What is front matter in a book?
Front matter is everything printed before chapter one — half title, title page, copyright page, dedication, contents, and sometimes a foreword or preface. It is what makes a book look like a book rather than a document.
The conventional order
- 1Half title — just the title, on its own page. Optional, and the first thing to cut.
- 2Title page — title, subtitle, author, imprint.
- 3[Copyright page](/glossary/copyright-page) — on the back of the title page, always.
- 4Dedication — one line, its own page, no heading.
- 5Table of contents — essential in non-fiction, usually skipped in fiction.
- 6Foreword — written by somebody else about the book.
- 7Preface or introduction — written by you, about why the book exists.
Ebooks want less of it
A print reader flicks past the front matter in two seconds. An ebook reader cannot: many stores open the sample at the first page, so eight pages of front matter means the free sample ends before the reader has seen a sentence of the book. Keep an ebook’s front matter to a title page, a copyright page and the contents, and move anything else to the back.
The roman numerals thing
By convention front matter is numbered in lower-case roman numerals and page 1 is the first page of chapter one. It is a print convention only, and it does not survive into a reflowable ebook, which has no page numbers at all.
Related terms
- Back matterBack matter is everything after the final chapter: acknowledgements, about the author, appendices, index, and — in a self-published book — the call to action. It is the page a reader reaches having just finished your book, which makes it the most valuable page in it.
- Copyright pageThe copyright page is the page on the back of the title page carrying the copyright notice, the edition, the ISBN and any disclaimers. In most countries it creates no rights — copyright already exists — but it states plainly who owns what.
- Reflowable textReflowable text re-wraps itself to fit whatever screen and font size the reader is using. It is how nearly every ebook works, and it is why an ebook has no fixed page count.
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