Footnotes, Endnotes, or Bibliography Only: Which Fits Your Book?

Many self-published books need no notes or bibliography at all. For nonfiction that does cite sources, one system is usually enough: footnotes at the bottom of the page, endnotes gathered at the back of the book or chapter, or a bibliography alone. The footnotes vs endnotes choice comes down to genre convention and reader experience.

What Is the Difference Between Footnotes, Endnotes, and a Bibliography?

A footnote is a short note printed at the bottom of the same page as the sentence it belongs to. A small raised number in the text (a superscript cue) points the reader down to it. An endnote works the same way, except the notes are collected at the end of the chapter or the end of the book instead of sitting on the page. Book-end endnotes are usually divided by chapter headers (ideally the chapter number and title, not just the number, for the reader’s convenience). A bibliography is different again: it is an alphabetical list of the sources a book drew on, printed in the back matter (the pages after the main text). Sometimes it is a single bibliography for the whole book; sometimes each chapter gets its own shorter list.

Notes and a bibliography do different jobs. A note attaches to one exact spot in the text; it can cite the source of a quotation, or add a side comment that would interrupt the main flow. A bibliography describes whole sources that usually apply more widely across the book, rather than to specific spots in the text, so a reader can find and follow up each book or article you used.

The two tools combine in three common ways. A book can carry notes plus a bibliography, which is the full scholarly kit. It can carry notes only, provided the first note for each source gives the complete publication details. Or it can carry a bibliography only, with no notes in the text at all. All three are legitimate; the rest of this article is about choosing between them, and it focuses on nonfiction, where these systems mostly live (novels borrow them only occasionally, as covered below). We have covered how to format the bibliography list itself separately.

Which Notes System Does Your Kind of Book Expect?

Genre convention decides most notes questions before personal taste enters into it. In US publishing, the reference point is the Chicago Manual of Style, now in its 18th edition (2024), which defines two citation systems. The notes-and-bibliography system uses numbered footnotes or endnotes; history, biography, and other humanities subjects use it. The author-date system skips numbered notes entirely: the text cites sources in parentheses, like (Smith 2024), and a reference list at the back gives the details; the sciences and social sciences use it. Under notes-and-bibliography, the bibliography itself is optional if the first note that cites each source carries full publication details. Under author-date, the reference list is always required, because the parenthetical citations make no sense without it.

Trade nonfiction (books written for general readers rather than academics) often takes a third path: endnotes with no numbers in the text at all. The notes section at the back keys each note to a page number and a short quoted phrase, for example:

Page 46, “where there’s a will”: based on John Smith, A History of English Wills (Midtown Press, 2021), 114-16.

Chicago’s editors recognise this style, sometimes called notes keyed to text, and recommend it for general-readership books because it documents every source while leaving the reading page completely clean. Bestselling narrative history and journalism have used it for decades.

At the lighter end sits the third option from this article’s title: a bibliography only, with no notes in the text at all. It fits books that draw on sources in a general way rather than quoting them line by line: a memoir is a personal account, and no standard requires it to cite anything; self-help, business, and hobby titles often list their sources in a further-reading section and stop there. The page stays completely clean, the back matter stays short, and readers who want the sources still get them. Citation apparatus (the publishing term for the whole kit of notes, references, and bibliography) is vanishingly rare in novels; when fiction uses footnotes, they are almost always a storytelling device rather than documentation, such as notes that gloss invented or world-building terms. The notable exception is historical fiction, where a short bibliography of the sources behind the story is not at all uncommon.

Footnotes vs Endnotes: What Changes for the Reader?

The practical difference between footnotes and endnotes is where the reader’s eyes go. A footnote delivers its answer on the same page: glance down, read, glance back. That suits notes many readers will actually want, such as translations, definitions, or wry asides. Endnotes keep the page clean and the narrative uninterrupted, at the price of a flip to the back for anyone who wants the detail. That suits pure source citations, which most general readers never check. A workable rule of thumb: if the average reader should read the note, make it a footnote; if the note exists for the record, or for the serious reader researching your book’s topic more widely, make it an endnote.

One old argument against footnotes has disappeared: the labour of setting them. Printers once classed footnotes as “penalty copy” and charged more to set them, because fitting notes at the foot of each page was fiddly manual work. Adobe InDesign and other modern layout tools now place and renumber notes automatically, so the workload no longer favours one system over the other. What your notes still affect is the book’s page count, and the next section covers what that means for printing cost.

A few print conventions still apply to footnotes, and a professional formatter handles them as a matter of course. A footnote must begin on the same page as its cue; if a long note runs over to the next page, the break should fall mid-sentence, so readers can tell the note continues. Multiple short footnotes that fall on the same page may be set in columns, to avoid the “chimney pot” look of several partially filled lines. And by an older nicety, a footnote on the short last page of a chapter was set a few lines below the end of the text rather than pushed to the foot of the page, though this one is not much observed these days.

How Does Your Notes Choice Affect Page Count and Printing Cost?

In print-on-demand publishing, where each copy is printed only after a reader orders it, every page you add costs money on every copy sold, because platforms build the printing charge from the page count. A notes section and a bibliography are extra back-matter pages, so a full apparatus nudges up the printing cost of every copy, and with it the minimum viable list price. We have covered how print-on-demand printing costs and minimum prices are calculated, with worked examples, separately.

Between footnotes and endnotes themselves, the totals usually land close together, because two effects cancel out. Footnotes need extra blank space on each page to keep them clear of the main text, but they are set in smaller type; endnote paragraphs run together at the back with no extra space between them. The bigger page-count lever is whether you carry a full notes-plus-bibliography setup at all: a bibliography-only or further-reading section is the leanest option, and for a general-reader book it is often the right one anyway.

What Happens to Footnotes in an Ebook?

A reflowable ebook (the standard kind, where text resizes and repaginates to fit the reader’s screen and font choice) has no fixed pages, so there is no page bottom for a footnote to sit on. Every notes system becomes some form of linked note in the ebook edition: tap the cue, read the note, tap back.

Platforms handle a Word manuscript’s notes differently at conversion. Some keep notes built with Word’s linked note feature and turn them into tappable notes: Amazon’s Kindle formatting guidelines require every note to link both ways (from the text to the note, and from the note back to the text) and strongly recommend placing the note text at the end of the chapter or book, and notes built this way display as pop-ups on some Kindle devices, such as the Kindle Paperwhite. Others remove notes altogether: Draft2Digital’s knowledge base states that its conversion of a Word, RTF, or ODT manuscript (three common word-processor file formats) strips out footnotes; the route it documents instead is uploading a finished EPUB (the standard ebook file format) with the notes already tagged as links, which passes through essentially unchanged.

The practical rule has two halves. While you are writing and revising, keep every note in your word processor’s linked note system: linked notes survive edits, renumber themselves, and can still be converted either way while the text is in flux. At publication, check what your ebook platform needs and prepare the file accordingly. And none of this affects print: the fact that ebooks present notes as linked endnotes or pop-ups is no reason to give up footnotes in the printed book if that is what you prefer; just don’t expect them to appear as footnotes in the ebook. We have covered how to format footnotes and endnotes so they work in both print and ebook in detail; today’s question is the upstream one of which system to pick.

How Do You Set Up Notes in Word So the Choice Stays Reversible?

Whichever notes system you lean toward, enter every note with your word processor’s built-in note feature rather than typing numbers by hand. In Microsoft Word, that is References > Insert Footnote or Insert Endnote on both Windows and Mac. Word then renumbers everything automatically when you add or delete a note mid-manuscript, which hand-typed numbers cannot do.

Word’s defaults give footnotes Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3) and endnotes lowercase roman numerals (i, ii, iii). You can change either in the Footnote and Endnote dialog, opened from the small arrow in the corner of the Footnotes group on the References tab. The standard choices are Arabic numerals, roman numerals in upper or lower case, letters in upper or lower case, and the traditional symbol sequence (*, †, ‡, §). The same dialog sets how numbering runs: continuously through the whole book, restarting with each section (which gives per-chapter numbering, provided each chapter starts with a Word section break and no section breaks appear within chapters), or restarting on each page, a scheme common in scientific work that marks footnotes with symbols.

Most usefully of all, the dialog includes a Convert option that switches every footnote to an endnote or the reverse in one step. Your choice of system is not a one-way door while the book is in Word; you can read a chapter both ways and decide late. Setting notes up cleanly is also one of the simplest ways to prepare your manuscript for professional formatting, because the formatter inherits notes that renumber and convert without hand repair.

The decision, then, runs in this order. Check what your genre expects; the answer eliminates most options. Weigh the reader experience: footnotes for notes worth reading in place, endnotes for the record, unnumbered endnotes for a clean trade-style page. Price the pages if your book is long; the cost lever is mostly whether you carry notes and a bibliography at all, not which kind. And hold the choice loosely in Word, where converting between systems is one dialog away.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can a book have both footnotes and endnotes?

A book can carry both footnotes and endnotes, but it is rare, and it only makes sense when the two systems do different jobs. The classic case is a specialist academic work such as an annotated edition, where the original author’s notes stay as footnotes and the editor’s commentary goes to the back as endnotes. For an ordinary self-published book, one system is enough.

Do footnotes count as a bibliography?

Footnotes do not count as a bibliography. They cite sources at the exact point they are used, while a bibliography is a separate alphabetical list of every source in the back of the book. Chicago style does allow a book to skip the bibliography when the first footnote for each source gives its full publication details.

What is the traditional order of footnote symbols?

The traditional footnote symbols run asterisk, dagger, double dagger, then section mark: *, †, ‡, §, and the sequence restarts on each page. Chicago style also reserves symbols for special cases in a numbered book, such as marking a translator’s note apart from the author’s own numbered notes.

How do you handle a quotation that already contains a footnote?

When you quote a passage that already contains a footnote, convention gives you two options. If the note is not relevant, omit it and omit its superscript cue too, so readers are not left hunting for a note that is not there. If it matters, set it as ordinary text just below the quotation rather than merging it into your own numbered notes. Any comment of your own inside a quotation goes in square brackets.

Do novels ever use footnotes?

Novels do sometimes use footnotes, but almost always as a storytelling device rather than citations: humour, worldbuilding, or mock-scholarly commentary. Fiction has no citation requirement, so notes in a novel are a stylistic choice, and most novels have none; the closest thing to an exception is historical fiction, which quite often closes with a short bibliography of sources.