Front matter and back matter are the pages that are not the story: the title page, the copyright page, the dedication, the table of contents at the front, and the acknowledgments, the author note, the bibliography at the back. A reader skims most of them once. They are still the pages that make a book look like a book, and the copyright page in particular is the one a reader checks when they want to know whether a title is a real edition.
This guide gathers our posts on the apparatus of a book in one place: what belongs at each end, whether an ebook needs a table of contents, and how to handle notes and references so they work in print and on a screen. Each post answers a single question and stands on its own, so start wherever your question sits rather than at the top. We add to the guide as we cover more ground, so it is worth bookmarking.
One caveat: notes and references behave very differently in print and in an ebook, because one has fixed pages and the other does not. Where a post covers both, read the part that matches the edition you are building.
What belongs at each end
- Front and back matter: what to include, in what order, and what to leave out.
- Ebook tables of contents: whether an ebook needs one, and what it has to do.
Notes and references
- Choosing a notes system: footnotes, endnotes, or a bibliography alone, and which suits your book.
- Footnotes and endnotes: how to format them so they survive in both editions.
- Reference lists and bibliographies: how to set one out in a self-published book.