How To Make an eBook:

Making A Copyright Page

o you’re a scrappy new writer, ready to self-publish, raring to go. Nothing can stop you! You’re fully prepared to format this book with your own two hands in the program of your choice, and bask in the glow of accomplishment afterward.

Then you glance at another book’s copyright page for reference and suddenly, you are filled with doubt. “This looks like a lot of legalese,” you think. “What if I get this wrong?”

Well, first off, you probably won’t get carted off to jail for Bad Copyright Page Crimes if you do fuck it up, so give yourself a little grace in case you do. Secondly, not every copyright page has to be a full, vertical wall of text.

The first step to approaching this topic for your self-publishing purposes is to do a little simplification. While it is very good to crack open some of the books lying around your house to study their formatting — we love using references in this house! — a lot of the things that might show up in the copyright for a traditionally published book aren’t necessarily relevant to something self-published. Do you have a publishing house? An imprint? Is your book cataloged in the Library of Congress? Does it have multiple editions? No to all of that? Then you won’t need to put that sort of information in your copyright page.

The floor is actually a lot lower here than you might think. The most basic, empty page you can get away with is “© [date] [author’s name]. All rights reserved.” Like this;

Yes, this is literally all that is required for a copyright page to technically function as copyright page. When you create an intellectual property, there are certain automatic rights that you have to it. In this instance, our one-sentence copyright page is simply establishing who owns the rights to this IP, and when the IP was established.

But if you’re anything like us, then you’ll look at this one-line page and think to yourself, “Sure, but this is a lot smaller than the copyright page that I see in most books. Does it leave anything useful out?”

If you’ve ever skimmed the copyright page of the fiction books you read as a kid, you’ve probably found that many fiction books specify that they are works of fiction and that any resemblance to real-world events is a coincidence, right? If it’s appropriate for your book, you can put some variation of that into your copyright page as well.

It’s also the place to directly acknowledge the contributions of your editors and designers. “Edited by,” “cover art by,” “book design by,” so on and so forth as necessary. You can go the extra mile and link directly to their sites as well. Just make sure to ask your contributors if they want to be credited, what name they want to be credited under, and whether or not they want the links!

You can list yourself as the designer and artist if you did the work by yourself. If you used outside elements that require credit for some of the work, such as a font or an image, those can be listed here too.

And since you’re this far into publishing a book, you might have an ISBN or ASIN at the ready. (If not, don’t worry, we’re going to write an article that’ll help explain them too.) If you’re intent on printing physical copies, then it’s not as vital to have the ISBN here as it is to make sure you have a barcode for it on the back of the book, but it’s still important. We typically put ours at the bottom of the page, after everything else.

You might also consider putting in contact details into the copyright page, such as a contact email, or the link to your website. We personally feel like plugging social media accounts in copyright pages is a little strange — because those look better in the biography, where people are explicitly looking to learn more about you — but ultimately, it’s up to you to decide where everything goes.

Lastly for the textual content, here are a few optional stipulations you can add to your copyright if you want. Having a clear statement on how you want your work to be used won’t dissuade bad actors from doing what they like, but it will give you some stronger legs to stand on should any funny business happen. And, if you actually want your work to be less strictly copyrighted than the commonly assumed standards of intellectual property, you can specify that as well. You ARE allowed to make your work public domain before the copyright expires if you see fit.

Finally, what is the proper way to format a copyright page?

If you want to have the same veneer of polish as a traditionally published book, then study how published books in your general genre and audience age range format theirs. There are also a few simple guidelines you can follow no matter what you write. We find that the most elegant look results from aligning your text the bottom of the page instead of the top, centering small bits of text, and setting larger textblocks in justified alignment.

For some visual examples of what can be done, here are some pages we have made;

Remember, you can make this as simple or as elaborate as suits your needs. If it fits on one page, and it properly establishes the publishing year and owner of the IP, then you’re set.

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