How To Make an eBook:
The Matter of Front Matter
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You might’ve heard of books having “back matter” before. Things like glossaries, appendixes, author biography pages, so on and so forth. Most folks encounter this term thanks to their textbooks in school. But once you get into the publishing industry, you learn that books have something called “front matter” at the beginning too! It’s just easier to skim past and forget.
If you’re publishing your own book, then yours should have front matter too. So what all goes there?
Firstly, a title page. A title page could be as simple as the title and author name stated in plain text, but it might include other text too, such as the author’s name or website. An experienced book designer could introduce ornamentation and decor matched to the rest of the book as well.
Optionally, you could have a half-title page instead. It’s similar to the title page, but it only states the title of the work, and it isn’t usually as decorated.
The page you’re likely most familiar with skimming past is the copyright page. Theoretically, you could create a book without a copyright page, but it’s such an expected part of a book that leaving it out looks unprofessional. Not to mention that it helps stamp your rights as a creator firmly onto your story. Copyright pages can be confusing to approach for the first time, so we have an entire separate guide on them.
If you want, you can leave your front matter at a title page and the copyright, then jump right into your actual story. But there are other pages that you could add in as well if you want to be an overachiever!
The most common addition is the dedication page. If the author hasn’t chosen to put their dedications in the backmatter, they’re probably in the front. It’s a pretty flexible page, and while it’s typical to just have the dedications in a single centered paragraph, you can play around with the formatting on this one.
Your book could also feature a quotations page. Here, you can quote opinions from reviewers. You could also drop in a quote or two from the characters or the narration.
A preface is a preliminary statement by a book’s author or editor. It’s most useful in academic texts where one or more of the contributors want to provide context for the research or creation of the book, or in fictional works that are trying to emulate the feel of an academic text. If what you’re writing doesn’t fall into one of these two categories, you probably don’t need one.
A table of contents is a feature that has fallen out of fashion for most paperback and PDF fiction; this is partially because it’s one of the more difficult pages to design, and partially because it’s not as useful in texts where the reader doesn’t need to jump around between chapters for reference. Most fiction is very linear, after all. But that doesn’t mean that a fiction book should never have a table of contents. In some books, it can lend an extra stylistic flair. Whether you want to go to the effort of making one is entirely up to you.
Tables of contents are widely used (and often structurally necessary) in EPUB files, where they directly link you between chapters, and in nonfiction books where a reader might only want to reference certain parts of the book.
Finally, a map page or map spread can be useful if you’ve written a story with a lot of geography references that a reader may want to look at. Fantasy stories and travelogs are the most likely to feature these. We have one drawn up for Heralds of Rhimn, since that series covers a lot of ground on an unfamiliar world.
Keep in mind that not every one of these pages belongs in your book all at once. Front matter should be relatively brief, so that the reader can find anything they need and then get on to the main text quickly.
Typically, one finds that the title-then-copyright order of the first two pages is non-negotiable. Most books also put either the dedication or the half-title immediately after copyright. Prefaces go best right before the main text; if there is no preface, then either maps or the table of contents is right before the text. The text itself generally has a blank left page or a decorative element on the left page before it starts. Everything that comes between can be arranged however looks best for your book.
We’ll get into the difference between verso vs recto another day, but one last thing to remember is to avoid white space on the front side of the page; ie, the right page or the “recto” side. Most readers have seen enough books to instinctively know what one should look like. A blank right page is an unconscious signal to the reader that the text has ended, and may feel off to them. The one exception to this is after a copyright page. A copyright page should be on the left page, and a blank page on its right is considered acceptable.
These rules might seem arbitrary, and that's because they're really just observations about how most books are usually formatted. Hence, the rules are simply what readers are used to; following them isn't always necessary, but it does ensure that your layout feels more like professionally formatted book to most people.
Here is an example of the frontmatter layout from one of our books;
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Since this is from a digital layout, the cover is included inside the book; it also helps the layout to retain the impression of a normal right-page-first physical book. Aside from the cover, this layout includes a title page, a copyright page, a dedication page, and a map right before the start of the main text. By more minimalist design philosophies, or by print design specifications, the fact that there are no blank pages within the frontmatter might make this seem cluttered. But it does work for a context where blank pages means more unneccessary scrolling for a reader.
If we were to introduce more blank pages to give this layout room to breathe, we would do it by introducing a blank space after the copyright page and before the first chapter. This would put the dedication and the map together on the same page, likely with the map placed before the dedication. It also means that the only blank right page would be situated properly after the copyright.
Here is the previous layout revised for a hypothetical physical print;
If the layout was actually, fully adapted to physical print, it would also be in black-and-white, with the background image that makes it look like old paper removed! But the minutiae of designing a layout for physical print is a conversation for another article.
In an EPUB format, no blank pages are necessary, and each of these pages would be in a separate HTML file; like how chapters are formatted! That way, the reader can scroll through them individually. You would probably not want every one of them listed on the table of contents. Instead, you might link to the first page file (the cover or the titlepage) as the start of the book, the table of contents page file if you have one, and then to the actual chapters in the book. This keeps the table of contents from getting unwieldy.
If you ever feel uncertain as to whether you’re formatting a page or a layout correctly, I recommend opening other books for comparison. With a little study, and a little practice, you can also craft a gorgeous start to your story!