Front matter and back matter: what goes in a book

A manuscript is chapters. A book is chapters wrapped in about eight pages of furniture that nobody reads closely and everybody notices the absence of. The furniture is the difference between a document with a cover and something a reader recognises as a book before they have read a sentence of it.

The order below is the one the publishing trade settled on, and it is worth following even for a 30-page guide, because the reason each page sits where it does is not arbitrary.

Front matter, in order

Traditional books number front matter in lowercase roman numerals and restart at 1 at chapter one. That convention exists because the front matter was typeset last, once the body pages were already numbered. If you are not producing a printed trade edition, straight-through arabic numbering is fine and increasingly common — just be consistent, and make sure the contents page agrees with the numbers actually on the pages.

The copyright page is the one that matters

It is the least designed page in the book and the only one with legal content. A workable minimum, in small type on the reverse of the title page:

Copyright (c) 2026 Your Name

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form without
the prior written permission of the publisher.

First edition, 2026
ISBN 978-0-0000000-0-0

Cover and interior design by Your Name
Set in Lora and Inter

Four things to consider adding, depending on what you wrote. A fiction disclaimer ("names, characters and incidents are the product of the author's imagination"). A professional disclaimer, for anything touching health, law or money. An image credits line, if the rights are not yours. And a contact or website line, which is the one that earns its space — it is the page people return to when they want to find you.

The ISBN belongs here if you have one, and you may well not need one — a lead magnet, a course workbook or a handbook distributed by link has no use for it.

Back matter, in order

1. Epilogue or afterword. Story first, commentary second — an afterword is about the book, so it comes after the book ends.
2. Appendices. The material a determined reader wants and a normal one does not: forms, long tables, raw data, worked examples.
3. Notes. Sources and asides, numbered by chapter. Endnotes at the back keep the body pages clean; footnotes keep the reference next to the claim. Pick one and use it throughout.
4. Glossary. Alphabetical, one term per line. Worth it the moment a reader might meet a term twenty pages after you defined it.
5. Bibliography or further reading. Different things: one is what you used, the other is what they should read next.
6. Index. Real indexing is a professional craft and a page-number index is meaningless in a reflowable EPUB. For most self-published nonfiction, a thorough contents page and a glossary do the job.
7. Acknowledgements. Often moved to the front in nonfiction. Either is correct.
8. About the author. Third person, short, with one link.
9. Also by / what to read next. The commercial page. It is the last thing a finished reader sees, which makes it the best-placed page in the book.

Building it in Markdown

Every one of these pages is a normal block of Markdown separated by a hard page break. In bukpress that break is a line of three dashes, so the whole front matter is one file with no special syntax to learn:

# The Quiet Ledger

---

# The Quiet Ledger

## A Field Guide to Doing Less

Morgan Reyes

---

Copyright (c) 2026 Morgan Reyes

All rights reserved.

First edition, 2026

---

*For anyone still awake at this hour.*

---

## Contents

1. The Problem With Mornings
2. Subtraction
3. What To Keep

---

# 1. The Problem With Mornings

The first chapter begins here.

Two things worth doing while you set it. Give the title page room — front matter is mostly white space, and a title page crowded to the top of the sheet is the single clearest tell of a self-produced book. And check the contents page against the real page numbers after every export, because a contents page that is one chapter out is worse than no contents page at all. Building a table of contents covers the mechanics of keeping the two in step.

The other reason to build the front matter in the same file as the book: the pages have to look like they belong to it. Same body typeface, same margins, same paper. A copyright page set in a different font because it was pasted in from somewhere else reads as an insert, and readers register that even when they could not say why. Setting the type once for the whole document is what makes the furniture invisible, which is the entire point of it.

What changes in an EPUB

Most of it survives, and three things do not. A reflowable file has no pages, so the contents page loses its numbers and becomes a list of links — which is better, and it is what every reading system expects. Page-number indexes stop meaning anything for the same reason. And a half title, whose whole purpose is to occupy a sheet of paper before the title page, is just a screen with two words on it; drop it.

Keep the copyright page. Keep the about-the-author page and the read-next page especially — an ebook reader is one tap from acting on either, which is more than a printed reader can say. The difference between the two formats is worth understanding before you decide what to cut.

The sample book is eight pages with the furniture in place: title, copyright, contents, chapters, and a last page that does something. It is one Markdown file, exported once.