All Fronts Matter, Part II
Book Front Matter Breakdown Continued
Welcome to a very merry edition of Shelf Life. I’m back with more nonsense about front matter you do not care about and do not need to know. Unless you are self-publishing a book sometime soon and you want to make sure you get your front matter in perfect order, in which case, you might care but you still do not need to know because honestly who cares.
Production editors care a lot.
In last Thursday’s part I, we covered the basics of front matter organization and numbering and the ins and outs of title pages. Today’s essay follows up with all the other parts of a book’s front matter, the order in which those parts should appear, and what they should (and shouldn’t) contain. Finally, I’ll include some details of front matter for periodicals because why the heck not.
Without further ado—
Copyright Page
The copyright page is the single most informative page in the entire book, at least as far as I’m concerned. So much handy information in such a small space.
The first thing you’ll find on most copyright pages is the copyright information. This tells you who owns the copyright to the book and what year the copyright was registered (registered and not issued, because as we know from reading Shelf Life, copyright is not issued but is inherent when you create a fixed work). When I used to register a lot of copyrights we’d start putting the copyright year down as the following year starting with books publishing September 1 because of the lag time at Library of Congress. So if a book was scheduled to publish on or after September 1 of a year, it’s copyright year would be listed as the next year.
The copyright line may also include disclaimers and usually includes the publisher’s address for people to write to them about questions or send permissions requests if they want to reprint part of the book. If you’re self-publishing I don’t recommend putting your home address.
If any part of the book is being reprinted with permission from something else, like if you’ve included song lyrics somewhere in your text or you are including an excerpt from someone else’s book, you’d put that permission information on the copyright page.
If your cover designer’s credit is not on C4 (the back cover of the book), then you could put that on the copyright page as well.
Next comes the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data, if you have it. Self-published books are not eligible for CiP data, but can acquire a preassigned control number (PCN) from the Library of Congress to include in this spot if you want to do that, which I discussed in Textual Congress.
The last thing you’ll see on the copyright page of a traditional published book is usually a line that looks like this:
23 22 21 20 19 18 1 2 3 4 5 6
What the heck does that mean? This is the record of the book’s impression, or its printing history. Not its publication history. Printing.
The first group of numbers (on the left of the space), which go from larger to smaller, indicate years and end with the year of the book’s original publication; in this case, the 18 indicates this book was first printed in 2018. The second group of numbers (on the right of the space), which go from smaller to larger, indicate which printing this copy you have in your hand is from. In this case, the 1 indicates that this copy is part of the first printing.
If we sell all our copies and go back for a second printing of this book in 2020, the impression that appears in all the copies from this new print run will look like this:
23 22 21 20 2 3 4 5 6
That tells us “the copy we are holding in our hands is from the second printing of this book, which happened in 2020.”
Dedication and Epigraph
After your copyright page, and before your table of contents, you may place your dedication page and your epigraph, if you would like to include these pages. They’re totally optional.
A dedication page is used to dedicate the work to someone who you would like to honor or who made the work possible. This is not the same as an acknowledgment, which we’ll review later. A dedication is usually one or two lines only; it’s very brief. A publisher I worked for once printed a dedication page with a typo and instead of dedicating the book to the author’s “wife Janet” he accidentally dedicated it to his “wide Janet.” I’ve related this anecdote in Shelf Life before. The editorial director of the imprint, when it came to her attention, said very solemnly: “Let us all hope that Janet is not, in fact, wide.”
An epigraph is a quote from some other work that is relevant to, and evocative of, the manuscript but not integral to the manuscript. As an example, TS Eliot’s “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” begins with an epigraph, six lines of poetry in Italian quoted from Dante’s Inferno. If you are quoting something in the public domain in your epigraph, you should attribute where it’s from on your copyright page but need not seek permission to reuse it. If you’re quoting something that is under copyright, you may need to seek permission depending on the type of work it is and how much you are extracting.
(Not really related, but remember that translations are copyright even if the thing they are translating is not. For instance, Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf is copyrighted, even though the original Beowulf in Old English is not.)
Contents and Other Lists
After your dedication and epigraph, if you included them, comes the first part of your book that somebody might actually look at: Your table of contents.
The table of contents should not list itself on itself, nor should it list anything that precedes it in the front matter. The first item listed on your table of contents should be the next item of front matter that comes after the table of contents ends. If you have other tables (like a table of illustrations), those would be next and would be the first things listed on your contents.
The table of contents should list every new part of the book that follows. Every piece of front matter, every Part and Chapter, and all the end matter. Some tables of contents include heading levels in addition to chapter numbers and titles. For instance, if your manuscript contains three levels of heading (A, B, and C headings), your contents could contain the chapter title and A-level heads only; or the chapter title and A- and B-level heads; or the chapter title and all your headings. If you add chapter subheads to your table of contents, you might consider running two tables of contents: First, a “brief” contents that contains only Parts and Chapters, and then a “full” contents that contains everything from the brief contents plus the subheadings.
Tables of contents can also be annotated. All of this (subheads, annotations) mostly happens in nonfiction (and in fiction books imitating nonfiction for creative reasons).
Other lists/tables that may appear in the front matter of your book after your table of contents are a table of illustrations (could also be called a table of figures) and/or a list of tables. If your book is illustration-, figure-, or table-heavy, these can be handy to help readers find your graphics. These are not necessary in most fiction titles.
Foreword, Preface, Acknowledgments, Introduction
Next come these four pieces, which each have their own definition and purpose and which are, again, deeply optional. You don’t need to have any of the above. You can have all of the above. Or any combination. If you choose to include these pieces of front matter, make sure you understand which title applies to which thing because people mix these up all the time.
Foreword
The foreword is a statement about the book that has been written by somebody other than the author. If the author wrote it, it’s not a foreword (it’s then a preface). A foreword is often (and should be) written by someone with name recognition—a famous name, or, if not a household-famous name, then someone who is well-known in the particular field or genre of the book they’re contributing a foreword to.
For instance, if you wrote a romance novel you would not solicit a foreword from me, because I’m nobody (generally, but also particularly nobody in the romance literature world). But if you got a foreword from, say, Nora Roberts, saying what an important and influential work of romance literature this is, that would be exactly the kind of thing you would want.
If you do have a foreword in your book, then at the end of the foreword you should skip a line and then, right-justified, put an em dash and then the name of the foreword writer. Then on the next line put their title and affiliation. You can also then include the date and place it was written, if appropriate.
—Catherine Forrest
Author of Shelf Life
Preface
A statement about the book that the author is making themself is a preface, and comes next after a foreword. A preface might include information about the writing of the book (why or how you wrote it) and may contain your acknowledgments as well, if there are not many. If there are many, the acknowledgments may be a separate section (next). Note: In much fiction, the content that would be a “preface” in nonfiction is usually included in the back matter as something like “author’s note” or “note from the author.” I rarely see a preface/acknowledgments in the front matter of fiction. In nonfiction it’s more common.
Acknowledgments
The acknowledgments is your Oscars speech where you thank everyone who helped you along the way and helped make the book possible. You are acknowledging the contribution these folks made to your book or your ability to write it. If you included work from another publication or person (reprinted with permission of course), you would also acknowledge that in this section, too.
Introduction
The introduction is sometimes part of the front matter and sometimes part of the main text (paginated with Arabic numerals, usually beginning with page 1). While the preface was a statement about the book, the introduction is information about the subject matter or topic of the book. It is where you (the author) introduce the reader to the topic you are going to write about. As such, this, again, is a piece of front matter you rarely need in fiction.
In a reissue of a popular or influential book, you sometimes will have an “Introduction to the New Edition” (or “to the Second Edition” or “to the 2022 Edition,” et cetera). These do appear in fiction, and are often written by someone other than the author. The idea with this type of introduction is to introduce the famous or influential work to new readers, from someone who was influenced by it. For instance, David Mitchell wrote the new introduction to the fiftieth anniversary edition of Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.
Title Page Redux
One last thing! If you had tons of front matter in your book, and someone was carefully reading it, they may have forgotten what book they were reading. Relatable. That’s why, at the end of lengthy front matter and before the main text starts, you can put a second half-title page. This would be identical to your first half-title page, containing only the main title and nothing else (no subtitle, no author name, et cetera) as described in last Thursday’s Shelf Life.
I didn’t really talk about this in the last essay but I will now: When you have your cover created (or create it yourself)—this advice supposes you are not with a traditional publisher but are creating your own title pages—ask your cover designer to create your half-title and full-title pages for you using the text treatment from the front cover. Meaning, ask them to create your title page with the same font face and size and style as the front cover, just none of the illustration or color. This pulls your front matter together nicely with your cover and makes the package look very well-designed and professional.
Other Publications
Some of you are out there starting literary mags, and I respect that. Like, a lot. At present, I am a publisher of periodicals at my day job so this is also something I know a little bit about. Periodicals have some different front matter than books do. For instance, they will usually have a masthead—that’s the page that states who-all works on this periodical. The editors and staff. Another thing you got to put in your periodical, if you mail it in the US Mail at least, is your statement of ownership. You have to put that in once a year after you file your form 3526 with the Post Office by October 1 of that year.
Just typing out that last sentence I realized this is probably a topic for it’s own Shelf Life another time so I’m going to quit while I’m ahead.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.
After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.