The first page of your book has been called the bastard title for over 300 years. That name tells you everything about how publishing treats its own conventions. Nobody explains the page. Nobody explains the name. Each generation of authors just copies what they’ve seen in the books before theirs, and nobody stops to ask why.
Publishing is full of pages like that. Pages that predate the printing press. Pages that solved problems nobody has had for centuries. Pages that are probably in your manuscript right now, and probably not where they belong.
Most of it comes down to a handful of front matter conventions that nobody bothered to teach you. First, let’s clear up a couple of words you may have heard but aren’t quite sure what they mean.
Recto and Verso
Every time you open a book, you’re following a convention that traces back to ancient Egyptian papyrus.
Papyrus sheets had two sides with different grain directions, and only one side was smooth enough to write on. That preference for a correct writing surface passed from the Egyptians to the Romans, who took it further when they developed the codex.
Where the Egyptians had a practical habit, the Romans made it a formal distinction and gave it Latin names that have never left. Recto, from the Latin for “right” or “correct,” is the page on your right when a book is open. Verso, meaning “turned,” is the page on your left.
Every page in your book has an expected position, recto or verso, and it helps to know where each one goes. Recto pages are always odd-numbered; verso pages are always even-numbered. That means if a chapter opens on page 4, or your half-title is on page 2, you have a problem.
The Half-Title
The half-title is the first page of your book’s interior. The only text on it is the title. No author name, no subtitle, no publisher. Just the title, centered, set in a typeface consistent with the rest of your interior design, positioned roughly a fifth to a sixth of the way down from the top of the page.
That probably sounds redundant. Your cover already has the title, and so does the full title page two pages later. But the half-title predates the modern book cover by centuries.
When books were sold as unbound sheets, and readers commissioned their own bindings, the half-title told the bookbinder what was inside without exposing the more ornate full title page to damage during production. That’s also where “bastard title” comes from. The page was separated from its parent, the full title page, during the binding process.
The binding problem is long gone. But the page stayed because a clean first page is worth having, regardless. It puts a visual pause between the cover and the full title page. Ask any author to sign your book, and they’ll turn to this page. It’s clean, with nothing else on it competing for space.
Include the half-title in both print and ebook editions. In print, its absence is noticeable to anyone who works with books. In ebooks, it gives reading systems a clear starting point for front matter navigation, which affects how the book opens on a reader’s device. Keep it simple. That’s the whole point of it.
The Verso of the Half-Title
The verso of the half-title is page ii, the back of that first page. It’s traditionally blank, but it’s one of the few places in your front matter where you have real flexibility. What goes there depends on what your book needs.
The most common use is a list of your other published titles. Publishers have done this for years, and the placement is a deliberate sales decision. A reader who sees your backlist before starting your book is a browser. A reader who sees it after finishing is a buyer. More on that later.
For debut authors with no backlist yet, this page can hold a content note if your book covers material some readers may want to know about before they begin, or a frontispiece if your book has an illustration that faces the title page. A content note only works if readers see it before they commit to the opening pages. Placed anywhere else in the front matter, it loses that function.
If none of that fits your book, leave the page blank. A blank verso is a convention, not an oversight. Filling it just to fill it adds clutter where there shouldn’t be any.
The Title Page
The title page is recto, page iii. It’s the formal record of what the book is, which means it doesn’t need to sell anything. Your cover does that. The title page just needs to be accurate. That means the full title, a subtitle if you have one, your name, your publisher or imprint name, and the city of publication at the bottom.
Libraries and book cataloging systems use the title page, not the cover, when they record your book. If your cover has a tagline or a shortened title for design reasons, make sure the title page reflects what you want listed.
The Copyright
The copyright page is on the verso of the title page. Always. It’s the one page in your front matter with a position that never changes.
Technically, you don’t need it. Your work has been protected by copyright from the moment you created it under the Copyright Act of 1976, and the United States hasn’t required a formal notice since joining the Berne Convention in 1989. But most authors include one anyway, and the reasons are practical. It shows anyone who picks up your book that you know your rights. It gives librarians and cataloging systems what they need to list your title correctly. And it makes the book look finished.
A clean copyright page includes the copyright symbol, year of first publication, and your name (© 2026 Your Name). It also includes an all rights reserved statement, your ISBN, your publisher or imprint name, and the city of publication. That covers the basics for every book.
Disclaimers depend on what you wrote, and for most books, they’re short enough to stay on the copyright page. Fiction gets a standard line clarifying that characters and events are fictitious.
If your book covers health, legal, financial, or any area where readers might act on your content, the disclaimer needs to be more specific. It needs to say you are not a licensed professional, that the content is for informational purposes only, and that readers should consult a qualified professional before acting on anything in the book. If the language runs long, it can move to its own page immediately after the copyright page.
For books in those categories, having an attorney review the language is worth the cost. If that’s not possible, look at published books in your specific genre for reference rather than borrowing from another genre. A disclaimer written for a personal finance book does not necessarily fit a book on herbal remedies.
The Dedication
The dedication is recto, page v. Of all the pages in your front matter, it’s the most personal. It tells readers who the book is for. A person, a group, a memory. Nothing more.
A dedication is not the place to thank your editor, your writing group, or your spouse for putting up with you through the drafts. That’s what acknowledgments are for, and acknowledgments go at the back of the book where they can take as much or as little space as they need. A dedication gets one page, no header, text centered and alone, often in italics, page numbers suppressed.
On a dedication page, the white space around the words is part of the design. A short dedication gets an entire page to itself. With nothing else on the page, the reader’s eye has nowhere else to go. Write a paragraph, and you’ve filled the page. When that happens, it looks like every other page in the book, and the dedication stops being distinct.
If you don’t have a dedication, don’t include the page. An empty recto makes it look like something got left out.
The Epigraph
An epigraph is a quotation placed at the front of the book before the main text begins. It can come from another writer, a song, a speech, a historical document, a film, or nearly any other source. It’s one of the more flexible elements in your front matter, which is both what makes it appealing and where authors get into trouble.
The conventional position is on its own recto page after the dedication. But it can also go on the verso facing the table of contents, or on the verso facing the first page of text. The placement changes what the epigraph does.
On its own page, the epigraph stands apart from everything, a pause before the book begins. When it faces the first page of text, it reads as a direct prelude, more immediate and more tightly connected to the opening.
Hemingway put two epigraphs in The Sun Also Rises, one from Gertrude Stein and one from Ecclesiastes. The Stein quotation places the novel in a specific historical moment. The Ecclesiastes passage places that moment inside a broader, timeless condition. Together, they tell readers what kind of book they’re about to read before the story opens. Neither is decoration.
That’s the standard worth holding your own epigraph to. A good epigraph frames a theme, establishes a tone, or introduces a tension that runs through the book. If you can’t say in one sentence why a particular quotation belongs in your book, it probably doesn’t.
Before you finalize your choice, sort out permissions. If your epigraph is from a copyrighted source, you may need permission to reproduce it. Short prose quotations often fall under fair use. Song lyrics and poetry are treated more strictly, and their brevity does not exempt them. Rights holders in both categories tend to enforce.
To request permission, contact the publisher’s rights and permissions department, listed on their website, or for older works, the author’s estate. Your request should include what you’re quoting, where it appears in the book, your expected print run, whether the book is for sale, and your publication timeline. Response times range from a few days to several months. Start the process before your publication date is fixed, not after.
The Colophon
The colophon is the oldest page in this article and the least known outside design and fine press circles. Ancient manuscript scribes used it to record who copied a text, when, and under what conditions. One colophon from a medieval manuscript reads: “Finished, thank God.” We understand completely.
In modern publishing, the colophon documents how the book was made. The typefaces used, the designer, the printer, and sometimes the paper stock. It goes at the back of the book, often under the heading “A Note on the Type.” Alfred A. Knopf made it standard practice in American publishing. The Folio Society treats it as essential. O’Reilly Media includes detailed colophons in its technical books, naming the typefaces, software, and production tools used.
For self-published authors, the colophon is largely absent, which is a missed opportunity. A short one looks like this:
This book was set in Garamond, a typeface first cut by Parisian engraver Claude Garamond in the 1540s and revived for digital use by Robert Slimbach for Adobe in 1989. Chapter headings are set in Freight Display. Interior design by [Name].
Two or three sentences are enough. If you designed the book yourself, you already have the typeface names. If a designer built your interior, ask them. Most typeface histories are well documented online, and a search for the name will turn up more than you probably expected.
The “Also By” Page
The “Also By” page lists your other published titles under the heading “Also by [Your Name].” Straightforward enough. But where it goes changes what it does.
In the front matter, it goes on the verso of the half-title, before the reader has started your book. In the back matter, it follows the story and reaches readers who have just finished it. For most authors, back matter is the stronger choice. A reader who just finished your book is far more ready to find the next one than a reader who just opened it.
Front matter placement makes sense in one specific situation. If you’re publishing a book in a series and want to show readers where this installment fits before the story begins, putting the list at the front makes that clear before the first page. For a standalone book or a debut, put it at the back.
Keep the list simple. Titles in chronological order, no subtitles unless two titles are close enough in name to cause confusion. In print, that’s all you need. In ebooks, link each title to its sales page. You’ve already done the hard work of writing the books. Don’t make the reader work to find them.
These pages have been in books for centuries not because nobody got around to removing them, but because each one still does something a book needs done. The half-title creates an entrance. The copyright page records ownership. The dedication addresses the reader before the story begins. The colophon documents the work after it ends. None of that is decoration, and none of it is arbitrary.
The difference between a self-published book that reads as finished and one that doesn’t is rarely the writing. It’s usually the hundred small decisions around the writing that either got made on purpose or didn’t get made at all. Front matter is most of those decisions.