7 Front and Back Matter

There’s more to a book than the body of the text. This chapter will note most of the elements you might have as front and back matter and which of those are nearly mandatory.

Front Matter

The rules for making front matter look good and work well are the same as for the body of the book, with a few exceptions:

art Don’t use Heading 1 through Heading 3—as is or with modifications—for front sections before the table of contents and typically not for the table of contents itself. Why? Because you’ll almost certainly use Microsoft Word’s built-in functions to generate your table of contents—and that function relies on Heading 1 through Heading 3. The Front style in bk6pv.dotx is the same as Heading 1 but doesn’t generate an entry in the table of contents.

art Front matter normally has no page numbers before the table of contents and roman numerals from the table of contents through the end of the front matter. The first chapter of the book’s body should be page 1 and marks the start of Arabic numbers. Typically, running headers also begin with the table of contents (if it runs to more than one page).

art You would typically not use vertical justification for front matter before and including the table of contents.

Title and Copyright Pages

Many books begin with a half title page, consisting of nothing more than the title of the book—sometimes without the subtitle. When used, the back (verso) of the half title page will be blank (unless you have written other books and choose to list them here or wish to include blurbs for your book). Half title pages can be useful as places for authors to autograph books and, in traditional publishing, can work to even out printing signatures and reduce the number of blank pages at the back of the book—but they aren’t mandatory. If you wish to save 4 cents per copy and don’t see the point, omit the half title page.

The title page is mandatory and is always a recto (right-hand) page. The title page contains up to six elements, from top to bottom, and rarely much more: title, subtitle, edition (if any), author’s name, publisher’s name, and place of publication.

Frequently, all elements of the title page are centered, with the title having the largest and most prominent type, the subtitle smaller type, the edition statement (if present) smaller still, a gap, the author’s name in some intermediate type size, and, near the bottom of the page, the publisher’s name (and logo), location, and (if present) year of publication. But none of those norms is written in stone. Two of my professionally published books have my name above the title, because they use the cover design as the title page and that’s how the covers were designed.

You say you don’t have a publisher’s name—this is a micropublication and you’re not planning to make a career of this sort of thing? Then don’t bother: Just put the city, state, and year at the bottom of the page. Come up with a balance of placement, type size, and typeface that looks good. If you’ve prepared a special design for the title and author name as part of the cover, consider reusing that design on the title page.

The copyright page is also mandatory and (almost) always appears on the verso of the title page. How much you include here depends on what you’re doing with your book and what other front matter you have. You’ll probably repeat the title at the top of the page. You should have a copyright statement—“Copyright © 2012 by Jane Author” will do, noting that when you key a capital C surrounded by parentheses Word automatically converts it to the copyright symbol (or you can add it using the Symbol list). I don’t see much reason to add the usual “All rights reserved …” paragraph for a micropublished book, and note that you cannot legally prevent all copying in any case. This page is the best place to add your full contact information if you wish to provide it.

What else goes on the copyright page? If you have an ISBN, it should appear here. If you have cataloging in publication (CIP) data—highly unlikely for a micropublication—it appears on the copyright page. If you need to give credit for the cover design or a photo on the cover, this is a good place to do so. If you have specific credits, you can put them either here or in a separate Acknowledgments page. I’ve seen copyright pages crammed with text from top to bottom; I’ve also seen (and produced) pages with only three lines of type. Your micropublication probably won’t need loads of wording.

I talk a little more about copyright in a later chapter, but you might consider whether your micropublication is a good candidate for a Creative Commons license, explicitly allowing others to copy all or part of it with certain restrictions. If so, you should determine which license you need, then print the license information on the copyright page.

If you choose to have a colophon—information on how the book was produced—the copyright page is one excellent place for it, although a colophon can also be its own page in either front matter or back matter, with or without Colophon as a label. A colophon should, at a minimum, say what typefaces are used in a book; it can additionally mention software used for layout and credit people involved in the production if you’ve outsourced some steps.

Other Pre-Contents Pages

Do you want to dedicate your book to someone? A great way to do that is with a dedication page, typically the next (right-hand) page after the copyright page. A good dedication page might have nothing more than a single line of type or paragraph saying something like “To x” and why the book’s being dedicated to x. You don’t need “Dedication” as a heading. Keep it simple, keep it clean. The verso of the dedication page—if you have one—will be blank in most cases.

You might also have an epigraph, a short quote or poem that seems important to the book. If you want an epigraph page, it works like the dedication page: very simple, on a recto page, with the verso blank.

Contents Page

It’s a rare book (at least where nonfiction is concerned) that has no table of contents—and if you’ve used Heading 1 and Heading 2 consistently, it’s a snap to create and maintain your table of contents.

Just start a new section or at least a new right-hand page, provide an appropriate heading (e.g., Contents or Table of Contents), then—where you’d start inserting text after that heading—open the References tab, click on Table of Contents at the far left, and click on Insert Table of Contents. In the dialog box, choose the number of levels to include in the table of contents—the default is 3, but you may want to change that to 2 or even 1 to avoid a very long table of contents—and click OK.

There it is: your table of contents, using built-in styles TOC 1, TOC 2, and TOC 3 (if you include three levels of heading). You may need to modify those styles—for example, TOC 1 may be indented because it’s based on Normal—but they work pretty well. As with most built-in styles, these won’t show up in the styles palette until they’re used, and maybe not then. If that’s the case, click on Options in the styles palette and change Select styles to show to All long enough to make the modifications. Alternatively, you could take one of the proffered designs that include text for the heading as well as styles for the contents.

You can generate your table of contents as soon as you have at least one heading and go back later, after you’ve done all the editing, right-click anywhere within the table of contents, and choose Update field to refresh the actual table of contents.

It’s possible to modify the table of contents directly, but try to avoid that if you can. The process is clumsy, and the next time you make changes that add or subtract pages, you’ll have to refresh the table of contents anyway, wiping out your modifications.

How many levels of content should you show? That’s up to you and depends on your book. The tables of contents in most of my books have only included chapters, but it’s not at all uncommon to include main headings and subheadings (two levels) as in this book—and I’ve seen books that usefully included three levels. If you’re doing a family history arranged by decade with major topics within each decade, two levels would seem natural.

Sections after the table of contents should use Heading 1 for section names, since those sections should appear in the table of contents. However, sections after the table of contents still use roman page numbers—up to the body of the book.

Foreword

A foreword is written by somebody else—that is, someone other than the author. It may be an essay by a person who has a big name in the area you are writing about or a fellow author in your genre endorsing your work.

If you’re publishing the reminiscences of an ancestor, you may write the foreword yourself. Forewords are entirely optional. Do note the spelling—it’s foreword, not forward!

Preface

How did this book come about? If there’s an interesting story to tell, the preface is a good place to tell it. The editor of a teen poetry anthology might use a preface to discuss the poetry group and the selection process; you might tell the story of how you gathered your family’s stories. Prefaces can be much more informal and personal than the rest of a book. It’s not unusual to include brief acknowledgments in the preface and skip the following section. A preface is usually short, typically no more than two or three pages. Otherwise, the content might better be treated as an introduction.

Acknowledgments

If you have a bunch of people to thank for helping make the book possible or granting permission to use quotations or photographs, you probably need an Acknowledgments section. It shouldn’t go on too long (Jennifer Basye Sanders suggests that if you need more than three pages for acknowledgments, you should move the section to appear just before the index). You can equally well acknowledge people in your preface or introduction.

Introduction

This is likely to be the last section of the front matter—and with luck your book won’t need all of these sections! Where a preface may be about how the book came to be, the introduction is about the book itself—what it’s about and how it’s structured. Of course, an introduction can also be a preface that’s more than three pages long.

Special Cases

Some books benefit from other sections of front matter. For example, this book has an About the Website page in the front matter.

Back Matter

After the last chapter of your book come appendices and other back matter—all of which are optional, all of which continue with Arabic numbering, and all of which should use Heading 1 as section titles. Think of these as chapters that don’t have chapter numbers. There’s no absolute set order to back matter, except that the afterword (if any) usually comes first and the index usually comes last.

Afterword

If you feel the need to wrap things up in a manner that doesn’t fit in your final chapter, here’s your chance. There’s not much more to say.

Appendices

You may have one or more appendices: lists, resources, stuff that’s needed to flesh out the book and that doesn’t fit into the book itself. You may choose to label each appendix as Appendix A: name of appendix, Appendix B: name of appendix, and so on.

Endnotes and Footnotes

Where do you put notes? There are three possible places, all more-or-less directly supported by Word:

1. As footnotes at the bottom of each page

2. As endnotes at the end of each chapter (or, really, section)

3. As endnotes at the end of the book

If you choose #3 and have more than a handful of notes, you’ll probably want to put all of the endnotes in their own section, probably labeled Notes.

You can mix #1 and either #2 or #3, offering substantive footnotes at the bottom of pages and source endnotes (citations) at the end of each chapter or the whole book. If you do that, you should use separate numbering schemes for endnotes and footnotes. Word can be tricky about formatting footnotes, including adding more space above the footnote separator than may seem reasonable and doing other things you may find difficult or impossible to correct. There’s a built-in Footnote style you can modify, used for both footnotes and endnotes.

Glossary

Do you need a glossary? Quite possibly not for many family histories and similar books, but you may find one useful. A glossary should clarify special terms that appear in your book, particularly ones where your usage is unusual. A glossary can also include other terms related to the book’s topic, even if they don’t appear in the text. Most glossaries are alphabetic, unless there’s a reason to have subglossaries separated by headings. Each glossary entry usually consists of a single paragraph beginning with the term and a colon (both in bold) followed by the definition.

I’ve provided the bibgloss style in bk6pv.dotx as a typical way to handle regular entries in this and the next section. It uses a hanging indent for the first line and adds 6 points blank space above and below (or between) each entry.

Bibliography

The bibgloss style should also work for bibliography entries, which should be done using a consistent citation style and may or may not include annotations or discussions of some or all books and other sources. (If your entries are annotated, you may prefer the bib style, used in this book, which adds 12 points space above each entry, twice as much space as bibgloss.)

Your bibliography may not be called a bibliography. If you leave out some minor references, it should be called what it is: A Selected Bibliography. If it’s a list that includes not only what you read to write the book but also other things you recommend to the reader, it’s probably Recommended Reading. There are other possibilities—and you could have more than one section of bibliography or more than one alphabetic list with subheadings. You’ll note that this book’s bibliography includes a paragraph of commentary after some citations; I didn’t call it an Annotated Bibliography, but that’s what it is.

About the Author

This is the one piece of back matter that could reasonably appear after the index, but I’d include it just before—if you feel it’s needed and haven’t already covered this ground. This page (and it’s usually no more than a page) is written in the third person: It may be by you but it’s about you.

Index

There are many ways to produce a good index—and probably no part of a nonfiction book (other than the cover) that can benefit more from the work of an expert. I’m not an expert indexer and am unqualified to tell you how to prepare an excellent index, or even what should be included (other than the obvious: names of people and significant topics).

You can’t generate an index until all your other editing and copyfitting is complete: This is just about the last thing you do in a book before uploading it.

There are effectively three ways to get an index into your book when you’re using Word to do the production:

1. Tag index entries within Word and let it do the work.

2. Create a dummy Word document consisting entirely of index entries, then import the generated index into your book.

3. Do the whole thing manually, then use suitable Index styles to tag the index you’ve created.

I’ll discuss them in reverse order.

Manual Indexing

Many of you will, quite appropriately, use the third technique. You’ll use index cards or whatever to note places where a topic needs to be indexed or a significant name appears, alphabetize all of those items, then prepare an index. You can start the new section with Index as Heading 1, then tag most index entries as Index 1, subentries as Index 2, and so on. If you want a two-column index, you’ll need to start a new section (continuous) immediately after the Index heading, then change the Page Layout to two columns from that point forward.

Or you can let Word do part of the work.

The Dummy Document Approach

In this case, you start another blank document, typing each item on page one that needs an index entry, just as you’d want it in the index. Then start a new page (Ctrl-Enter is one fast way) and add items on page two, and continue until you’re done. You’ll probably want to keep this document in draft view (the rightmost option on the bottom bar, just left of the zoom percentage) so it’s not too jumpy.

Now—or as you finish each page—highlight each entry, use Alt-Shift-X (or Mark Entry on the References tab) to mark the text as an index item, and continue until you’re done. (There may be a way to automate this process, but if so I haven’t found it.)

Then start a new section and click on Insert Index in the References tab. You can now copy that text—the index for your dummy book—to the Index section of your actual book.

This sounds clumsy. It is clumsy. The advantage is that you can’t possibly screw up your actual book in the process. (I use this process to index my ejournal, Cites & Insights, but that’s partly because one index covers multiple issues and I can use chapters to simulate issues.)

Note that you can, along the way, add See and See Also references and build a two-level index.

Indexing Within Word

You can also mark text as index entries within your book, then use Insert Index to prepare your index. That’s probably the most natural way to do it, but it requires a few caveats:

Remember that names need to be reversed for the index—that is, if you mark “Jane Grandmere” in the text, you’ll need to change the Main Entry to “Grandmere, Jane” in the Mark Index Entry dialog box.

Be very cautious when using Mark All! This sounds like a real winner—you encounter the first appearance of John Grandpere, change the Main Entry, and now you can index all the appearances with just one stroke. And so you can … but you can also completely wreck your book! That’s most likely to happen because you use Mark All on text that appears within a running header or footer—and the results are calamitous. (Remember: If you’re indexing a word, that string of letters may also appear within a longer word.) If you’re absolutely certain this won’t happen, then Mark All is a time-saver … but I’d suggest saving a separate copy of the book under a different name before you try it out.

The other warning on Mark All is to use “shorter may appear within longer” caution. If Jane Grandmere and Jane Grandmere Parsons both appear in your book and you Mark All on the first Jane Grandmere … well, you can guess what happens.

Word doesn’t do a great job of marking page ranges for indexed items, it limits an index to two levels (main entries and subentries), and it doesn’t highlight the most important page numbers. You can modify the index once it’s produced to take care of this.

You probably already know that a good index notes concepts, not just words—it uses the same term for the same concept throughout, even when that concept is discussed using different terms. An index is not a concordance: You should be noting where topics are discussed, not just where specific words appear.

That’s It

Your book is complete—other than a cover, that is. You’ve proofread everything. You know that all sections are in the right order. You’ve done your copyfitting and other grunt work. The pages look right on the screen and on your test printout.

Take a break. Celebrate. Continue with the remaining steps to seeing your book as a book: the cover, PDF issues, and dealing with your provider.