Indie Scribe Magazine October 2014 | Page 28

Author News

Front Matter Matters: A Guide for Indie Authors

A regular column from BookWorks

By Betty Kelly Sargent |

Sep 15, 2014

Front matter matters. It matters a lot, but sometimes authors get confused about what goes where, when, and why. It’s really not all that complicated, but it is important to get it right if you want to end up with a top quality, professional-looking book. Here’s how it works.

•Half title: Only the title appears here. This is usually the first page the reader sees when opening the book. The verso or back of this page can be used to list other books by the author. Sometimes this page is eliminated to help reduce the overall page count. Incidentally, recto means front side and verso means back side of a piece of paper in a bound book. The recto is the right hand page and the verso is the left hand page of an open book.

•Frontispiece: This is an illustration on the verso that faces the title page.

•Title page: Here you will find the title, subtitle, author, and publisher of the book. You can also include here the publisher’s location, the book's year of publication, perhaps some short, descriptive text about the book, and even illustrations.