# What is back matter in a book?

Back matter is everything in a book after its main text: a conclusion or appendix, notes, a glossary, an index, an author bio, and often a call to action. It is reference material and a way forward, for a reader who has finished and wants more.

Updated 30 October 2026. Web page: https://chapbook.ink/glossary/back-matter/

## What it means in practice

Back matter serves two kinds of reader: someone looking something up, and someone who finished and wants what comes next. An appendix or a template serves the first, and a link to your next book or service serves the second.

Put what every reader needs in the main text, and keep the back for what only some will want.

## How Chapbook uses it

Chapbook's planner marks each chapter of an outline as front, body or back matter, and keeps the front and back short. In the outline on this page, the Conclusion and "Appendix: The Interview Script" are back matter.

The book can also close on [a **Next step** page](/manual/launch-and-export/#end-on-a-next-step): a button with your link, a sentence above it and, in the PDF, a QR code. A lead magnet, workbook, brochure or activity pack has one unless you turn it off, and it prints once you give it a link. Puzzles in an activity pack print their answers under an "Answers" heading at the back.

## Made with Chapbook: The Pricing Playbook

The Pricing Playbook: How founders set a price they can defend, by Jane Founder. Nonfiction book, 9,862 words, 43 pages. A sample generated from one brief and exported unedited; it is not a customer's book. Read every page: https://chapbook.ink/examples/nonfiction/

The brief:

> A repeatable method for pricing software: customer interviews, a value metric, tiering, and setting numbers you can defend. Promise: A repeatable method for setting a price you can defend to customers, investors and yourself, validated by ten customer interviews in a week. Reader: A founder who priced by guessing or by copying a competitor and now has to defend or change the number. Voice: Direct second person with occasional first person; worked examples with fictional companies; tables where they clarify; no invented statistics or named studies: reason from mechanics and examples.

The outline the planner proposed:

1. Introduction (620 words)
2. Why Guessing Fails (1,014 words)
3. What You Are Actually Selling (1,004 words)
4. Interview Ten Customers (1,088 words)
5. Choose the Value Metric (979 words)
6. Draft Three Tiers (1,076 words)
7. Set the Numbers (1,130 words)
8. Say the Price Out Loud (1,063 words)
9. Revisit Every Quarter (994 words)
10. Conclusion (384 words)
11. Appendix: The Interview Script (475 words)

## Questions

### What should go in the back matter of a lead magnet?

One clear next step. A reader who finishes a lead magnet has just seen what you can do, so end with the one thing you want them to do. Chapbook's Next step page is built for this.

### Does Chapbook add an About the Author page?

Not inside the book. Your bio appears on the back of the paperback cover and on your public book page. To have one in the book itself, add it to the outline as a chapter.