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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.

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: 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.

In a real book

Cover of The Pricing Playbook by Jane Founder: a brass balance scale lit from the left on deep teal above white type, subtitle “How founders set a price they can defend”.

The Pricing Playbook

How founders set a price they can defend, by Jane Founder

Nonfiction book, 9,862 words, 43 pages

The outline the planner proposed from its brief, chapter by chapter:

  1. 01 Introduction 620 words
  2. 02 Why Guessing Fails 1,014 words
  3. 03 What You Are Actually Selling 1,004 words
  4. 04 Interview Ten Customers 1,088 words
  5. 05 Choose the Value Metric 979 words
  6. 06 Draft Three Tiers 1,076 words
  7. 07 Set the Numbers 1,130 words
  8. 08 Say the Price Out Loud 1,063 words
  9. 09 Revisit Every Quarter 994 words
  10. 10 Conclusion 384 words
  11. 11 Appendix: The Interview Script 475 words
Start from this brief Read the book it became
  1. What is front matter in a book? Front matter is the pages before a book's main text: title page, copyright, contents, and sometimes a foreword. What Chapbook adds on its own, kind by kind.
  2. What is a lead magnet funnel? A lead magnet funnel is the path from a free offer to a subscriber to a customer. The steps it takes, and which of them Chapbook handles and which your email tool does.
  1. AI ebook writer for nonfiction: from one paragraph to EPUB An AI ebook writer for nonfiction: an outline you approve, chapters drafted in your voice from your own sources, then an EPUB 3, a typeset PDF, a Word file and a cover.

Questions people ask

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.

Read a chapter of your own book before you pay for it.

The outline, one sample chapter up to 2,500 words and a watermarked cover are free: 60 Book Credits on sign-up, no card.

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