# What is front matter in a book?

Front matter is everything in a book before its main text: usually the title page, the copyright page and the contents, and sometimes a dedication, foreword or introduction. It tells a reader what the book is and who owns it before the reading starts.

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

## What it means in practice

Front matter adds length and little reading time, so keep it plain. A short guide needs a title page and a copyright line; a contents page helps once a book has more than a few chapters.

In a printed book these pages are often numbered apart from the main text, or not at all. Chapter 1 still starts on a right-hand page, so a paperback may need a blank page to get there.

## How Chapbook uses it

A lead magnet, workbook, nonfiction book, guide or collection gets three pages made for it: the title page, a copyright page with the year and your name, and the contents. They are in the book's language, and they appear in the PDF, the Word document and the paperback.

You don't write these pages, and you can ask the assistant to leave them out. In the PDF and the paperback interior, numbering starts at 1 on the first page of the text, so the title, copyright and contents pages carry no number. In the sample on this page, those three pages come just before the Introduction, which is page 1.

A foreword or a dedication is a chapter you add to the outline. Chapbook's planner marks each chapter of an outline as front, body or back matter, which keeps the front and back short.

## 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

### Is an introduction part of the front matter?

Often, yes. Chapbook's planner marks an introduction as front matter in the outline: in the sample on this page, the Introduction is front matter and the chapters that follow are the body.

### Which Chapbook books skip the title, copyright and contents pages?

Brochures, newsletters and activity packs. A brochure has no title page, a newsletter reads straight through, and an activity pack is the cover and then one activity per page.