# What is a running head in a book?

A running head is the short line at the top of a book's pages that repeats the book's title or the current chapter's name. It often sits beside the page number. It shows a reader flipping through the pages where they are.

Updated 30 October 2026. Web page: https://chapbook.ink/glossary/running-head/

## What it means in practice

The usual pattern is the book's title on left-hand pages and the chapter's name on right-hand pages. Blank pages and chapter openers go without one, and the title page, copyright page and contents have none either.

Keep the words short. A long chapter title makes a long running head, and it will crowd the page number on a small trim.

## How Chapbook uses it

Chapbook sets the running head for you in the PDF and the [paperback interior](/manual/launch-and-export/#make-a-paperback-interior), in the look's small capitals. A left-set look puts the book's title on even pages and the chapter on odd pages, with the page number in the outer corner. A centered look centers the head and moves the page number to the foot.

It leaves the head off a chapter's first page, off blank pages, and off every page of an activity pack, where nothing should compete with the coloring.

In the sample on this page, the Introduction's first page has no head. Turn it and the next page reads "2" and "The Pricing Playbook". Later, in the [downloadable PDF](/samples/nonfiction/book.pdf), an odd page near the end reads "Appendix: The Interview Script" and "39".

## 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

### Should a chapter's first page have a running head?

Usually not. The chapter's title is already on the page, so a running head there would only repeat it. Chapbook leaves it off every page that opens a chapter.

### Do EPUBs have running heads?

Not as part of the book. An EPUB has no fixed pages, so any header you see comes from the reading app. Chapbook sets running heads in its PDFs and paperback interiors.