Front matter, body, and back matter — and the markdown that produces each one
A book has three structural parts, in this order: front matter (everything before the story — title page, copyright, dedication, table of contents), the body matter (your chapters), and back matter (everything after — epilogue, acknowledgments, about the author). No book uses every possible part; you pick the ones your book needs and place them in the conventional order below.
Most guides stop at defining the parts. This one goes one step further: for every part, it shows the exact markdown page-type annotation that produces it and the EPUB 3 semantic it maps to. We build EbookFormatter's EPUB generator by hand — it assembles the archive byte by byte and tags each section with the format's own epub:type vocabulary — so this is written from inside the file a reader actually opens, not from the outside.
Here is the full sequence, front to back. The body is the only required part — everything in front matter and back matter is optional and chosen to fit the book.
| Section | Parts, in order |
|---|---|
| Front matter | Half-title → title page → copyright page → dedication → epigraph → table of contents → foreword → preface → introduction |
| Body matter | Prologue → chapters → epilogue |
| Back matter | Afterword → acknowledgments → about the author → also by the author → appendix → glossary → bibliography → index |
Front matter is everything the reader pages through before the story begins. In print it's traditionally numbered with Roman numerals (i, ii, iii) so the body can start clean at Arabic page 1. Ebooks reflow and have no fixed page numbers, so that convention falls away — but the order and the parts stay the same.
A page with just the book's title, no author name or subtitle. It's the first printed page inside the cover, a holdover from when books were sold unbound. Often dropped in ebooks to save the reader a tap.
The full title, subtitle, author name, and usually the publisher. This is the page every book has. In markdown: # Title {.title-page}.
The legal page — copyright notice, ISBN, edition, publisher, and any disclaimers ("this is a work of fiction…"). It almost always sits on the back of the title page in print. In markdown: # Copyright {.copyright}.
A short, personal line from the author to a person or group — "For Maria." Centered, alone on its own page, no heading needed. In markdown: # Dedication {.dedication}.
A quotation that sets the tone — a line of poetry, scripture, or another author's words, with attribution. Optional, and easy to overuse. In markdown: # Epigraph {.epigraph}.
The navigable list of chapters. In an ebook this isn't decorative — it's the menu readers use to jump around, and Amazon expects it. In markdown: # Contents {.toc}, which generates the links from your chapter headings automatically.
These three get mixed up constantly, so here's the distinction:
# Foreword {.foreword}# Preface {.preface}# Introduction {.introduction}The body is the book — your chapters, and the bookends that frame them.
A scene before chapter one, usually in fiction — a flash-forward, a piece of backstory, a different point of view. It's part of the story, not front matter. In markdown: # Prologue {.prologue}.
The main content. In markdown, a plain top-level heading with no annotation is a chapter — # Chapter One or # The Letter. EbookFormatter splits the book into separate ebook files on each # heading, which is also what builds the table of contents. (To structure a full manuscript this way, see writing your book in markdown.)
A closing scene after the final chapter — what happened next, the fate of a character, a return to the prologue. Still part of the story. In markdown: # Epilogue {.epilogue}.
Back matter is everything after the last chapter — the supporting material, the housekeeping, and the parts that sell your next book.
The author stepping out from behind the story to talk about it — its origins, its themes, a thank-you to the reader. In markdown: # Afterword {.afterword}.
Thanks to editors, beta readers, family, and anyone who helped. Sometimes placed in front matter instead; either is correct. A plain # Acknowledgments heading works here.
A short bio and, increasingly, where to find the author online. In markdown: # About the Author {.about}.
A list of the author's other titles — the most valuable page in the back of an ebook, because a reader who just finished is the most likely to buy the next one. In markdown: # Also by Jane Author {.also-by}.
Reference material, mostly in nonfiction: an appendix for supporting documents, a glossary for specialized terms, a bibliography for sources, and an index for lookup. The bibliography has a dedicated style in EbookFormatter: # Bibliography {.bibliography}. (A traditional page-number index doesn't translate to a reflowable ebook, so it's usually dropped.)
This is the part no other guide gives you. Every page-type annotation in EbookFormatter maps to a real EPUB 3 semantic — the epub:type attribute from the format's own Structural Semantics Vocabulary. That's what lets a reading system, a screen reader, or Amazon's ingestion pipeline know that a page is a copyright page or a dedication, not just text that happens to look like one.
| Book part | Markdown annotation | EPUB 3 epub:type |
|---|---|---|
| Title page | # Title {.title-page} | titlepage |
| Copyright page | # Copyright {.copyright} | copyright-page |
| Dedication | # Dedication {.dedication} | dedication |
| Epigraph | # Epigraph {.epigraph} | epigraph |
| Table of contents | # Contents {.toc} | toc |
| Foreword | # Foreword {.foreword} | foreword |
| Preface | # Preface {.preface} | preface |
| Introduction | # Introduction {.introduction} | introduction |
| Prologue | # Prologue {.prologue} | prologue |
| Chapter | # Chapter One | — (body) |
| Epilogue | # Epilogue {.epilogue} | epilogue |
| Afterword | # Afterword {.afterword} | afterword |
| About the author | # About the Author {.about} | — (styled page) |
| Also by the author | # Also by … {.also-by} | — (styled page) |
| Bibliography | # Bibliography {.bibliography} | bibliography |
Be careful with any guide that hands you one definitive sequence. They disagree. The order above follows the dominant Chicago Manual of Style convention — title page before copyright, foreword before preface — but Reedsy's guide lists the copyright page before the title page and the foreword after the preface, and the copyright page legitimately appears in either the front or the back depending on the design. What's consistent across every source: front matter, then body, then back matter; and within front matter, the title and copyright pages come first and the table of contents comes after the dedication and epigraph. Get those anchors right and the rest is house style.
Front matter (everything before the story — title page, copyright, dedication, table of contents), the body matter (your chapters), and back matter (everything after — epilogue, acknowledgments, about the author, appendices). No single book uses every possible part.
The dominant order is half-title, title page, copyright page, dedication, epigraph, table of contents, foreword, preface, then introduction. Style guides disagree on a few placements, so treat it as a strong convention rather than a hard rule.
A foreword is written by someone other than the author to lend credibility. A preface is by the author, about how the book came to be. An introduction is by the author, setting up the content itself.
Mostly. Title page, copyright, dedication, chapters, and back matter all carry over. The difference is pagination — print uses Roman numerals for front matter and starts the body at Arabic page 1, but ebooks reflow and have no fixed page numbers. In EPUB 3, each part is tagged with a semantic epub:type instead.
Building your book? Annotate each part with the markdown above, then format your book into a Kindle-ready EPUB in seconds — no account. New to this? Start with the Formatting Guide or convert it to EPUB.