Weekly Writers: The Main Types Of Front Matter (Part 2)

Dedications, Tables Of Contents, Maps

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I discussed front matter and back matter recently. Open a book and see which of these it contains.

From an early edition of Lost Solace

Dedication

A Dedication is when the author dedicates the book to a person, place, thing, group or even concept: “To Billie, I couldn’t have done it without you” or “To Beauty, who art my eternal inspiration”.

It’s an old-fashioned practice from the days of rich patrons sponsoring poor artists, or from sycophants sucking up to titled nobs. Rarely are they of interest to the reader, which is why I avoid them in my own books nowadays.

Sometimes bold or italics are used for this kind of content. It may also be indented like a block paragraph (which I’ll discuss later). They are often placed a third of the way down the page, but there is scope for variation here. These pages have a lot of blank space around the limited amount of text.

From They Move Below

Table Of Contents

A Table Of Contents (TOC) helps the reader find the chapter or section that they are interested in.

A TOC in a print book will look slightly different to a TOC in an ebook. Both will list the chapters and sections, but in a print book the TOC will display the page number where each begins, so you can flick to the correct page. Whereas ebooks do not have page numbers, so the TOC entries will instead act as links to jump straight to the appropriate place.

Navigating through an ebook is more clunky than being able to riffle through a print book’s pages, so an ebook will always have an inbuilt TOC at the start, which can usually be called up at any time by a navigation button.

However, although all ebooks have a TOC, not all print books do. And there’s a reason for that. A novel is something you are expected to read from start to end, as the story has a logical progression. As such, it is standard for a printed novel to omit a TOC. Whereas you will have a TOC for non-fiction, poetry, and short story collections.

The TOCs in some books (primarily non-fiction) have extra entries for subheadings within chapters. These may be indented to differentiate them from main chapter headings.

For non-fiction it is important to choose chapter titles that help a browsing potential buyer quickly understand what content is covered. Avoid titles that may be jokey and fun but not serve your readers well in terms of explaining what the chapter contains.