Front Matter

Front matter for your articles, stories, or books is nothing more than the first few “official” pages of your manuscript. First of all is a Title Page, and, if you choose to use them, a Copyright page, a Dedication page, a Preface page and a Prologue page. Bare minimum, every manuscript you upload to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) should always include the Title Page.

There is considerable debate about the value of having so many front matter pages before a reader even sees the body of your text. Amazon.com offers a “look inside” option to all writers uploading works through KDP or CreateSpace, and that presents a problem with Kindle, especially if you insert all the front matter pages that are suggested.

The theory goes, if you have all these front matter pages and potential buyers take a “look inside” at the Kindle version, if they can’t find the beginning of your article or story within about 5 seconds, they click away from your work, and the sale is lost.

Here’s a quick and easy solution that incorporates several front matter pages into one. This method assures you that your readers are going to be able to see the beginning of your text without the delay of having to click through several pages to get there.

The title page is the most important, and the manuscript’s title should be centered and at the very top of it, with “by” and the author’s name underneath, with two line feeds between each, as below:

The Lion’s Tale

by

Claude Hunter

You can bold the title and make it a larger font size if you like, but be forewarned: anything larger than a 16 point font size is distracting to your e-book readers. E-book users have the choice/capability of changing the font size, meaning your large font title could end up being huge, to the point of being unreadable.

After the author’s name, insert 6 line feeds, then, while still centered, enter your copyright information, as such:

? Copyright 2012 Claude Hunter All Rights Reserved

There is a very good reason for including the phrase, “All Rights Reserved” in your copyright information. By uploading your work to KDP or CreateSpace, you are giving them “one time rights” to publish your work, which is standard for written works.

You probably already know that Amazon.com’s marketplace is global, meaning they will sell your manuscript all over the world. What you may not be fully aware of though, is that if you do not include the “All Rights Reserved” phrase, you risk having someone in a foreign country publish your work—without your permission.

You would not only lose your foreign copyrights in that country, you would lose any royalties that may have been generated from the sale of your manuscript. Most countries have treaties between them to protect writers’ copyrights, but why take a chance. Include the phrase.