Today Jodi is talking about your book frontmatter. What that is frontmatter? Frontmatter is pretty commonplace terminology today. And it's basically everything before the main body of the text. A book is structured similarly to the three parts of a story (introduction, body and conclusion). You have the frontmatter, the text, and the backmatter. It's not that the front matter is necessarily setting up the text, although in a way some pieces of it do, but it's really just everything that comes before the text itself — that is, the body of the book.

Frontmatter may contain a half-title page, a copyright page, a table of contents, preface, introduction, a foreward. Jodi dives into which of these are necessary and which are more optional. Listen in to hear more about your book’s frontmatter and determine what is best for your book!

The next episode will cover backmatter, so stay tuned for that information as well.