Setting Up Front Matter and Back Matter in the Right Order

The standard trade-book order for front matter is title page, copyright, dedication, epigraph, table of contents, foreword, preface, and then your chapters. Back matter follows the last chapter, conventionally starting with acknowledgments. In Deckle, that order is simply the order these pages sit in your Binder, and getting it right is what makes page numbering come out the way a printed book's does.

If you are not sure what each of these pages actually is, start with what front matter is, which defines every element before this page puts them in sequence.

What You'll Need

• An open Deckle project with your chapters written in the Draft folder.
• A decision about which of these pages your book actually needs. Most novels use four or five, not all thirteen.

Step-by-Step: Adding Front and Back Matter

1. Click the + button at the top of the Binder.
2. Choose Front Matter or Back Matter from the menu. Each opens a submenu of the page types Deckle ships.
3. Pick a page type. It is created as a direct child of Draft, inserted just after whichever Draft-level document you currently have selected, and opened in the editor so you can fill it in straight away.
4. Drag it into position in the Binder if it landed in the wrong place. There is no fixed slot for these pages: Deckle exports them in whatever order the Binder shows, so the Binder order is the book order.
5. Repeat for each page, working top to bottom so you do not have to reshuffle afterwards.

Because position is everything here, it is worth doing this pass before you prepare the manuscript for export rather than after.

The Standard Front Matter Order

Deckle offers seven front matter page types. In the order they should appear:

#	Deckle page type	What it is
1	Title Page	Book title, subtitle, and author, generated from your Compile metadata (or replaced entirely by a full-page image).
2	Copyright	The copyright line and legal boilerplate, auto-generated from your author name and year, plus room for your publisher and ISBN.
3	Dedication	One short line. "For Anna."
4	Epigraph	A quotation and its attribution.
5	Table of Contents	Generated automatically from your chapters. You do not type it.
6	Foreword	Written by someone else about you or the book.
7	Preface	Written by you about the book.

This matches the sequence the Chicago Manual of Style sets out in its chapter on the parts of a book.

On the half title: convention puts a half title page (the book's title alone, on the very first leaf) ahead of the title page. Deckle does not have a half-title page type, so if you want one you would need to build it as an ordinary document rather than pick it from the Front Matter menu.

The Standard Back Matter Order

Deckle offers six back matter page types. A sensible default order for a novel:

1. Acknowledgments
2. About the Author
3. Also by the Author
4. Coming Next (a teaser or excerpt from the next book)
5. Book Club Questions
6. Glossary

Acknowledgments-first is the genuinely standardised part. The rest are trade and indie additions that the Chicago Manual does not rank against each other, so the order there is a judgement call rather than a rule.

A note on the glossary. Chicago places a glossary well down the back matter, after appendixes and chronologies. That ordering suits a reference book, where the glossary is consulted after the fact. In a novel with invented terminology, readers flip to the glossary while reading, so many fiction authors move it to the top of the back matter or even into the front matter after the table of contents. Deckle imposes nothing either way. Just be aware that anything you place above Chapter One sits inside the roman-numeral run described below.

How Page Numbering Works Across Front Matter, Body, and Back Matter

This is the part that surprises people, and almost all of it is standard book design rather than anything unique to Deckle.

The behaviour is controlled by one toggle: open Styles, select the Print & layout category, and find Restart page numbering at Chapter One under Pagination. It is on by default. Turning it on also switches on Start chapters on right-hand page and locks that toggle, because a restarted page count only stays in step with the book's real left and right pages if chapters actually open on a right-hand page. Both settings apply to PDF output only; EPUB has no fixed pages, so they are ignored there.

With it on:

• Front matter numbers in lowercase roman numerals (i, ii, iii), and the count restarts at arabic 1 on Chapter One.
• Back matter continues the arabic sequence. It does not restart, and it does not revert to roman.
• Turn it off and you get one continuous arabic count from the title page onward instead.

Why some pages show no page number at all

Two behaviours look like bugs and are not:

Display pages carry no printed number. The title page, copyright page, dedication, and epigraph are counted in the roman sequence but print no page number and no running head. That is the convention (Chicago is explicit that no folio appears on the half title, title, copyright, dedication, or epigraph), and it is why your table of contents can be the fourth physical page yet be the first page in the book showing a number, "iv". The table of contents, foreword, and preface all do print roman numerals.

Every section's opening page is counted but unnumbered. A chapter's first page carries no page number and no running head, so the first number you actually see in that chapter appears on its second page. The same applies to the foreword, the preface, and every back matter section. Their opening pages are bare; their continuation pages carry the number, and the running head on a foreword's continuation page names the foreword rather than inheriting a chapter title from elsewhere.

The one blanket exception is the table of contents, which prints its roman numeral but never carries a running head on any of its pages.

Watch Out: A Title Page With No Copyright Page Leaves a Blank Page

💡 If your book has a Title Page but no Copyright page, and the next thing in the Binder is a chapter (or a foreword, preface, or back matter section), the exported PDF shows a completely blank page immediately after the title.

Nothing is broken. Those sections are forced onto a right-hand page. The title page is page 1, a right-hand page, so the next right-hand page is page 3, and page 2 is left empty. In a real book, page 2 is the back of the title leaf, which is exactly where the copyright notice conventionally lives. Adding a Copyright page fills it, and the blank disappears.

If you genuinely do not want a copyright page, a dedication, epigraph, or table of contents will also fill that slot, since none of those force a right-hand start.

Common Mistakes

• Putting a prologue above the front matter. A prologue is body matter and belongs after the table of contents. Placed above your front matter it falls inside the roman-numeral run, so arabic page 1 lands somewhere you did not intend. Deckle raises an export warning naming the offending document when this happens, rather than silently producing the wrong book.
• Assuming the missing numbers on display pages are a rendering failure and turning the restart setting off to "fix" it. That trades a correct book for a continuously numbered one.
• Typing your own table of contents. The Table of Contents page type builds itself from your chapters. If you leave it out entirely and have Include table of contents ticked on export, Deckle inserts one for you, placed after the title, copyright, dedication, and epigraph pages.
• Styling front matter by hand inside the editor. Each page type has its own typography controls in Special Page styling, which is where alignment, size, and font for these pages actually belong.