Front matter

Front matter is all the content that appears prior to chapter one, and KDP publishes a canonical order: half title, title page, copyright page, reviews and praise, dedication, table of contents, preface, acknowledgments, prologue, introduction. Placement is conventional: the half title, title page, dedication and table of contents always fall on a right-facing page, and the copyright page always falls "on the first left-facing page after the title page." The half title, title, copyright and contents pages carry no page numbers or headers, and the title page does not include "by" before the author name.

For the author, front matter is the first thing a reader opens, and a self-published interior typesets it by hand. The contents page must match the chapter names exactly as they appear in the body, so it is generated after the body is final, never before. A prologue is the last front-matter story element; what follows the body is back matter, and the full sequence is how to create a print-ready PDF.