What order does back matter go in?

Story closings first — epilogue, afterword — then acknowledgements, then the reference apparatus for nonfiction — appendices, endnotes, glossary, bibliography — then the pages about you: about the author, other books, and finally the teaser or the request for a review. The reader's momentum through these pages runs from finishing the book to finding the next one, and the order follows it.

Do acknowledgements go in the front or the back?

Either is conventional. The front is the traditional place and still the default in nonfiction; fiction increasingly moves them to the back so the story starts without ceremony. What is not optional is getting the names right — the acknowledgements are the page your closest readers proofread hardest.

Should I include a sample of my next book?

One chapter, clearly labelled with which book it is from, placed last after the about-the-author page. It converts the reader at their moment of maximum goodwill — the second after they finish — and its only failure mode is obscurity: a teaser that does not say it is a teaser, or does not say of what, reads as a printing error.

What is the about-the-author page for?

Two jobs: credibility — why this person wrote this book — and connection, which means where to find you. Written in the third person, a few sentences long, carrying one human detail. The same text, trimmed, becomes the author biography the retailer's product page shows, which is why it is written once and kept somewhere findable.

Back matter: the pages after the last chapter

The back matter is the part of the book most people skip and the part that decides what they do next. A reader who turns the last page has just finished a relationship with your book at its peak of goodwill; the pages that follow are where the book either ends cleanly, hands them to the next one, or both.

The conventions are loose about content and strict about order, because the order is a gradient: from the story to you, from closure to the future.

The conventional order

Epilogue — the story’s final movement, part of the book proper.
Afterword — a closing piece about the book, by the author or another writer.
Acknowledgements — see below.
Appendices, endnotes, glossary, bibliography — the reference apparatus, in the order the text refers to it. These belong in the table of contents; they are the entries nonfiction readers navigate by.
About the author.
Other books by this author.
A teaser chapter or a note to the reader — the review ask, the newsletter, the next book.

Fiction usually uses steps one, two, three, five, six and seven. Nonfiction often ends at five, with the apparatus above it. A book that skips the pages about you is a legitimate choice; a book that scatters them out of order just reads as unedited, because the gradient is visible when it is broken — nobody notices an order that works.

Acknowledgements: front or back

Both placements are fully conventional, and the choice is about what the reader meets first. The front is traditional — the book thanks its people before it begins. Fiction has been moving them to the back for decades, on the argument that a page of names between the title and chapter one is a tax the story did not levy.

Whichever you choose, one quality control matters more than any other: the names are right. The acknowledgements are the page your inner circle — the people in them, and readers who know them — read most carefully, and a misspelled editor’s name is remembered longer than any review. Check every spelling against the person’s own usage.

About the author

The page that answers two questions the reader has just earned the right to ask: who wrote this, and what else have they done.

The working form is short — four to eight sentences — in the third person, even in first-person memoir. It carries: what you write (the genre connection, so a reader who loved this book knows whether the others are for them); one credibility signal appropriate to the book; one human detail, because the reader has just spent twelve hours in your voice; and where to find you, if you want to be found.

The mistakes are consistent: too long — the page is not a CV; too modest — a book on pistol shooting written by an instructor should say so; and no connection — the biography that could preface any book by anyone.

Keep the text somewhere findable beyond the book. Retailer product pages show an author biography, and it should be a version of this one — written once, trimmed for the metadata, consistent everywhere a reader meets you.

Other books

The list is a service to the reader, ordered usefully: series in reading order, standalones after. Two details separate a professional page from an afterthought:

It is correct. Titles, series order, and what is actually available — a book listed that a reader cannot find is worse than a book unlisted.
It is current. The list lives in the back matter of every edition, and it changes with every release, which means every new book triggers a revision to every old one. This is the page that decays, and the reason authors republish back matter.

In an ebook the list carries links to the books — the reader can act on the page, which makes it the highest-leverage retail surface you own. In print the titles are simply correct and findable.

The teaser chapter

The last page of the book is the reader’s moment of maximum willingness to start another one, and the teaser chapter spends it. The conventions that make it work:

One chapter. A sample is a hook, not a second book.
Labelled, both ways — it says it is a teaser, and it says of which book. An unlabelled excerpt reads as a defect: the reader thinks the file is corrupted or the book padded.
Placed last, after the about-the-author and other-books pages, so the reader has already been shown the bridge.
A chapter that hooks, not the best chapter. Choose the one that opens a question the reader cannot put down, which is rarely the one you are proudest of.

The same page is also where the note to the reader lives — the request for a review, the newsletter invitation, the author’s site. It works because it sits after the relationship, not before it; the same note at the front of the book is an ad, and at the back it is a conversation.

Back matter is structure, and it is the same structure in every book: close the story, list the sources, introduce the author, point at the next book. That regularity is the whole reason it costs so little to do well and decays so reliably when nobody owns it.

Nueel’s designs carry the back-matter order with them, and every piece — the acknowledgements, the author page, the teaser — is an ordinary section in the same book, styled by the same design and exported with the same links working in the ebook.

Common questions

What order does back matter go in?: Story closings first — epilogue, afterword — then acknowledgements, then the reference apparatus for nonfiction — appendices, endnotes, glossary, bibliography — then the pages about you: about the author, other books, and finally the teaser or the request for a review. The reader's momentum through these pages runs from finishing the book to finding the next one, and the order follows it.
Do acknowledgements go in the front or the back?: Either is conventional. The front is the traditional place and still the default in nonfiction; fiction increasingly moves them to the back so the story starts without ceremony. What is not optional is getting the names right — the acknowledgements are the page your closest readers proofread hardest.
Should I include a sample of my next book?: One chapter, clearly labelled with which book it is from, placed last after the about-the-author page. It converts the reader at their moment of maximum goodwill — the second after they finish — and its only failure mode is obscurity: a teaser that does not say it is a teaser, or does not say of what, reads as a printing error.
What is the about-the-author page for?: Two jobs: credibility — why this person wrote this book — and connection, which means where to find you. Written in the third person, a few sentences long, carrying one human detail. The same text, trimmed, becomes the author biography the retailer's product page shows, which is why it is written once and kept somewhere findable.