Front and Back Matter

Front and back matter documents are documents that go before and after your main story text. They can include pages like your cover page, content tables, prologues, epilogues, etc. These special pages and sections are supported to some extent by novelWriter.

The Title Page

It is recommended that you add a document at the very top of each Novel root folder with the novel title in it. You should modify the level 1 heading format code with an ! in order to render it as a document title that is excluded from any automatic Table of Content in a manuscript build document.

You can also add the author name and address above this if this is required by the manuscript format you use, and additional space added before the title.

Example

This is the title page novelWriter generates automatically for a new project as of version 2.6:

Jane Doe[br]
Address Line 1[br]
Address Line 2 <<

[vspace:5]

#! My Novel

>> **By Jane Doe** <<

>> Word Count: [field:textWords] <<

The title is by default centred on the page. You can add more text to the page as you wish, like for instance the author’s name and details.

The default title page inserts the word count for text only, but you can add other counts too. See Inserting Word Counts in the Text for more details.

Additional Pages

If you want an additional page of text after the title page, starting on a fresh page, you can add [new page] on a line by itself, and continue the text after it. This will insert a page break before the text. See Vertical Space and Page Breaks for more details.

Unnumbered Chapters

If you use the automatic numbering feature for your chapters, but you want to keep some special chapters separate from this, you can add an ! to the level 2 heading formatting code to tell the build tool to skip these chapters when adding numbers.

Unnumbered chapters are useful for prologue and epilogue chapters, and also for interlude chapters if you use those in your text. There is a separate formatting feature for such chapter titles in the Manuscript Build tool. See the Building the Manuscript page for more details.

Example

##! Unnumbered Chapter Title

Chapter Text