The Anatomy of a Book: End Matter
Today is our last post in our mini-series about the Anatomy of a Book! Week one, we talked about Front Matter - where we set the direction and expectations for the book. Week two, we talked about the Body itself - the core content of your book. And today we’re talking about End Matter.
End Matter
The end matter of a book - also known as the back matter (because it comes at the back of the book, after the body) - is intended to give you additional resources and information related to the book. These often enable you to take action in some way. Just like the front matter, your end matter is a menu of tools you can choose from to provide further resources for your readers.
The end matter you include will depend on your content and what would be helpful to your reader. It can include:
- Acknowledgments
- Author’s Notes
- About the Author
- Appendices
- Glossary
- Index
- References or Notes
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments are the one piece of end matter that I always recommend an author include, no matter what. I don’t know of any books that are made without a single other person’s help or encouragement in some way, and it’s classy to acknowledge the other people who made your book possible. Authors often take this opportunity to thank people they interviewed for the book, advance readers who provided feedback, their agent and editorial team (if the book is traditionally published), and anyone else who contributed to the making of the book.
It might be tempting to skip reading the acknowledgments section when you finish a book, but I always take a look because I like knowing who was important to this author, and who helped them succeed.
Author’s Notes
An author’s note usually provides extra details and insights related to the making of the book. This is often the “behind the scenes” look at what it took to put the book together. The author might talk about the unique interviews or great lengths they went to in researching the book. It’s where they might provide more discussion of their research methods, disclaimers, and insights into the decisions they made while writing the book. If something in the book makes you wonder why an author chose to do X or Y, you might look in the Author’s Note for the answer.
About the Author
This section sometimes comes in the front of the book, but with most commercial nonfiction, I see it in the end matter. The About the Author section usually includes a headshot of the author and their professional bio. The goal here is to establish your credibility and let readers know about your other work so that they can be invested in you, not just in this one book. Your book is one of the best marketing tools to support your other work!
Appendices
Appendices usually provide the reader with additional resources and/or data that is good to reference, but would be too clunky in the middle of the text. For example, in the end matter of Trust Me, I’m Lying, Ryan Holiday includes the transcripts of several interviews he had with other media professionals that informed the writing of the book. It’s useful to the reader to hear their opinions in their own words, but would’ve been disruptive to Holiday’s own narration to include them in the book itself. Other common things to include in appendices are: templates, lesson plans, reproducibles of any kind, and raw data sets.
Glossary
Glossaries are helpful if your book includes specialized terminology or jargon that your reader might not be familiar with. For example, one of my clients is working on a book about financial wellness for women. After reading her first draft, I recommended she include a glossary where women who might not already be familiar with certain financial terms so that they can find definitions.
Index
An index is an alphabetical list of important phrases and terms used throughout your book, so that readers can find those terms again easily throughout the book. Indices are usually compiled by a professional indexer - not by the author! It takes a special set of skills to know what to include and how to prepare it professionally.
References or Notes
If your book draws on a lot of information from other books, articles, or resources - for example, if you read a biography of someone in order to include a paraphrased story from that person’s life, or you included data from a study - the References (also sometimes labeled “Notes”) section would be the place to include the full source information. When this section is labeled “Notes,” it often includes both the source information and annotations related to that source.
This list of end matter pieces isn’t exhaustive, but it generally covers the range of what you might like to include. I hope you’ve found this little series helpful! If you did find it helpful, please consider sharing this link with them.
