The Back of the Book

Front Matter, Back Matter, and the Only Marketing That Compounds

The last page of your novel is the most valuable advertising space you'll ever own. Most authors leave it blank.

The Back of the Book is a book in the Indie Author Guide Line: short, source-checked guides for independent authors who have finished writing and now have to be found. This is a short, unglamorous, load-bearing book about what happens after "The End" — the sequence of the next-book link, the reader magnet, the newsletter ask, the series map. Everything else in publishing decays. Back matter appreciates, silently, in every copy already sold.

The pitch here is compounding, not promotion: one hour of work now, paid out across every reader for years. This book models its own advice in its own back matter, and says so plainly.

What's inside:

• The exact sequence a well-built back matter section follows, and why the order matters
• What a next-book link, reader magnet, and newsletter ask each need to actually work
• How to build a series map that turns one sale into several
• Why front matter deserves nearly as much attention as back matter, and what belongs there
• The single hour of setup work with the longest payout of anything in this line
• A working example, built into this book's own back matter, that you can copy directly

This is not a promise that back matter alone will build your career. What it will do is show you the highest-leverage hour available to any author who already has a finished book, because most of that hour is currently sitting unused.

From the Indie Author Guide Line, from Novel Concepts Publishing.