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How to write a book dedication, with examples

A dedication is one short line, alone on a right-hand page after the copyright page, with no heading. Where it goes, how it is set, and how five famous authors wrote theirs.

The Nueel team8 min read

A dedication is one line on a right-hand page of its own, after the copyright page and before the contents. It has no heading, no page number and, usually, no explanation. Once again to Zelda is the whole of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s for The Great Gatsby, and it does the job completely.

It is the only page in a book addressed to one reader. Everyone else who opens the book reads it anyway, including strangers in Amazon’s preview who have not yet decided to buy. Most of what follows, from the wording to where the line sits on the page, comes from writing for that one person in a place where everyone else can see.

Dedication, acknowledgments, epigraph

Three front-matter elements get confused with one another, and each has a different job.

Dedication Acknowledgments Epigraph
What it is The book offered to someone Thanks to the people who helped make it A quotation that sets the tone
Whose words Yours Yours Someone else’s
Length A line, occasionally a few A page or several A few lines
Gives reasons? Rarely Always: who did what No
Where Front, recto, after copyright Front or back Front, after the dedication, or chapters

The practical test is the reason. If you want to say why a person matters to the book (she read every draft, he checked the ballistics), you are writing acknowledgments, which have their own page and, in many novels now, a place in the back matter. A dedication names the person and stops. An epigraph is borrowed text, with its own conventions and permission questions, covered in epigraphs, block quotes and pull quotes.

Where the dedication goes

The order of the front matter is a convention, but an old and stable one. The Chicago Manual of Style gives it as half title, title page, copyright page, then dedication, then epigraph, then contents; our front matter guide walks through every page of it. KDP’s own help page on front matter gives the same position in nearly the same words: the dedication “always falls on a right-facing page, usually after the copyright page.”

That page describes convention, not a submission requirement: it sits among KDP’s formatting advice, not in the list of things a file must do to be accepted. Readers notice anyway, because nearly every book they own does it the conventional way.

In print, the dedication costs two pages. It takes a recto (in the Chicago scheme, page v), and the verso behind it is normally left blank so the next element can also open on the right. The 1982 edition of the Manual says so directly in a footnote to its front-matter table: the dedication “may be moved to p. iv to save two pages (v and vi).” For a 300-page novel that is noise. For a 32-page picture book, where every page is spoken for, it is a real decision.

It carries no page number. Chicago lists the dedication among the display pages, with the half title and the title page, which are counted in the roman sequence but print no folio and no running head. KDP says the dedication “only contains page numbers and page headers if it extends beyond one page,” which is another way of saying that it should not extend beyond one page. More on which pages drop their numbers in running heads and folios. The dedication is also left out of the table of contents, since nobody navigates to it.

How it is set

The 1982 Chicago Manual of Style (13th edition, §19.49) has the most specific instruction we found, and it is still a good default:

A dedication is normally placed on a recto page by itself. It is usually set in the same type size as the text (if only two words, it might be a size larger), either centered or flush left or right or indented to match other display matter, and placed on the page with the same sinkage as the first line of text in a chapter.

Sinkage is the empty space above the first line of a chapter opening, the drop that makes chapter openings look deliberate. Tying the dedication to it means the line sits about where the chapter text will later begin, a third of the way down or so, rather than at the top of the page. Our front matter guide puts it a little above the optical centre instead. Both are conventions, and both look intended. What looks wrong is a dedication pinned to the top margin, which reads as a page whose heading has gone missing.

In practice:

  • No heading. Never a line reading Dedication above it. The empty page is what marks it.
  • Text size, or one step up for something as short as For Anna. Italic is common and optional.
  • Centered, unless the book’s other display pages are set flush left, in which case match them.
  • No folio, no running head, and no drop cap or other chapter-opening ornament.

A dedication written as a letter, like C. S. Lewis’s below, is set as a short text block, still on its own page and still without a heading, and is easier to read flush left than centered.

In the ebook

An EPUB has no fixed pages, so “recto” and “sinkage” become approximations. The dedication becomes its own section, which the EPUB 3 structural semantics vocabulary even has a name for: dedication, “an inscription at the front of the work, typically addressed in tribute to one or more persons close to the author.” Readers see it as a screen with one line on it.

Keep the space above that line modest. A large top margin in an ebook stylesheet is scaled by the reader’s type size, and on a phone with large text it can push a two-line dedication onto a second screen.

The cost that matters more is the sample. Amazon’s Look Inside preview starts at the first page of the file, not at chapter one, and shows 10% of an ebook and 20% of a paperback, percentages KDP says cannot be adjusted. Everything before the story spends part of that. A one-line dedication is a cheap page to spend, far cheaper than a two-page contents list for a novel or an epigraph from a better-known writer. A dedication that runs to a full page of private prose is the expensive kind, and the arithmetic is in what Amazon’s sample shows.

Five real dedications

Each of these is quoted from the first edition or from a reliable transcription of it, and each shows a different way of doing it.

The inscription. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818, first edition):

To William Godwin, Author of Political Justice, Caleb Williams, &c. These volumes are respectfully inscribed by the Author.

Godwin was her father. The first edition was published anonymously, so the most personal line in the book is signed the Author and names him by his works rather than his relationship to her. Formal dedications of this kind (“respectfully inscribed”) were ordinary in 1818 and are rare now.

The plain name, with history. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925): Once again to Zelda. Two of the four words, once again, tell you there is a history without telling you what it is. That is about as much private information as a dedication can carry before the stranger reading it feels like an eavesdropper.

The sentence. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926): This book is for Hadley and for John Hadley Nicanor. His wife and his son, in one line with no explanation of either. Written as a sentence rather than a label, it sounds like speech.

The verse. A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), dedicated “To Her,” generally read as his wife, Daphne. The first lines run: “Hand in hand we come / Christopher Robin and I / To lay this book in your lap.” It works in a children’s book because it is in the book’s own voice.

The letter. C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), dedicated to his goddaughter Lucy Barfield, opens: “I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books.” The rest of the letter, a short paragraph, says she is now too old for fairy tales and will one day be old enough to read them again. Most dedications would be spoiled by explaining themselves; this one gets away with it because the explanation is about the book.

Writing your own

The Chicago Manual of Style leaves the whole thing to the author: whether to have a dedication at all, to whom, and the phrasing. Its 1982 edition offered a few suggestions, which still hold up:

  • “Dedicated to” is unnecessary. “A simple ‘To’ is sufficient.” For works equally well, and so does a bare name.
  • You do not have to say who the person is, or give their full name. Life dates for someone who has died are not required either, though they are permitted.
  • Jokes date. Chicago warned that a humorous dedication “will very likely lose its humor with time.” That is a judgment about serious nonfiction more than about a comic novel, but it is worth asking whether the joke will still land in ten years.

Most dedications that work follow one of a few patterns:

  • The name alone. For Anna. To my mother. It reads as complete because it is.
  • Name plus one clause that only the person will fully understand: For M., who asked what happened next.
  • In memory. In memory of my father, 1941–2019. The dates are optional; the restraint is not.
  • Several people in one line, as Hemingway did. After two or three names it becomes a list, and a list belongs in the acknowledgments.
  • The letter, for a book with a story behind it. Keep it short enough to fit one printed page, or it will cost you two pages in print and more than one screen in the ebook.

And a few things to check before the book goes to print:

  • Would the person want to be named? A private nickname, a child’s name or an ex-partner’s initials will be printed in every copy and indexed by every retailer that shows a preview.
  • Will it still be true in five years? You can change the ebook later. You cannot change the paperback copies already on shelves.
  • Does each book in a series need its own? Usually yes. Different people helped with different books, and readers notice when every volume is dedicated to the same person.
  • Is it in the front, alone, on the right? If the dedication shares a page with the copyright notice or the contents, it has stopped being a dedication and become a line of type.

In Nueel, the dedication is one of the front-matter roles in the book’s outline rather than a formatted paragraph, so the page takes the front matter’s roman numbering, never gets a chapter opening or a drop cap, and goes wherever the front matter goes. That is our product, so weigh this as a pitch: you can see what your own front pages look like set properly in the free preview, which typesets your first chapter without an account.

The rest of the book is written for every reader who opens it. The dedication is written for one of them, so it should read as finished to that person even if nobody else understands it.

Sources

Common questions

Where does the dedication go in a book?
On a right-hand page of its own, directly after the copyright page and before the epigraph and the contents. That is the order the Chicago Manual of Style gives and the one KDP's own formatting help describes. It is a convention rather than a rule any printer or store enforces, but it is followed so consistently that a dedication anywhere else usually reads as a mistake.
What is the difference between a dedication and acknowledgments?
A dedication names one person, or a very few, and gives no reasons; it is a gift. Acknowledgments thank everyone who helped make the book and say what each of them did; they are a debt being paid. The dedication sits in the front matter on its own page. Acknowledgments can go at the front or the back, and fiction increasingly puts them at the back.
Should a dedication page have a heading?
No. A dedication is recognized by its position and its isolation on the page, so a heading reading Dedication is redundant, and it is one of the clearest signs of a book laid out in a word processor. The page also carries no page number and no running head.
Do I have to write 'Dedicated to'?
No. The Chicago Manual of Style called the word dedicated superfluous as long ago as 1982 and suggested a simple To instead. The word For works just as well, and so does a bare name. You also do not need to explain who the person is or give their full name.
Can I dedicate a book to more than one person?
Yes. Hemingway dedicated The Sun Also Rises to his wife and his son in one line. Past two or three names, though, a dedication starts turning into acknowledgments, and the people named lose the thing a dedication gives them, which is being singled out.
Does the dedication count in Amazon's Look Inside sample?
Yes. KDP's reading sample runs from the start of the file: 10% of an ebook and 20% of a paperback or hardcover. A one-line dedication costs one page or one screen of that sample, which is cheap. A dedication that runs to a full page of prose costs more, and in an ebook it may spill onto a second screen.

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