What Belongs on a Copyright Page

Nobody reads the copyright page. That’s the joke, and it’s true of readers. Librarians read it. Cataloguers read it. Rights departments read it. Anyone deciding whether your book can sit on a shelf in a public building reads it, and if the information isn’t there, they stop reading and move on. You won’t hear about it. The book just never appears anywhere.

Of every page in a self-published book, this is the one I’d call the most neglected, and the neglect is expensive. Authors spend months on a cover and ten minutes copying a template onto this page, then wonder why no library carries the book. What belongs on it, what to keep off it, and the one item most self-publishers leave out are simple enough, and that last one costs them the library market entirely.

What goes on a copyright page?

The copyright notice. The word Copyright or the symbol, the year of first publication, and the name of the rights holder. If you formed a company to publish under, decide which name holds the rights and use it consistently, because a mismatch between the notice and the registration is an unpleasant thing to discover later.

The ISBN, one per format. Self-publishers lose days on this. Hardback, paperback, ebook and audiobook each need their own. They aren’t interchangeable, retailers treat them as separate products, and a page listing one ISBN for a book available in three formats confuses every system that reads it. List them all, labeled.

The one-ISBN shortcut is a false economy. It saves an afternoon and a little money, and it hands every retailer and library system a record that doesn’t match what they’re holding. The only sign of the damage is sales that never arrive.

The rights statement. All rights reserved, plus whatever permissions language your situation needs. If you’re publishing under a license that allows reuse, say so here in plain terms.

The Library of Congress number. The one people skip. More on it below, because it needs its own section.

Credits. Cover artist, interior designer, editor, indexer, photographer, anyone whose work is in the book. Name or business name. These belong here and I put them on every book I’m involved with, because the people who make a book look professional deserve the line.

Edition and printing information. First edition, printing number, publisher name and place. Useful to cataloguers and to you, when someone asks which printing has the corrected chapter nine.

Disclaimers, where the book needs them. The names-have-been-changed note for memoir, the not-medical-advice note for health, the fiction disclaimer. Put the real one in, not a generic block copied from another book.

The Library of Congress numbers, and which one you can get

Two programs, they do different things, and the names get mixed up constantly. Getting this right is the difference between a book libraries can order and one they can’t.

The Preassigned Control Number program issues a Library of Congress Control Number before publication. You apply as the publisher, you get a number, you print it on the copyright page. It’s free, it’s the route most self-publishers can use, and it’s what lets libraries find and catalogue your book in the systems they already use.

Cataloging in Publication produces the full catalogue data block, the paragraph of bibliographic information you’ve seen in traditionally published books. It has eligibility rules built around established publishers with multiple titles and distribution history, and most self-publishers don’t qualify. There are commercial services that will produce a similar block for a fee, and opinions differ on how much they’re worth.

Apply before the book is printed. That catches people, because both programs work on pre-publication information, and a book already in print is too late for this round.

What it costs you to skip it: acquisitions librarians work from catalogue records, and a book with no control number takes manual effort to add to a collection. Some will do that work for a local author. Most won’t, and you’ll never know it happened.

That silence is the worst of it. Nobody sends a rejection letter. A librarian who’d happily have ordered a local author’s book moves on to one that’s easier to process, and the author goes on believing libraries just aren’t interested. The program is free and the application is short, which makes skipping it a very expensive shortcut in publishing.

What doesn’t belong on a copyright page?

I have strong opinions about this one, because it keeps happening to authors I work with.

A designer sets your interior, does good work, and adds her company’s tagline next to her credit. Not her name. Her name belongs there. Her marketing line. Nobody asked you.

The credit belongs on the page. The advertising doesn’t, and the distinction is simple: a name identifies who did the work, a tagline sells their services to your readers using your book as the medium. So the things that stay off: logos, taglines and straplines, service URLs, promotional copy for anyone’s business including your own, and QR codes. Your marketing goes in the back matter, where readers expect it and where it doesn’t sit inside a legal record.

State it as policy instead of fighting case by case.

When you brief a designer, formatter or printer, tell them the credit line is the name or business name and nothing else. Stated up front it’s a standard. Raised afterward it’s a complaint, and you’ll be negotiating about whether the tagline is tasteful instead of about whether it’s suitable.

One more, since it’s the reason this article exists. If a vendor adds a line implying something about how your book was made, and you didn’t approve it, that line is a claim about your work sitting on a page that makes claims for a living. Remove it.

Where does the copyright page go in a book?

The copyright page sits on the verso, the left-hand page, immediately after the title page. Front matter order runs half title, title page, copyright page, dedication, then contents. Set it small, usually a point or two below body text, and left-aligned or centered to match your interior. It should look like a record, because it’s one. Nobody is reading it for pleasure and design flourishes here look like a category error. Keep it to one page. If your permissions and credits don’t fit, permissions can continue onto the following page, as they do in anthologies and academic work.

Do I need to register my copyright separately?

Different question, and authors conflate the two constantly.

The notice on your copyright page is a statement of claim. Copyright exists from the moment the work is fixed in tangible form, so the notice announces something already true.

Registration is a separate act with a government office, and it buys you things the notice alone doesn’t, including the ability to bring an infringement action and, if you register in time, access to statutory damages and legal fees. For a book you’re publishing commercially, registration is usually worth the fee and the form. (See how to register a book copyright) The page and the registration should agree. Same rights holder, same year, same title. Sorting that out before publication is easier than amending it after.

I’d register every book I planned to sell. The fee is small next to what it protects, and authors who skip it tend to learn why it mattered on the day someone copies their book, when it’s too late to do anything cheap about it.

The boring page that decides things

I’ve been through this with enough authors to know how it goes. The copyright page is the last thing anyone thinks about, assembled at midnight from whatever the template had in it, and it’s the page carrying the identifiers that determine where your book can go.

Twenty minutes of attention. The notice right, an ISBN for each format, the control number applied for in time, credits for the people who earned them, and nobody’s marketing on it.

Good books get shut out of libraries and catalogs over a page that takes twenty minutes to get right, and every template and formatting service that ships it half-empty shares the blame. Fill it in properly and the only people who’ll ever study it are the librarians and cataloguers deciding where your book goes, which is exactly who it’s for.

For the rest of what a finished book needs, my publishing hub covers the process, and the copyright and legal hub covers the rights side. If you’d rather have all of it handled, including the parts that decide whether the book can be ordered at all, that’s what my ghostwriting service does.

From the author

Publish Your Book
Publish Your Book covers the rest of the self-publishing process around the copyright page, with five platforms compared and the lessons from more than a hundred titles I have published since 2016.

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