Most restaurants print a little story on the menu. The founder’s grandmother, and the sauce recipe that came over on a boat. Almost nobody reads it. Diners go straight to the food, and then the waiter walks over, tells them what’s good tonight, and in that one minute they decide what to order.
The front of a book works the same way. Your preface is the story on the menu, and your introduction is the waiter. Plenty of authors pour their hearts into the preface and treat the introduction as a chore. They’ve got it backwards.
I’ve written 113+ books under my own name and 54+ as a ghostwriter, so I’ve had to sort out these opening pages more than a few times. The confusion annoys me, though I understand where it comes from. Four different names float around for the pages before chapter one, people use them interchangeably, and a few of them get used for the wrong kind of book entirely. Each one has a job. Get the jobs straight and you’ll stop wasting your best material on the page your readers skip.
| Page | Who writes it | Its job | Where it sits | In nonfiction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Foreword | Someone else, ideally a name readers recognize | Vouches for you and lends credibility | First, after the table of contents | Optional, many books skip it |
| Preface | You, near the end | Tells why you wrote the book | After the foreword | Optional, and most readers skip it |
| Introduction | You, near the end | Tells readers what the book will do for them | After the preface and any acknowledgments | Almost always needed, two to four pages |
| Prologue | A novelist | Shows what happened before the story starts | Before the story begins | No, prologues are for fiction |
What is the difference between a preface and an introduction?
A preface tells the reader why you wrote the book. An introduction tells the reader what the book is going to do for them.
The preface is about you.
What triggered the book, what you’d been chewing on, the moment you decided somebody had to write it. Length is up to you.
You’ve read a hundred of them even if you don’t remember any: “I’d been thinking about this book for years. Then a client came to me with a problem, and I realized everybody has that problem and nobody had written the book about it.” Every preface is some version of that story, told well or badly.
The introduction is about the reader. Somebody opens your book, and the first thing they read is the introduction, so I treat it as a sales tool. It tells them what’s wrong in their world and what changes once they’ve read the book. By the end of it, the reader should be saying, “Okay, here’s my money.”
That difference decides who reads which page.
People who already like you read the preface. Everybody else reads the introduction, and they’re deciding whether to spend money on you.
Watch: Preface, Introduction, or Foreword: What's the Difference?, Kristen Corrects, Inc.
Where the foreword fits
A foreword comes from somebody else.
Another person, ideally one your readers recognize, writes it to vouch for you and your book. You don’t write your own foreword, and you don’t call your preface a foreword because it sounds more important.
I’ve covered who to ask and how to ask them in my piece on book foreword strategy, so I won’t repeat it here. For this article, the foreword matters for one reason. It’s borrowed credibility, and it sits in front of your preface and your introduction, so the reader meets your endorser before they meet you.
The standard order for a nonfiction book runs like this. Title page, then the copyright page, a dedication if you want one, the table of contents, the foreword, the preface, a short acknowledgments section if it lives up front, and then the introduction. Chapter one follows.
Some publishers treat the introduction as the start of the main text and number its pages that way. Doesn’t that tell you how much weight it carries? My book Publish Your Book covers the publishing side, and you don’t need every one of these pages. A lot of good nonfiction runs with no foreword and no preface at all. Almost none of it runs without an introduction.
Should a nonfiction book have a prologue?
No. Prologues are for fiction.
A prologue is what happened before the story starts. Picture a novel that opens with a man walking out of prison. The prologue tells you he went in for this and this and this, and now he’s trying to be a good person. Then the story jumps forward and the real book begins. The reader, or the listener on an audiobook, can skip past all of that and get to the story.
Nonfiction doesn’t have a “before the story” in that sense. Whatever led up to your book goes in the preface, and whatever the reader needs to know to use the book goes in the introduction. A prologue on a business book reads like somebody borrowed a novel’s furniture without knowing what it was for.
I’ve caught myself calling a preface a prologue in a working session. For some reason the wrong word comes out, and I correct it fast.
Fiction writers should think hard about prologues too. The film version of The Lord of the Rings opens with a long narrated history of the Ring before anybody meets a hobbit. I believe they could have cut it.
A prologue on a business book reads like somebody borrowed a novel’s furniture without knowing what it was for.
Movies are hard for me anyway. When I watch one, I dissect the plot and the writing so much that I have to tell my brain to turn off and just eat the popcorn. A slow history lesson before the story starts makes that harder for any viewer, and it does the same to a reader. If your novel’s first pages are history the reader hasn’t been given a reason to care about yet, read my take on opening pages that aren’t hooking anyone before you keep it.
How long should a book introduction be?
Two to four pages. I figure about 500 words to a page, so you’re looking at somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 words.
Long enough to make the case. Short enough that somebody standing in a bookstore aisle, or scrolling the free preview on a retailer’s site, gets to the end before they lose interest. The introduction has to carry a reader from “I’m thinking about this book” to “I’m buying this book,” and that takes a few pages of real argument. A single paragraph can’t do it. Ten pages lose people before the pitch lands.
Put these in yours. The reader’s problem, stated in terms they’d use themselves. What their life or their business looks like once the problem is handled. Enough of your own experience that they believe you’ve been there. A promise about what the book will give them. Then stop.
What I leave out is the chapter-by-chapter tour. Some introductions walk you through the book: Part One covers this, Chapter Three covers that, and in Chapter Seven we’ll discuss the other thing. I hate those.
Your table of contents already does that damn job, and it does it in a format the reader can scan in ten seconds. Spending your sales page repeating it is like the waiter reading you the menu out loud while you’re holding the menu.
Keep the reading level easy. Seventh or eighth grade suits most nonfiction, and the introduction is no place to show off your vocabulary.
People who already like you read the preface. Everybody else reads the introduction, and they’re deciding. – Richard LoweShare on X
Write the introduction last
I write the introduction near the end, and the preface too. By then I understand the whole book. After all, I wrote it.
Writing the introduction first sounds logical, since it’s the first thing a reader sees, and it’s a trap. At the start of a book you think you know what it’s about. Forty thousand words later, the argument has shifted, a chapter you were sure of got cut, and the strongest material turned up in places you didn’t plan. An introduction written on day one promises a book that doesn’t exist anymore, so you end up rewriting it. I despise rewrites. They waste time and money, and this one is avoidable.
Expect to revise both pages a few times anyway. The preface and the introduction come together close to the end of the process, and they get tightened until they’re short and to the point. That’s normal polishing. A rewrite from scratch because the book moved underneath you is the part I despise.
On a ghostwriting project, the author owes me a list of bullet points before either page gets drafted. For the preface, the list is everything that led them to write the book, twenty items or however many there are. For the introduction, it’s everything they want the reader to hear. Then the story gets written around those points. An author who can’t think of anything is fine too, because by the end of the manuscript there’s enough in the book itself to build both pages.
What belongs in a preface?
Start with the trigger. Something happened that made you sit down and write this book, and the preface tells that story. A conversation, a failure, a pattern you kept seeing, a question nobody could answer for you. Give the reader the moment in enough detail that they can see it.
After the trigger, you can add a little about who you are and why the subject matters to you personally. Then add a short paragraph on what the rest of the book covers. Write that paragraph late, for the same reason you write the introduction late.
A preface is also a good place for a brief thank-you. Keep it tight: one to three people or groups who made the book possible, named in a sentence. If you want to thank your editor, your spouse, your first boss and everyone who read a draft, put a fuller acknowledgments section at the back of the book. Readers who care will find it there, and readers who don’t won’t have to wade through it to reach chapter one.
Leave out anything the reader needs to use the book. Why?
Because of what readers do with prefaces.
Do readers skip the preface of a book?
Most of them do. My guess is that around 80 percent skip it. Nobody I’m aware of has measured that, so treat the number as my opinion. I’d bet on it, though.
How do you open a nonfiction book yourself? You see the word “Preface,” you know it’s going to be about the author, and you flip ahead looking for the page that speaks to you. Readers are busy. A page that announces it’s about the writer gets skipped the way diners skip the story on the menu.
That has a practical consequence. If you bury something important in the preface, most of your readers will never see it. Your definition of a key term or the one framework every chapter depends on doesn’t belong in a page four out of five people skip. Put it in the introduction or in chapter one.
Repeating yourself between the preface and the introduction is fine
Authors worry about this constantly, and it drives me up the wall. They write both pages, spot the overlap, and want to cut it.
It’s okay to repeat things that are in the preface. Since most people skip the preface, most readers meet that material for the first time in the introduction. The repetition only shows up for the minority who read both, and those readers already like you enough to forgive it.
If the repetition turns into a real problem, your beta readers will pick up on it. That’s their job, and it’s a good reason to get a few fresh readers on the manuscript before it goes to an editor. I’ve written more about how beta readers and proposals fit into getting published. Trust them on this question more than your own nerves.
One more check before anybody else sees it. Read both pages out loud. You’ll be amazed how many things you find when you read aloud that you’d never catch reading in your head, because your mind fills in what it expects to see. Clunky repetition sounds clunky when you hear it. Repetition that serves the reader sounds like emphasis.
Is a book introduction the same as the back cover copy?
No, and authors mix them up because both are trying to sell the book.
Back cover copy is short and punchy. It has a few seconds to make a browser turn the book over or click the cover, and it competes with endorsements and a barcode for space. The same goes for the description on a retailer page, and if yours isn’t pulling its weight, read why a book description doesn’t convert.
Your introduction gets the reader who has already picked the book up. They’ve given you a few minutes, and you have two to four pages to close the sale. An introduction that reads like a blown-up blurb wastes those pages, and I hate seeing it. Borrow lines and ideas from the back cover if they work, but the introduction has room to tell a story and make a promise. Treat the back cover as the sign out front and the introduction as the conversation inside.
My take
Spend your effort on the introduction, because that’s the page that sells the book. Most readers skip the preface, so keep it short. Write the introduction last, once you know what the whole manuscript does, and give it two to four pages. Repeat whatever matters from the preface. Treat the back cover as the sign out front and the introduction as the conversation inside. Save prologues for novels.
Getting the opening pages right
Working on a nonfiction book right now? Write the chapters first. Collect your bullet points for the preface and the introduction as you go, whenever something occurs to you.
When the manuscript is close to done, draft the introduction as a two to four page sales pitch aimed at the reader’s problem, then draft the preface as the short story of why you wrote it. Line up a foreword if you have the right person. Skip the prologue unless you’re writing fiction. Read everything out loud, hand it to your beta readers, and don’t panic about overlap.
An author who spends weeks polishing the page readers skip, then knocks out the page that decides whether anybody buys the book in an afternoon, has it upside down. That makes me crazy. The publishing and marketing hub covers the rest of what goes into a finished book, and if you want help getting your manuscript from draft to published, my book publishing services handle it. Let the story on the menu be as charming as you like. Just make sure the waiter knows what he’s selling.
Front matter is one of many decisions in self-publishing. My book Publish Your Book walks through them, written after more than 100 titles since my first in 2016.
