Every chapter starts with a heading, and every heading answers two questions: which chapter is this, and what is it called. Books answer them in a handful of established ways, and the only real mistake is answering them differently in different chapters.
The number
Four conventions, all correct:
| Style | Example | Where you see it |
|---|---|---|
| Word and spelled number | Chapter One | Literary fiction, most trade novels |
| Word and numeral | Chapter 1 | Nonfiction, genre fiction, textbooks |
| Spelled number alone | One | Literary fiction wanting quiet |
| Numeral alone | 1 | Thrillers, design-led books, short chapters |
Spelled numbers read as more formal and take up more room — Chapter Twenty-Seven is a wide heading. Numerals are neutral and scan faster, which matters in a book with sixty short chapters or one a reader will navigate by number. Pick by the kind of book, then keep it.
Two things not to do. Do not mix — Chapter One through Chapter Nine and then Chapter 10 is a common accident of typing quickly. And do not number by hand in a document that also auto-numbers headings; Word will happily give you Chapter 1 Chapter 1.
The title
A chapter may have a title as well as a number, a title instead of a number, or a number alone.
- Number only is the default for most fiction. Chapters are not episodes.
- Number and title suits nonfiction, where the title tells the reader what the chapter covers, and fiction with a strong structural game — chapters named for their narrator, their date, their place.
- Title only works when the titles carry the structure themselves and nothing is gained by counting them.
If chapters have titles, all of them do. A book where chapters one to four are titled and chapter five is just Five looks like the author ran out.
Keep titles short. In print they have to fit on a line at display size; in an ebook they become entries in the navigation menu, where a long title is truncated on a phone.
Prologues, epilogues, parts and interludes
A prologue and an epilogue are chapters that are not numbered. They get a heading in the same style as the chapters — the same size, the same position — with the word instead of a number. They count as chapters for navigation: a reader should be able to jump to them.
Parts sit above chapters. Part One gets a page of its own, a recto, usually with nothing else on it, and the chapter numbering either continues across parts (the usual choice) or restarts (rarer, and confusing unless the parts are very distinct).
Interludes — short sections between chapters, in another voice or time — are chapters with a different label. Same heading style, or a deliberately different one if the difference is the point. Either way, consistent.
Case, size, and the space above
Headings are conventionally set in one of three cases: small capitals or capitals (CHAPTER ONE), title case (Chapter One), or, less often, lower case for a modern look. The heading is larger than the body text but not by much in a novel — display type in a book is quieter than on a poster — and it sits a third or so of the way down the first page of the chapter, leaving white space above it. Why chapters open low on the page, and on the right, is in chapter openings, page numbers and running heads.
None of the sizing applies to an ebook, where the reader controls type size. There, the heading should be relatively larger than the body — one and a half times, say — and centred, and that is all you can decide.
The thing that actually matters: the heading style
Everything above is taste. This is not.
In a Word manuscript, a chapter heading should be styled as a heading — Heading 1 — not typed as a paragraph and made bigger and bolder by hand. The two look identical on screen. They are not identical to software:
- Kindle and EPUB navigation is built from headings. A real Heading 1 becomes an entry in the book's table of contents and in the Kindle "Go to" menu. A bold paragraph becomes a bold paragraph, and the book has no chapters as far as the device is concerned.
- Page breaks come from headings. A formatter starts a new page (in print, a new right-hand page) at each chapter heading. A bold paragraph runs on from the previous chapter's last line.
- Consistency comes free. Change the heading style once and every chapter changes. Forty hand-styled headings are forty chances to differ.
Our formatters read Heading 1 as a chapter and also recognise the chapters that were typed as plain paragraphs — a short line that looks like Chapter 3 or THREE is offered as one, and you confirm. The heading then gets one style — case, size, and how far down the page it starts are all yours to set — applied to every chapter, and becomes the navigation in the Kindle and EPUB editions. Kindle: EPUB or Word? goes into what Amazon's own converter does with headings, which is the same thing, less forgivingly.
The short version
- Number chapters one way — Chapter One, Chapter 1, One or 1 — and keep it.
- Title all chapters or none.
- Prologue and epilogue are unnumbered chapters in the same style.
- Style headings as headings in the manuscript. That single choice is what gives the ebook its navigation and the print book its page breaks.