Every other part of your book is something you decided. The copyright page is a form you have never filled in, written in language you have only ever skimmed, and it sits on the second page where everyone sees it.
It is also much shorter than people fear.
What has to be there
The copyright notice. Three parts: the © symbol, the year of first publication, and the name of the rights holder.
Copyright © 2026 R. Nightingale
That is the substantive content of the page. In most of the world copyright exists from the moment you write something — the notice records a claim rather than creating one, and its practical job is to make ownership obvious to anyone who looks.
What is conventional
Everything else is convention rather than requirement, and all of it is optional.
A rights statement. The familiar "All rights reserved" paragraph, saying reproduction requires permission with the usual exception for brief quotations in a review. If you would rather license the work openly, a Creative Commons statement replaces it — but it must replace it, not sit alongside it. A page that reserves all rights and then grants some is contradicting itself.
Edition. "First edition", and the year. Useful once there is a second.
ISBN, if you have one. Not needed for a Kindle ebook, which Amazon identifies its own way. For print, KDP will give you a free one, with the trade-off that it lists KDP as the publisher and cannot be used elsewhere. One you buy keeps the imprint yours and travels with the book.
Your imprint, if you have invented one, and a city. A self-publisher naming their own imprint is entirely normal.
Credits. Cover designer, editor, illustrator — generous, and often contractually required.
What to leave out
Traditional copyright pages carry things belonging to a publishing apparatus you do not have: Cataloguing-in-Publication data from a national library, a printer's key, a chain of imprints and distributors.
Copying that in does not make a book look professional. It makes it look like it is imitating one, which reads worse than a page that is simply short and correct.
The disclaimer, and when it is wrong
Novels usually carry some version of:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A memoir must not carry this. Nor should a biography, a history, or anything presenting itself as true. It is a statement about your book, and on a memoir it is a false one — you would be asserting that the people in your own life are invented.
This is the mistake a template makes, because a template that emits the same page for every book cannot know which kind it is — and the author does not remove it, because they trusted the tool. Our front matter generator asks whether the book is fiction for exactly this reason, and the disclaimer only appears when you say it is.
If your memoir needs protective language, it needs different language: something about events recounted to the best of your recollection, and names changed to protect privacy. That is a different claim and, if the book is sensitive, one worth showing a lawyer.
Where it goes
The copyright page is the back of the title page. Always. They are two sides of one leaf, which is why they are never separated and why the title page must fall on a right-hand page.
Set it smaller than body text — a size or two down — and align it consistently. It is the one page in a book nobody is meant to enjoy reading.
The order around it: any "also by this author" page first, then the title page, then copyright on its reverse, then a dedication if you have one. About the author goes at the back, where a reader who enjoyed the book will look for it.
Getting one written
Our front matter generator produces a copyright page from a handful of fields — title, author, year, rights choice, and whether the book is fiction — along with the title page, dedication and the rest. It runs entirely in your browser, and the output is meant to be pasted into the manuscript you already have open.
Then format the book: Kindle and KDP, EPUB, or a print interior.
One caveat worth stating plainly. Standard wording is fine for an ordinary book you wrote yourself. It is not drafted for your jurisdiction, and it does not cover a co-authored work, licensed images, quoted song lyrics, or anything you did not write. If your book involves any of those, the copyright page is worth ten minutes of a lawyer's time — considerably less than the alternative.