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. If you want it written for you rather than explained, our front matter generator produces one from a handful of fields, free. The rest of this page is what those fields mean.
The template
This is a complete copyright page for a self-published book. Replace the bracketed parts; delete any line that does not apply.
Copyright © [year] [rights holder]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the author, except for brief quotations in a review.
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.
First edition, [year]
ISBN [978-0-000000-00-0] (paperback)
ISBN [978-0-000000-01-7] (ebook)
Cover design by [name]
Edited by [name]
[Imprint name], [city]
[website]
The fiction paragraph comes out for anything that is not fiction. That one sentence is the most important thing on this page, and it has its own section below.
What each line is for
| Line | Required? | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Copyright notice | Yes | Records who owns the work and from when |
| Rights statement | Convention | Says what readers may and may not do with it |
| Fiction disclaimer | Fiction only | Asserts the people in the book are invented |
| Edition and year | Convention | Useful once there is a second edition |
| ISBN | Print, usually | Identifies each edition to shops and libraries |
| Credits | Convention | Cover, editing, illustration — often contractually required |
| Imprint and city | Optional | Who published it, in the traditional form |
Only the first line is doing legal work. The rest is what a copyright page conventionally looks like, and a page with only the first line is still a correct copyright page.
The copyright notice
Three parts: the © symbol, the year of first publication, and the name of the rights holder.
Copyright © 2026 R. Nightingale
Use the name that owns the rights. If you write under a pen name but own the work personally, either is defensible; many authors use the pen name, because the page is public and the legal name is not. If a company you set up owns the work, the company's name goes here.
The year is the year of first publication. A second edition does not change it; it adds an edition line.
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. Registration is a separate step — in the United States notably, it affects what you can claim in a dispute — and a question for a lawyer, not a formatting guide.
The rights statement
The familiar "All rights reserved" paragraph, saying reproduction requires permission with the usual exception for brief quotations in a review. The wording in the template is standard; it is not magic, and shorter versions are fine.
If you would rather license the work openly, a Creative Commons statement replaces it — it does not sit alongside it. A page that reserves all rights and then grants some is contradicting itself.
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:
This is a work of memoir. It reflects the author's present recollection of experiences over time. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.
That is a different claim — true recollection, altered names — and, if the book is sensitive, one worth showing a lawyer.
Nonfiction that gives advice — health, money, law — often adds a sentence saying the book is general information and not a substitute for professional advice. Whether you need it depends on the book, and again on the lawyer.
Edition, ISBN, imprint, credits
Edition. "First edition", and the year. It costs one line now and saves confusion later.
ISBN. 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. Each edition — paperback, hardback, ebook — has its own ISBN, and listing all of them on one copyright page is normal.
Your imprint, if you have invented one, and a city. A self-publisher naming their own imprint is entirely normal, and it reads better than "Independently published".
Credits. Cover designer, editor, illustrator — generous, and often contractually required. Check the licence on any stock photograph on the cover; some require a credit line here.
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, a Library of Congress control number.
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.
Three worked examples
A novel. The full template: notice, rights statement, fiction disclaimer, edition, ISBNs, credits, imprint.
A nonfiction book. The same page with the fiction disclaimer removed, and an advice disclaimer added if the subject calls for one. A book with quoted material may also carry a line of permissions — "Extract from X reproduced by permission of Y" — which is the one part of a copyright page that is not optional when it applies.
A memoir. The same page with the fiction disclaimer removed and the memoir wording in its place. No "any resemblance is coincidental"; the resemblance is the book.
Layout: where it goes and how it is set
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.
The order around it: a half title if you use one, any "also by this author" page, 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.
On the page itself:
- Set it a size or two below body text. It is the one page in a book nobody is meant to enjoy reading, and it should not compete with the pages that are.
- Left-aligned or centred, but consistently. Traditionally the block sits at the foot of the page; at the top is also common in self-published books. Either is fine. Mixing alignments within the block is not.
- Single-spaced, with a blank line between items. No indents.
- No running head or page number on this page. It is front matter, and front matter is unnumbered or numbered in roman, never in the main sequence.
In an ebook the content is the same, but the page competes for the sample space Amazon shows in Look Inside. Some authors move the copyright page to the back of the ebook edition for that reason. Nothing requires it to be at the front of an ebook; the front is where readers expect it, and that is the whole argument for leaving it there.
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. The formatters treat the pages before chapter one as front matter rather than as chapters, so they do not turn up in the navigation.
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.