Open any novel on your shelf and count the pages before the story starts. A half title. The title page. The copyright block in small type. A dedication, maybe an epigraph. Readers flip past all of it in four seconds — and its absence is the single fastest way a book announces it was self-published carelessly.
The last post designed the pages your manuscript sits on. This one is about everything wrapped around it: the front matter, and the cover.
A note before we start: front matter and covers are among the newest parts of Charc, and they’re still in active development during the alpha. Everything below works today — but this is the area of the app most likely to grow and shift before it reaches its final form.
What front matter is
The Front Matter tab holds the pages a reader passes before chapter one: half title, title page, series page, copyright, dedication, epigraph, author’s note, table of contents. Each is a real page with its own layout — not a text field that gets typeset for you, but a page you can see and adjust.
Each one can also be included or left out of any export independently, which matters more than it first sounds: a submission manuscript wants almost none of this, a paperback wants nearly all of it, and an ebook sits in between. You build the pages once; the export decides which of them ride along.
Built from templates, not from scratch
Every page starts from a template rather than a blank. Title pages come in classic centered, modern left-aligned, and screenplay variants; there are templates for the half title, series page, dedication, epigraph, copyright, and author’s note, plus framed, split, and ornament-only layouts for anything that doesn’t fit a category.
The division of labor is clean: templates set position and typography, and the words are always yours. Pick the classic centered title page, type your title, and the result already looks like the front of a real book — because the layout decisions were made the way a book designer makes them.
Putting a page into the body of the book
Here’s the part that turns front matter from a formality into a design tool: any page you build can go into the body of the book rather than the front. A part title before an act. A full-bleed image between chapters. A custom heading for the one chapter that needs to look different from the rule you set in your format.
The outline is where this happens. + pg on a scene attaches a page ahead of that scene; + hd on a chapter replaces its generated heading. Everything the format produces automatically can be overridden this way — one place at a time, without abandoning the rule everywhere else.
A page can also be set to element mode, which makes it flow inside the text column instead of taking a page of its own — right for an ornament or a section marker that shouldn’t force a page break. Element-mode pages are marked ELEMENT in the picker so you can tell the two apart before you choose.
Covers
An ebook cover is a single front panel. A print cover is a different animal entirely: a spread — back cover, spine, and front — sized together as one piece of artwork, because that’s what actually gets wrapped around a book.
The part people get wrong is the spine, and Charc does the math for you: spine width follows your page count and paper stock, so the cover you design fits the book you actually wrote — not the one you estimated three drafts ago. Dust jackets add inside flaps to the same spread, and trim presets for the common print services set every dimension so you start from their spec instead of reverse-engineering it.
Print-ready means print-ready
When a cover leaves Charc for a printer, it exports as PDF/X-1a in CMYK — the format print services expect, and the thing that stops colors shifting between your screen and the press. Bleed is handled for you.
Best of all: artwork below print resolution is flagged before you export, not discovered when the proof arrives looking soft. The proof copy that comes back wrong costs a week; the warning costs a second.
The Front matter & covers reference documents every template and control. Next up: what happens when the book stops being a solo project.