What it means
A dedication is the author's personal inscription to someone — a partner, a parent, a friend, occasionally a reader or a city. It is one of the few pages in a book that belongs entirely to the author and it is expected to be short: a line or two, rarely more than a short paragraph.
It appears in the front matter on its own recto, conventionally right after the copyright page and before the epigraph or the contents, set without a heading (the word "Dedication" is never printed) and often in italics, centred or placed on the upper third of the page. The verso behind it is left blank.
A dedication is different from the acknowledgements, which thank the people who helped make the book and can run for pages, and from an epigraph, which quotes someone else's words rather than offering the author's own.
Make the book, not the checklist
Describe a book or upload a manuscript. Bindery writes with you, typesets in LaTeX, sizes the spine from the real page count and produces printer-validated files — the watermarked proof is always free.
Start Free