There are two ways to add a "dedication" page to the beginning of your book, before the Table of Contents.
This is very easy to do, but it has very limited formatting options. The dedication text will be either centered or left-aligned, it will be in italics, and you will not be able to add newlines.
This will give you a lot more formatting options, but it's more complicated. With that said, if you're familiar with writing in Markua, it's pretty straightforward, and we have a working example below that you can copy and paste into your book.
In this article, we'll show you how both options work.
Option 1: Adding a Dedication Page to Your Book Using a Form in Your Book's Settings
To easily add a "Dedication" page to the beginning of your book, go here:
https://leanpub.com/YOUR_BOOK/settings/dedication
...making sure to replace YOUR_BOOK with your book's unique web address.
You can also find a link to the Dedication page from your book's Overview page:
On the Dedication page, you can enter your text here:
Once you're ready, click the blue "Update Dedication" button.
The next time you create a preview of your book, you will see a page at the beginning of the book, with your dedication text, like this:
Option 2: Adding a Dedication Page Using Markua
One cool fact about Markua is that you can move the Table of Contents around using the {toc} directive.
Here's how you can add a dedication page at the top of your manuscript:
This text at the very top of a book manuscript will appear on a page in the book before the Table of Contents, which we are manually positioning in the book using the `{toc}` directive on a line by itself below here.
You can use this page as a conventional "dedication" page.
You can have multiple lines and do things like **bold** and *italicize* your text.
C> You can also center text like this.
{toc}
{mainmatter}
# Chapter One
Welcome to the Leanpub Browser book writing editor! This page is where you will be writing your book. This file is a working, real example of how to write a book chapter in plain text with Markdown formatting (which we'll explain briefly below).
Note that you need to type this after your dedication content, and before the first chapter:
{toc}
{mainmatter}
The {toc} directive moves the Table of Contents after the content before it, and the {mainmatter} directive is necessary to say to Leanpub's book generators "The main book content starts here".
Here's what the dedication page will look like using the manuscript content above:
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