Copyright Page Generator
Fill in your book's details and get a formatted copyright page — plus an optional title page and disclaimer. Copy the text, or download it as a DOCX or a PDF sized to your trim. It all runs in your browser: no login, and nothing you type here is sent anywhere.
Your book
Only the title and the name matter — everything below is optional.
The copyright notice
What you allow
The rights statement is the paragraph readers, libraries and reviewers actually read.
Disclaimer
Extra pages
A title page goes on the leaf before the copyright page — the right-hand page carrying the title and your name.
ISBNs
One row per format. Leave blank if you are using KDP's free ISBN — Amazon assigns it after you publish, and it does not have to appear inside the book.
Publisher and credits— imprint name, website, cover designer
Page size and type— trim, margins, font
This tool assembles generic, commonly-used wording from the details you enter. It is informational, not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for registering your copyright or for a lawyer where your situation calls for one. Your copyright exists whether or not this page appears in your book — the page tells readers who holds it and what you allow. Read every line before you publish it, and take advice if anything about your rights is contested or unusual.
Copyright © 2026 by [Your name] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright holder, except for brief quotations in a review or article, and other uses permitted by copyright law. First Edition
The DOCX is the one to use. A copyright page is a page inside your manuscript, not a file you upload on its own — open the DOCX, and copy the pages into the front of your book, where they will pick up your own fonts and margins. The PDF is for reading, proofing, and sending to a designer: it uses the typefaces every PDF reader has built in rather than embedding one, so it is not a file KDP would accept as an interior by itself.
What a copyright page is actually for
It is not what creates your copyright. That happens the moment the book is written down — the U.S. Copyright Office's own introduction to copyright is explicit that protection attaches on creation and fixation, and that registration, while it brings real advantages, is not what brings the right into existence. A book with no copyright page is just as protected as one with a page of forbidding paragraphs.
What the page does is answer questions, quickly, for the people who have to ask them. A librarian cataloguing your book wants the year and the edition. A reviewer wants to know whether they may quote you. A foreign publisher, an audiobook producer or a school buying forty copies wants to know who holds the rights and where to write. Every one of those readers is looking at the same page, and a book without one simply makes them go away.
It also does something quieter: it makes a self-published book read like a published one. The front matter is the first thing a reader sees after the cover, and a missing or improvised copyright page is one of the few signals that reliably marks a book out as amateur to anyone who reads a lot of them.
verified 30 August 2026The three things a notice must contain
The Copyright Office sets out the form of notice as three elements: the symbol ©, the year of first publication, and the name of the copyright owner. That is the whole requirement, and everything else on a copyright page is convention — useful convention, but convention. It is worth knowing which part is which before you copy a page of paragraphs out of a book you happen to own.
The same guidance is clear that for anything published from 1 March 1989 the notice is no longer required by law, while still recommending it — particularly for a book that may be sold outside the country it was published in. So the honest framing is: you don't have to, you probably should, and it costs you three lines.
Two details the form of notice does not settle, and this tool asks you about. Whose name.It is the owner's, not necessarily the author's — a pen name, a legal name, an estate, or a company are all correct answers, and the tool defaults the holder to the author name so you only fill it in when they differ. Which year. A first edition carries one; a revised edition conventionally lists every year the work has been published in, which is why the year field accepts a comma-separated list.
verified 30 August 2026Choosing a rights statement
The rights statement is the paragraph under the notice, and it is the only part of the page that changes what you are actually offering. The notice says who owns the book; the statement says what other people may do with it.
All rights reserved is the default for a book you are selling, and it grants nothing. The brief-quotation variant is the one most trade fiction and non-fiction actually carries: it reserves everything but lets a reviewer or a critic quote a short passage, which costs you nothing and removes a reason for someone not to write about your book. Adding a permissions address is worth it if you expect reuse requests — anthologies, classroom copies, translations — but remember that whatever you type there is printed in every copy, so use an address you are happy to publish rather than the one you live at.
A Creative Commons licence is a genuine choice rather than a lesser one, and it suits educational and low-content work in particular. This tool names the licence you pick and links its official text at creativecommons.org rather than paraphrasing it — a paraphrase of a licence is not that licence, and anyone relying on our summary would be relying on the wrong document. Read the licence before you print a reference to it: CC licences are not revocable once someone has relied on one.
Disclaimers, and the one most books get wrong
The fiction disclaimer — invented characters, coincidental resemblance — is the one everybody recognises, and it belongs in any novel, including ones nobody could mistake for reportage. It states your intent, in your own book, before there is an argument about it.
The one that matters more and appears less is the professional-advice disclaimer. Any book a reader might acton — a book about money, health, law, diet, or business — is a book somebody may follow into a bad outcome, and the paragraph that says plainly “this is general information, not advice about your situation, speak to a professional” is the single most useful thing on the page. If you are writing that kind of book and your front matter carries only a fiction disclaimer, you have the wrong one.
Low-content and children's books have their own: a puzzle book can say its puzzles were checked and invite error reports, and an activity book involving scissors or glue should say it is meant to be used with an adult nearby. Both are here. A disclaimer can sit at the foot of the copyright page or take a page of its own — put it on its own page when it runs long, or when you want the reader to actually read it.
ISBNs, imprints, and what KDP's free ISBN costs you
KDP's help page is the thing to read before you decide, and it says three things that matter to this page. An ISBN is required for paperbacks and hardcovers; ebooks and low-content books are the only formats where it is optional. A free ISBN from KDP can only be used on KDP— you cannot take that same number to another printer or distributor. And a book published with one shows its imprint as “Independently published”, which is a line about your book that you did not write.
Buy your own ISBN and you set the imprint yourself — but the imprint you enter in KDP has to match what the ISBN agency has on file, or publishing is blocked. That is the practical reason the publisher field on this page matters: if you have your own ISBN, the imprint name printed here should be the same one registered against it.
If you are taking KDP's free ISBN, note that it is assigned during publishing — it does not exist while you are writing your front matter, so leaving the ISBN line out entirely is normal and correct. Every ISBN you do type here is checked against its check digit by the same module that drives our ISBN Barcode Generator, so the two tools can never disagree about whether a number is valid.
verified 30 August 2026How this tool works
Everything happens in your browser. The preview is not a picture of a copyright page — it is your page, laid out at your trim size by the same code that writes the PDF, so what you see and what you download cannot drift apart. The DOCX is built here too, as a real Word document with your trim as its page size and one section per front-matter page, which is why it opens with the right margins in Word, Pages, Google Docs and LibreOffice rather than needing to be reformatted.
The template wording is our own. None of it is transcribed from another generator or lifted out of a book, and the paragraphs are deliberately generic — they are wording thousands of books already use, assembled from the details you give, not advice about your situation. Where a claim on this page is a fact rather than an opinion, it carries the date someone last opened the source and checked it.
Two typefaces, and one trade-off worth stating. The PDF uses the fonts every PDF reader has built in, which is what keeps it a few kilobytes and lets it be built without a server — and it means the PDF embeds no font, so it is not a file KDP would accept as a book interior. That costs you nothing, because a copyright page is never uploaded on its own: it is a page inside your manuscript. Use the DOCX for that, and change the font to whatever your book uses once it is in your word processor.
Frequently asked questions
Do I legally need a copyright page in my book?
No. For works published from 1 March 1989 onwards, the U.S. Copyright Office's own guidance is that a copyright notice is no longer required by law, though it still recommends one — particularly if the book may be sold abroad. Your copyright exists from the moment the book is written down, notice or no notice. What the page buys you is practical rather than legal: it tells a reader, a librarian, a translator or a rights buyer who owns the book, what year it came out, and who to write to.
What has to be in a copyright notice?
Three things, per the Copyright Office: the symbol ©, the year the work was first published, and the name of the copyright owner. Everything else on a copyright page — the rights statement, the edition line, the ISBNs, the disclaimer, the printer's number line — is convention rather than requirement. That is why this tool starts you with the notice and leaves the rest optional.
Should the copyright page name my pen name or my legal name?
Either works, and the choice is yours. The name in the notice is the name of the copyright OWNER, which can be a pen name, your legal name, or a company. Many authors put the pen name on the cover and the title page and the legal name or imprint in the notice; others use the pen name throughout, which keeps the legal name off a page that goes into every copy. Nothing you type here reaches us — the whole tool runs in your browser — but whichever name you pick goes into print, so pick it deliberately.
Where does the copyright page go?
On the back of the title page — the left-hand page, page iv in the traditional roman-numeral scheme — and the text usually sits at the foot of it rather than the top. That is the default this tool lays out, and you can move it to the top or the middle if you prefer. In a print book the copyright page is almost always the second leaf; in an ebook it often moves after the table of contents so the sample doesn't open on it.
Do I need an ISBN on the copyright page?
Only if you have one, and you may not need one at all. KDP requires an ISBN for paperbacks and hardcovers, and its own help page says ebooks and low-content books are the only formats where an ISBN is optional. If you take KDP's free ISBN it is assigned during publishing — so it does not exist when you are writing your front matter, and it is perfectly normal to leave the line out. Two things worth knowing before you choose: a free KDP ISBN can only be used on KDP, and it makes your imprint read "Independently published". Your own ISBN lets you set your imprint, but the imprint in KDP has to match what the ISBN agency has on file or publishing is blocked.
What is the row of numbers at the bottom of a copyright page?
The printer's number line. The lowest number still on it names the printing you are holding — so a first printing reads 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1, and by the third printing the 1 and the 2 have been struck off the plate. It is a survival from offset printing, where striking a digit was cheaper than resetting the page. Print-on-demand has no printings in that sense, so most KDP books leave it out; it is here because plenty of authors want the traditional look, and because it is the kind of detail that makes a self-published book read as a published one.
Which disclaimer should a novel have?
The fiction one — the paragraph saying the characters, places and events are invented and any resemblance to real people is coincidental. It is worth including even in a book that plainly could not be mistaken for reportage: it costs a paragraph, and it makes your intent explicit if anyone ever claims they recognise themselves. Non-fiction takes a different one, and any book a reader might act on — health, money, law — should carry the professional-advice disclaimer, which says plainly that the book is general information and not advice about their situation.
Can I just use the DOCX as my book's interior?
No — and neither can the PDF. A KDP interior is one file containing the whole book, so a copyright page is a page you paste INTO your manuscript, never a file you upload on its own. Open the DOCX, copy the pages into the front of your book, and they will pick up your own fonts and margins. The PDF is for reading and proofing and for sending to a designer; it uses the typefaces every PDF reader has built in rather than embedding one, which keeps the file tiny and means it is not print-ready on its own terms.
Is this legal advice?
No. The tool assembles generic, commonly-used wording from the details you type. It is not advice about your situation, it is not a substitute for registering your copyright, and it is not a lawyer. Read every line before you publish it — and if anything about your rights is contested or unusual (co-authors, a work-for-hire, an estate, translated or licensed material), take advice.
Do I need an account?
No. Everything runs in your browser — the preview, the DOCX, and the PDF are all built on your own machine. Your name, your address and your ISBNs never reach our servers, there is no login, no watermark, and no limit on how many times you use it.
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