Why do authors dedicate books

Ellie Maas Davis owns Pressque , a publishing consultation firm located in downtown Charleston that offers editing and ghostwriting services to authors and publishers. By clicking the "submit" button, you are agreeing to receive future marketing e-mail messages from IngramSpark.

Cookie Preferences. Create Account Log In Help. Back to Blog. Tuesday, June 02, Tweet. Some writers dedicate their books to things. He writes: You know how it is. My second favorite is E. Having secured my wife's permission to be light-heartedly unkind, I slipped the carefully centred dedication into the page proofs and sent it off.

In the intervening weeks I imagined the copy editor chortling at its wickedness, its aptness and its originality. I thought about all the people who might buy the novel solely on the promise of the hilarious dedication at the front. When the first box of books finally arrived, I turned to the page after the title page.

It said:. And that's all it said. Evidently the copy editor had taken the bit in brackets not as a joke, but as an instruction. I didn't know which was worse, the missing payoff or the fact that someone at my publishers thought me capable of writing such a dedication and then including a warning that I already had other plans for subsequent editions.

When my wife opened the book she laughed harder than I have seen her laugh in a long time. Life is rarely so satisfactory. I didn't say anything to the publishers, but when a few weeks later I got an email from them asking, in all seriousness, what sort of dedication I had in mind for the paperback, I felt obliged to explain.

Then, after some thought, I asked them to restore the bit in brackets. Why not have it both ways? This article is more than 14 years old. Tim Dowling. You've written your novel and even got a publisher. Then the hard work really starts: Tim Dowling on the fraught business of the dedication.

Generally, when analysing a book's dedication, the discerning reader concerns himself with just two questions: Is the book dedicated to me? Is it dedicated to anyone I could plausibly claim to know? It said: For Sophie, for all time And that's all it said. The dedication usually goes on the dedication page, which is in the very front of the book, after the Title page. Anyone they like. A dedication section is short and usually focused on one person or specific group of people.

Think about the people to whom you want to dedicate this work. Who was the most important person? The seminal influence? The people you care the most about? This should be short and sweet, and there are no wrong answers. You are expressing a personal sentiment, so only you can decide. The worst thing you can do is get stuck on it. Go with your gut. Anyone you leave out can be thanked in the Acknowledgments which goes at the end of the book.

As the dedication is at the beginning of a book on the dedication page , many of the readers will read it and be influenced by it. Think not just about the person or people named in the book dedication, but also about all of the readers who will pass by this page and be impacted.

Make a conscious choice about what you want that impact to be if any. And yes, though everyone will see it, no one but the person you mention will remember it.

Want proof? Name your favorite book dedication.