How to Format Footnotes and Endnotes (2026)

Nothing dates a self-published book faster than sloppy notes. If your nonfiction title leans on research, citations, or scholarly asides, you will eventually face the question every serious author meets: footnotes or endnotes? The choice changes how your book reads, how it is typeset, and — critically — how it converts to an ebook. Readers notice ragged note sections, mismatched numbering, and orphaned markers instantly, even when they cannot name what is wrong. This guide walks you through both systems the way a professional book formatter approaches them: numbering, placement, typography, and the special handling notes need in print books and reflowable ebooks.

By the end, you will know exactly when to use footnotes versus endnotes, how to number and place notes correctly in your manuscript, what notes must look like on the page — the separator rule, the indent, the type size — where endnotes live in your back matter, and how to keep every note intact when your book becomes an EPUB or Kindle ebook. If your book is nonfiction, pair this guide with our complete nonfiction formatting guide for the full chapter-by-chapter setup.

Footnotes vs Endnotes: What Is the Difference?

A footnote is a note printed at the bottom of the same page that carries its reference marker. The reader’s eye drops to the foot of the page, reads the note, and returns to the text without turning anywhere. An endnote is a note collected at the end of the book — or sometimes at the end of each chapter — where the reader must flip pages or jump sections to read it. The markers look identical in both systems: a small superscript numeral placed at the end of the sentence or clause the note supports.

The real difference is about reading experience. Footnotes interrupt the page but reward the curious reader who wants the source immediately. Endnotes keep the page clean but ask the reader to trust that the notes will be findable later — and many readers never make the trip. Trade books written for a general audience, such as narrative nonfiction, memoirs, popular history, and self-help, most often use endnotes. Scholarly books, legal texts, dissertations, and reference works most often use footnotes, because their readers check sources constantly. One rule is absolute: never mix both systems for the same notes in one book.

Which Should You Choose for Your Book?

The comparison below summarizes the trade-offs a formatter weighs before recommending one system.

If you write memoir with family-history sources, for example, endnotes grouped by chapter keep your story flowing while still documenting every claim — our guide to formatting a memoir covers how those chapters should be structured around them.

Footnote Numbering Rules Every Author Should Know

Numbering is where most self-published books go wrong, and the rules are simpler than authors fear. Follow them exactly.

Use superscript Arabic numerals — 1, 2, 3 — for the main note sequence. Never use Roman numerals or letters for standard notes; those belong to special cases, like the front-matter notes in some academic books. Restart numbering at 1 with every new chapter. This is the book convention. Running numbers straight through the entire book is a journal convention, and in a 300-page book it produces grotesque markers like 214 that distract every reader. In US publishing style, place the marker after the punctuation it belongs to — the claim sits inside the sentence, then the number follows the period. UK style often places the marker before the punctuation; either is acceptable, but pick one house style and never mix them.

Attach exactly one marker per note, and never hang two markers on the same point in the text. If one sentence genuinely needs two notes, merge them into a single note with both citations. Never place note markers in chapter titles, headings, epigraphs, or the table of contents — a marker in a heading is a classic amateur signal, and it will also pollute your TOC if the heading is pulled into it automatically. Every marker in the text must have a matching note, and every note must have a matching marker; orphan markers and orphan notes are the single most common defect in self-published books with notes, and they are almost always created by deleting a note during revision without deleting its marker, or vice versa.

How Notes Look on the Page: Typography and Layout

The classic footnote block has four elements: the marker in the text, a short separator rule, the note number, and the note text. The separator rule — a thin horizontal line about a third of the text width, roughly 1.5 inches on a standard trim — sits above the first note on the page and tells the reader “the apparatus begins here.” Note text is set 1–2 points smaller than body text: if your body is 11/14, your notes are typically 9 or 9.5 point. Notes always use the same typeface as the body text. Switching to a different font for notes is one of the fastest ways to make a book look assembled from spare parts.

Each note begins with its number, set either as a superscript at the start of the note or on the baseline followed by a period. Note spacing is single or slightly looser than single — never double-spaced. When a single long note runs onto a second page, the continuation keeps identical formatting and the separator rule does not repeat.

Long URLs inside notes must break cleanly: set them at the note size, allow breaks after slashes, and never hyphenate a URL, because a hyphenated URL is a broken URL.

Endnotes Placement: Where They Go in Your Back Matter

Endnotes belong in the back matter, after the main text ends. The standard professional order is: appendices first, then the notes section, then the bibliography or references, then the index. Some books place notes after the bibliography, but placing notes before it is the Chicago Manual of Style convention that most trade publishers follow, and consistency with convention helps your book feel traditionally published.

Group your endnotes by chapter with a clear subheading — “Chapter 1,” “Chapter 2,” and so on — so readers can locate the note that matches the marker they just saw. A single undivided wall of notes with no chapter groupings is nearly useless; nobody will hunt through four hundred notes to find number 37. If your chapters have titles rather than numbers, use the chapter titles as the group headings. Within each group, notes appear in the same order as their markers in the text. A brief line in the front matter telling readers where the notes begin removes the friction of the unknown — readers who know exactly where to flip are readers who flip.

Setting Up Footnotes and Endnotes in Microsoft Word

Most authors draft in Word, and Word’s built-in footnote and endnote engine is genuinely excellent — provided you use it instead of faking notes by hand. Insert a footnote with References → Insert Footnote (Ctrl+Alt+F) and an endnote with References → Insert Endnote (Ctrl+Alt+D). Word numbers, positions, and renumbers everything automatically as you edit. Never type superscript markers manually and never fake footnotes with text boxes anchored at the bottom of the page; manual markers will not renumber when you revise, and faked notes will not convert into ebooks or professional layouts at all.

Set your preferences before you write far: choose footnotes at the bottom of each page or endnotes at the end of the document (end of document means the back of the book — match this to your planned back-matter order), and set numbering to restart with each section, giving each chapter its own Word section so numbering restarts correctly. Then style the Footnote Text and Endnote Text styles directly: 1–2 points smaller than your Normal style, single spacing, the same font family. Styling the built-in styles — rather than formatting notes by hand one at a time — guarantees every note in the book matches.

Word also lets you convert an entire document between the two systems with References → Show Notes → Convert, which re-homes every note and renumbers everything cleanly — but decide before final typesetting so the layout can settle. A manuscript with properly inserted Word notes converts cleanly into both print layouts and ebook pop-up notes; a manuscript with hand-faked notes must be rebuilt note by note.

How Footnotes and Endnotes Behave in Reflowable Ebooks

Reflowable ebooks — EPUB and Kindle formats — have no fixed pages, so a footnote cannot physically sit “at the bottom of the page.” Instead, properly coded ebooks turn each footnote marker into a tappable link: on Kindle it opens the note in a pop-up panel, in EPUB readers it jumps to the note, and a return link brings the reader back to their exact place. Endnotes become a linked Notes section at the back of the ebook, where every note carries a back-link to the text that cited it. Done right, ebook notes are actually more convenient than print notes — no page-flipping at all.

All of this depends on the notes being real, coded notes. If your manuscript used Word’s footnote engine, or your EPUB marks notes with proper footnote semantics, the conversion pipeline preserves the links. If you faked notes with manual superscript numbers, text boxes, or plain text at chapter ends, the converter sees ordinary characters with no link structure, and your notes ship as dead text. The most common ebook note failures are: manual markers with no link behind them, notes trapped inside text boxes or tables that the converter cannot reach, endnote sections with no return links that strand readers at the back of the book, and fixed-layout conversions that freeze note positions that made sense only on one print page size.

Kindle Create handles this well when fed a clean Word file: it imports Word footnotes as linked notes automatically. Verify before you publish — open the book in Kindle Previewer, tap through several notes, and confirm every pop-up opens and every return link works. Our comparison of ebook formats explains how EPUB, MOBI, and PDF treat notes differently, which matters when you decide which formats to publish.

7 Common Note-Formatting Mistakes to Avoid

Run through this checklist before your manuscript goes to layout — every item is a defect formatters see in self-published books every month.

• Restarting footnote numbers mid-chapter, or running one continuous sequence through the whole book instead of restarting per chapter.
• Orphan markers: a superscript number in the text whose note was deleted during revision.
• Orphan notes: a note sitting at the foot of the page with no marker anywhere in the text.
• Mixing footnotes and endnotes for the same note stream in a single book.
• Setting notes in a different typeface — or dramatically smaller type — than the body text.
• Dumping endnotes in one undivided block with no chapter groupings, so readers cannot find anything.
• Pasting long raw URLs into notes without line-break control, creating ugly gaps in print and overflow in ebooks.

Conclusion: Format Your Notes Like a Publisher

Footnotes and endnotes are small elements that carry outsized weight: they are where your book proves its research, and where careless formatting is most visible. Choose footnotes when your readers live in the sources and endnotes when your readers live in the story; restart numbering every chapter; keep note typography quiet and consistent; group endnotes by chapter in the back matter; and build notes with Word’s real footnote engine so they survive the journey into EPUB and Kindle. Get these details right and your notes disappear into the reading experience — which is exactly what well-formatted notes should do.