Choose an appropriate length for your acknowledgment section. FastEssay says that a one page acknowledgment section should be more than adequate, but this guideline applies to modest-length essays and dissertations. For novel-length work, consider a three- to four-page maximum. You don’t have to be too strict with yourself about the page count, but having a guideline in mind helps you to narrow your acknowledgment to people you really want to thank.
Consider who you want to thank. Think about friends, family members, research assistants, arts funding organizations, libraries, librarians and historical societies. Try to thank individuals rather than entire institutions. For example, if your local historical society helped you find some information critical to your novel, thank the society representative who supplied the information and offered a helping hand.
Write a brief but detailed example of how each person on your thank you list helped you. For example, if you want to credit your spouse for emotional support, don’t just say, “I’d like to thank my wife, Kate, for always being supportive while I worked.” Instead, talk about how Kate saw you through your 2 a.m. mental breakdown when you thought you just couldn’t write anymore. Thanking through story and example not only makes your acknowledgments more personal for the people you’re honoring, but also adds color for readers who peruse them.
String individual acknowledgments together in a way that makes sense to you. Common approaches include thanking according to a timeline, recognizing family and friends first for their initial support, then research help, followed by editors and publishers. Use transitional sentences to show how different parties contributed to your writing process. For example, to move from thanking family to thanking research assistants, you could say something like, “While my family fueled me with support and inspiration, my research assistant put in the long hours to help transform my work from a collection of far-out ideas to something resembling reality.”