The short answer: probably not — but maybe. Prologues aren't inherently bad; they're inherently risky, because they delay the thing readers opened the book for. Most prologues in unpublished manuscripts are backstory in a trench coat. A few are doing a job nothing else can do. Here's how to tell which one yours is.
Agents and readers have been burned by thousands of prologues that were really info-dumps: history lessons, childhood wounds narrated instead of felt, worldbuilding lectures before anyone has a reason to care. Many readers now skim or skip anything labeled "Prologue" on sight. That's the tax every prologue pays before it earns a single sentence of goodwill — so yours has to be worth taxing.
Delete the prologue (into a safe file), then reread chapter one cold. Two outcomes:
Nothing confuses, nothing is missed — the prologue was scaffolding. It helped you write the book; readers never needed it. Leave it out.
Chapter one now underpromises — genre, dread, stakes arrive too late without it. Either the prologue was working, or (equally often) its hook belongs inside chapter one. Try moving it before you restore it.
Whichever you keep, your opening pages carry the whole audition — the free First-Chapter Autopsy reads your opening 5,000 words, prologue included if you keep one, and returns three severity-ranked findings quoted from your own prose. It's the fastest way to find out whether the opening you chose is doing its job.
The Manuscript Scorecard grades your full manuscript on nine craft metrics, benchmarks it against professionally-edited books, and tells you exactly what to fix first. Free, in minutes.
Get your free Manuscript Scorecard →They hate bad prologues — info-dumps and throat-clearing — and they've seen enough to be wary of the label. A short, tense scene doing a job chapter one can't do is not what the wariness is about.
Short — a scene, not an act. If it runs the length of a full chapter, it's probably chapter one mislabeled, and the label invites readers to skip it.
If it's the same POV and timeline as the rest, it probably is chapter one, and renaming it is the accurate call. If it's a different POV or time, renaming only hides the jump — the deletion test tells you whether the content deserves its slot under any name.
Run the deletion test. Genre convention gives you more latitude in romantasy, but prophecy prologues are the most-skipped of all — the promise usually lands harder delivered inside a living scene than as an epigraph in costume.