Don’t know your French flaps from your headbands? Here’s a guide to the arcane terminology of the book world
When I taught a course about publishing last winter, I learned from my students that much of what I say when I talk about publishing is jargon. That was an unhappy realization because, as a writing teacher, I rail against coded language and shortcuts designed to let readers know that you are “in the club.”
Until that course, it had never occurred to me how many terms of art there are in the world of book publishing. I thought I would take this opportunity to explain some of its more arcane terminology.
Advance: A chunk of change paid by the publisher to an author as an advance against future royalties earned. If the book doesn’t sell enough copies for you to make back the advance, you haven’t “earned out.” Authors don’t have to pay back the advance if that happens, but no one is happy.
Author’s alterations (or AA’s): If you make changes at the page-proof stage that are notcorrections from the copy-edited manuscript (printer’s errors, or PE’s), you will be charged for them after a certain point. Try to do your rewriting before typesetting or be prepared to pay.
Author questionnaire: This essential marketing tool goes by different names at different presses. Your publisher will ask you to list every media contact you have ever met, anyone who ever said nice things about your writing, and any place you’ve ever lived where people might be interested in you and your book. The harder you work on this document, the better you will be published. Which brings me to more insider lingo: To be “published well” means that a publisher has put everything in place — sent review copies to the right people, placed strategic ads, positioned the author appropriately, sold the book into stores — and that the book is a success. If you do a good job on the AQ, the publisher can do a good job with the book.
Blurbs: Spy magazine used to have a column called “Logrolling in Our Time": In pairs of reciprocal blurbs, authors would puff each other’s books. Don’t ask your mother for a blurb (unless she’s a famous author in your field). Blurbs can help buyers to situate your work by seeing the intellectual company you keep.
Bound galleys: Now called ARC’s, or advance reading copies, these are uncorrected page proofs that look like paperback versions of your book. They are sent to review outlets and are used to generate prepublication publicity. Don’t freak out when you see errors in them; reviewers know to check text against the published version.
Commercial house: A for-profit publisher.
Copy editor (or manuscript editor): The person who can save you from yourself or turn your prose into grammatically correct mush. When publishing with university presses, do not expect your acquisitions editor to read, let alone edit, your manuscript. The only person likely to do that is the copy editor, who may be a freelancer. In fact, it’s possible that no one on the press’s staff will read the book at all.
Copyright: Some publishers default copyright to the author; some publishers keep it for themselves. Generally, it matters less in whose name something is copyrighted than who has the publishing rights. There are many different publishing rights (hardcover, paperback, first serial, audio, translation, and so on). These are all spelled out in the contract.
Course adoption: Use of a book as a required text in a college course. Many university presses look for scholarly books that are likely, in paperback, to be chosen as secondary sources in college courses.
Dingbat: Who says publishing is a humorless profession? Dingbats are the little ornaments (an asterisk, a fleur-de-lis) that denote a space break in the text.
Foreword: Introductory matter written by someone other than the author is a foreword. You can write your own preface, but not your own foreword.
French flaps: Extensions of the cover of a paperback that fold elegantly back inside the book and hold extra copy, in imitation of the flaps of the jacket of a hardcover book. Très chic.
Frontlist: A list of a publisher’s newest books. Everyone is always looking for books that will also prove popular on a publisher’s “backlist” — i.e., books that will continue to sell for years after publication.
Front matter: Everything before the first chapter: the half-title page (a page that includes only the title of the book), title page (a page that includes the title, author’s name, etc.), copyright page, dedication, foreword (remember: you can’t write it), preface, acknowledgments (though current fashion has those migrating to the back), and table of contents. Some introductions are treated as part of the front matter, others as text.
Gutter: The blank space that separates the type on facing pages of a book.
Headbands: Adorable, colorful ribbons at the top and bottom of hardcover books. They are there to delight you.
Imprint: The publisher. Some of the bigger presses are umbrellas for a number of different imprints, each with its own flavor of book.
Jobber: A giant book wholesaler.
Mass-market books: Paperbacks you can buy in drugstores and supermarkets. They tend to be shorter and fatter than the trade paperbacks that are sold in bookstores. Cheaper, too.
Monograph: A scholarly tome on a single subject or limited aspect of a subject. Monographs were once bought primarily by libraries that used to have “standing orders” for all books on certain topics from specific presses. Those days are gone. Those days have been gone for a long time. Remember that when you are revising your dissertation.
Option clause: A paragraph that gives the publisher the right of first refusal on an author’s next book. Scholarly publishers tend to be willing to strike that clause if asked. It’s only an issue when a lot of coin is at stake.
Orphan: This refers to the first line of a paragraph left sitting by itself at the bottom of a page. “Widows” are the final line of a paragraph left alone at the top of a page. It’s the publisher who creates that kind of loneliness; it’s the publisher who should take care of it.
Out of print: The end. Most university presses make a practice of not declaring books out of print. They do, however, let them go out of stock, which can mean functionally the same thing if they don’t intend to reprint.
Over the transom: A manuscript submitted without an agent, usually with a letter that starts “Dear Editor,” is one that is said to arrive over the transom. Most books submitted that way are never published.
Perfect bound: This is the type of binding used for most paperback books (and some glossy magazines). It means the pages are glued to the spine. For most hardcovers, the pages are bundled together in “signatures,” groups of (usually) 32 pages that are folded and sewn into the binding.
Permissions: The biggest pain in the butt for any author. Any piece of proprietary work (song lines, poetry, artwork, chunks of other people’s intellectual property) must have permission cleared by whoever wants to use it from whoever owns the rights. Often there’s a fee involved.
Platform: One of the most important considerations for commercial books. A platform is what the author brings to the table: expertise, the ability to reach large groups of people, a ready-made audience. If you want your book to go beyond a scholarly readership, you have to have a platform.
PMS: The crabby feeling you get while waiting for your book to finally be published. (Actually, this refers to the Pantone Matching System that designers use to choose colors for book jackets and covers.)
Pre-emptive offer: A bid by a publisher that keeps a project from going to auction. Such offers are usually handled by agents and involve amounts of money greater than most of our annual salaries.
Provisional contract: A contract based on a proposal, offered before the manuscript is finished. It binds the author to the publisher but doesn’t commit the press. In fact, all contracts have an “acceptable manuscript” clause and so are, in that sense, provisional.
Publication date: A date, six to eight weeks after the bound book is available, before which news media are not supposed to review the book (to allow it time to get from the warehouse into the stores). Often, with scholarly books, the official pub date comes and goes accompanied by radio silence.
Reading line: A long descriptive subtitle that appears on the jacket or cover but isn’t an official subtitle.
Remainder: The sad result of too much initial enthusiasm. When presses print too many copies of a book and can’t get rid of them, they unload them at a big discount. Getting a hardcover book for $6.98 at Barnes & Noble doesn’t mean it is a bad book, just that its publisher had high hopes for it.
Sample chapter: When you send in a book proposal, a sample chapter is part of the submission packet. The sample should be thought of as something that will give the editor a sense of the whole book, rather than an actual chapter yanked out of a dissertation you are planning to revise.
Short discount: This is the reason you don’t see scholarly books at your local bookstore. Publishers give different discounts to the stores based on the type of book. Commercial publishers give booksellers a discount of 40 to 50 percent off of a book’s list price (which is the amount it actually sells for in a store). That’s how the stores make a profit. Academic books don’t usually come with such a “long” (40 percent) discount. They come with a “short” discount (more like 20 percent), so a bookseller has less incentive to sell them. A monograph on the banana slug is going to provide a profit of only 20 percent; a Stephen King novel yields more like 50 percent. So that’s why you see mostly best-selling books in the big-name bookstores and academic books in university bookstores. The relative invisibility of academic books is somewhat less of a problem now, thanks to Amazon.com.
Slush pile: Here is where those over-the-transom manuscripts end up. They are read by underpaid, overworked, highly educated, and often snotty editorial assistants who will make merciless fun of you if you send in a manuscript that isn’t appropriate for their list.
Stet: Your recourse if a copy editor has proposed an inaccurate or nonsensical change to your prose. Writing “stet” next to a paragraph or sentence in the copy-edited manuscript means “Go back to my original wording.” Use “stet” only if you are absolutely sure you are correct.
Style sheet: The running list of words and phrases that an editor keeps to remind herself, and you, of what she’s changed for consistency. This list should be included with the copy-edited manuscript.
Track: The sales record of an author’s previous books, easily accessed by book stores when they are deciding how many copies to order.
Trade: That is, the bookselling trade. Trade books go into the big-name bookstores; academic (or short-discount) books do not.
Trim size: The size of the physical book.
Vanity press: A press that requires you to pay to have your book published. The only person who decides whether or not to publish is you.
Warranty: Your promise to the publisher that you are who you say you are (Margaret B. Jones!), that you have written the work (Kaavya Viswanathan!), that everything you say is true is true (James Frey!), and that you have the right to be named as author.
Rachel Toor is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Inland Northwest Center for Writers, in Spokane, the M.F.A. program of Eastern Washington University. Her newest book, Personal Record: A Love Affair With Running, will be published in October. She welcomes comments and questions directed to careers@chronicle.com. For an archive of her previous columns, see http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/archives/columns/page_proof.
