CTRL+F or COMMAND+F for easy searching ;)
Abstract - The summary of an academic article included before the article.
Academic press - Academic presses specialize in scholarly works: research papers, “critical editions” (annotated and edited “classic” works), and book-length arguments, among other things. Academic presses may publish both full-length books and journals (or one and not the other). Please note that while all university presses are academic presses, not all academic presses are university presses. University presses refers to academic presses additionally affiliated with an academic institution (a university). So: Ohio State University Press? University and academic press. Norton? Just an academic press.
Acquisitions Editor - Independently or in an “acquisitions team,” an acquisitions editor decides which submissions the publishing house will fairy-godmother from manuscript into book, which can boil down to “how commercially successful would your book be?” or “how closely does your book align with our mission/brand?” Lots of number crunching involved either way.
Addendum - Something added to a book or other document after publication. This also refers to a legal tool called “the author’s addendum” that empowers an academic author to modify “copyright transfer agreements with non-open access journal publishers,” which will allow the author to reproduce their work elsewhere.
Advance - An amount of money a publisher gives to an author in exchange for the rights to publish their book.
Advance reading copy (ARC) - A copy of the book made available before its official publication date, often for the purposes of hyping up the book before its release date. Good reviews sell books. Shiny blurbs are the jewels of the back cover.
Author/writer - The person who writes the manuscript; or, maybe more accurately, the name on the cover of the book, but now we’re entering Foucauldian territory. Read What is an Author? by Michel Foucault if you want your brain to break.
Beta reader - The first set of eyes on a manuscript; usually non-professional, volunteer readers who offer their honest reaction for the writer to consider.
Bibliography - Not a synonym for works cited, although they’re often used interchangeably. A bibliography is merely a list of books related to one another. A bibliography may be the list of citations (but only if those citations are books) at the end of an essay, but a TOP 10 ROMANTASY RELEASES FOR FEBRUARY list is also a bibliography.
“Big Five” - Designates the powerhouses in publishing, who dominate the profits and resources available to publishers. As I’m writing this, the Big Five are Penguin Random House, Hachette Books, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan, although this can change (and nearly did in the early 2020s).
This occurs primarily through acquisition—when one company buys another—or mergers—when two companies combine forces into one super-company. You may remember the phrase, “Big Four” thrown around in the early 2020s. Penguin Random House had officially offered to buy Simon & Schuster and was on track to make the acquisition until the DoJ under the Biden administration sued to block the acquisition, arguing the new company would wield too much power over author payments.
Before this, the most recent change to this group of publishing houses was in 2013, when Penguin and Random House merged to make Penguin Random House. The “Big Six” became the “Big Five” we know today.
Over the Past 25 Years, the Big Publishers Got Bigger—and Fewer | Publishers Weekly
Blurb - The paragraph that summarizes the book, usually on the back cover.
Boilerplate - Reusable content that can simply be pasted into a piece of writing. Think author bio or company mission statement.
Bookseller/Retailer - Says it in the name: the people who sell the book to adoring readers; think Barnes and Noble, abebooks.com, or your local bookstore. Some publishers forge close relationships with certain booksellers (like Milkweed; check out their website for their “ecosystem” philosophy), but not all by any means.
Chapbook - Modern chapbooks most often refer to “poetry chapbooks,” which are short, sometimes handmade, collections of poetry focused on a central theme. Originally (that is, around the start of the 16th century), chapbooks were a cheap way to distribute “light literature” like ballads, “dream lore,” and (the lightest of all) notorious crimes (see Britannica linked below).
Collation - A description of the physical attributes of a book.
Colophon - A publisher’s or imprint’s logo, like Graywolf’s stylized wolf face, or Penguin Random House’s penguin, usually located on the spine of a book and on the title page.
Compiler - Someone who gathers the work of others into a single volume, like an anthology or contributed volume (although here they're usually called the "editor" of the volume).
Contract assistant/manager/executive - The "contract" is a document between author and publishing house that grants the house the legal rights to publish the author's work, usually in exchange for an "advance" (a chunk of money for the author and their agent, which will be counted against royalties) and "royalties" (an amount of money sent to the author for each book sold). Those working on the contract will create, edit, and negotiate the contract with the author.
Copy - Any material that will be printed, most commonly in a newspaper/magazine context, and usually in the context of editing it. E.g., if you sent a 14-page paper about the dialectic relationship between Snoop Dogg and Snoopy to a freelance editor at a journal about Hip Hop and Cartoons, the 14-page paper is the “copy.” As in, “Did you receive the copy I sent you?” and “Hey, checking in on this again—did you get the copy?” and “Please respond to me, I need to know; did you receive the copy I sent you yesterday?” Not the same as “copies” that come out of a printer.
Copy editor - A copy editor checks for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and internal consistency and may fact-check their author. Copy and line editors are collapsed into each other more frequently than other editorial roles (in my admittedly limited experience).
Corrigendum/erratum - Correction to a published text, usually attended by a list of the corrections made.
Critical Edition - A single version of a text constructed with “all the available evidence,” with extensive editorial and critical notes.
Types of Editions | Harvard's Geoffrey Chaucer Website, see for quote
Cover - The front of the book. Yes, people judge books by their covers.
Deckle edges - Also called “feathered” edges, where the outward-facing edges of the pages (opposite from the spine) are rough or unevenly cut.
DEL - Shorthand for “delete,” usually too short or prescriptive to use in author-editor communication.
Developmental editor - The big-picture stage of editing, where editor and author work out questions about the story’s characters, plot, themes, etc.; in nonfiction publications, these questions may center on the breadth of the research. Editor and author will discuss the book’s tone, its place in its genre landscape, and how it can be a “better” read (“better” is perfectly vague; this can boil down to “more commercially successful”). Publishing houses are increasingly taking on manuscripts that arrive essentially ready to be published, so developmental editing is becoming the territory of volunteers, freelancers, and literary agencies.
Dust jacket/wrapper - Sometimes also just called a “jacket," the paper wrap around a hardcover's paperboard binding.
Editor - A general term for someone who improves text or works in publishing. Its Latin root means "to produce." Editors usually have a supervisory role in addition to just working with the author and may organize multiple teams to ensure everything comes together properly. Freelance editors will also wear multiple hats, as they have to advertise, manage, and do all the accounting for their business.
What does a book editor do? | YouTube - from an industry perspective
What Does A Book Editor Actually Do? | YouTube - from a freelance perspective
Editor-at-large - Surprise! Usually not an editor in the traditional sense. Editors-at-large are instead essentially beat reporters—writers who specialize in an area like “science reporting” or “Foucauldian fountain designs.”
Editorial assistant - A rung above interns, editorial assistants are usually employees on the first step of their publishing journey. They fill in the gaps for the editorial team and perform a range of functions, including administrative tasks, permissions requests, answering authors, determining the publishability of a manuscript (see “reader/intern”), etc.
Editor-in-chief/executive editor - Both terms usually used to define the person at the top of the editorial chain. These terms can be used interchangeably, but usually editors-in-chief lead periodicals (newspapers, scholarly journals, etc.) while executive editors manage houses/imprints. You’ll hear that they’re “responsible for the editorial direction” of the house/periodical, a statement vague enough to clue you into the fact that there is a huge range of responsibilities that EICs/executive editors may have: they may set the style sheet, make hiring decisions, have the final say on acquisitions, work on budgets, directly or indirectly manage the editorial team, negotiate contracts, etc.
Em dash (—) - A dash the width of the m in a typescript, used to interrupt a sentence, a little stronger than a comma. E.g., “An em dash—and other punctuation marks—may be used to set off a clause in a sentence for emphasis or readability.” While each press has its own style, em dashes usually do not have spaces on either side.
En dash (–) - A dash the width of the n in a typescript, used in certain style guides for numerical ranges, and not at all otherwise. E.g., “see pages 78–79 for information on the criminally underappreciated en dash.”
Ephemera - Most popularly used in archival research, materials designed not to last.
Flyleaf - The blank pages at the beginning or end of a book.
For-profit - These publishers only earn money through their revenue stream and have no obligation to reinvest their profits in their organization and can instead distribute it to shareholders and owners.
Ghost writer - Someone who writes a book for someone, often without accreditation; think celebrity memoir. Although this is changing; some ghost writers are being credited under the headline author, as in “Headline & ghost writer.” Whether these can be considered ghost writers, or are now to be considered co-authors, is up for debate.
Galleys/galley proofs - The typeset copy of a piece read over before the print-run. At this stage, editors will start “proofreading,” or scanning the text for egregious errors, like mispellings or missed punctuation, and for errors introduced in the typesetting phase, like laddering, widows, orphans, rivers, or runts.
Gilt edges - Outward-facing edges of pages (usually all edges) are covered in thin gold-leaf.
Gutter - When you open a book, you’ll find that there is a blank space on both pages where the page is sewn into the spine. This is to make sure that the text isn’t obscured by sewing the pages too tightly in.
Hardcover - A book with a hard cover (wow!), usually cardboard, more expensive than other variants. Often you’ll see a hardcover/hardback book released first, followed by its softcover variant, then maybe a mass market paperback release.
Hybrid - In hybrid publishing, the author takes on some of the risk of publishing—often paying for “some or more of the production and editorial costs in exchange for the publisher’s expertise—and for higher royalties” (from the PW article linked below). They can be distinguished from vanity presses in a few ways, most succinctly and clearly by the IBPA’s 11 points of criteria which hybrid presses are expected to meet. You can peruse these at your convenience through the link below.
Illustrator - The person who does the interior illustrations for a book or works on the cover art.
Imprints - These are the “trade names” that a company may use to publish to certain markets. For instance, Tor Books, which specializes primarily in sci-fi/fantasy, is an imprint of Macmillan, just as “Bubly” is an “imprint” of PepsiCo.
There can be overlap among imprints within a single publishing house, as well. For instance, Tor Teen and Wednesday Books, both imprints of Macmillan, publish YA fantasy (it’s built into Tor Teen’s mission, and Wednesday Books, as a general YA imprint, also publishes YA fantasy). It’s not just the genre of books that are put out—it’s everything surrounding a brand, too.
How the relationship between the parent company and its imprints gets hashed out varies, even within a single publishing house. Imprints may share certain key staff, especially when they can be grouped together under some unified branding name. For instance, there are multiple Tor imprints: Tor Books, Tordotcom, Nightfire, Tor Teen, Bramble, and Orb. These imprints in particular may share certain members of their staffs, like their publicists. However, the editors at Minotaur Books (Macmillan’s crime imprint) don’t overlap with the editors at Tor.
How Publishing Works: Publishing Houses, Subsidiaries & Imprints | YouTube
Independent - Although sometimes when people say “indie press,” they mean a small, literary press, an independent press is simply any press that is not owned by one of the Big Five.
Independent/Small Press/Regional - While each of these terms literally refers to something unrelated to audience, presses that market themselves as “small” or “independent” are often either literary or mission-based presses, focusing on some interest that isn’t served in the raw publishing market—publishing niche history on a local area, or books meant to promote certain social justice issues which might not sell well, etc.
Indexer - The person who creates a book's index, that list of key terms in the back of the book.
Juvenilia - Work produced by an author when they were young; Jane Austen’s juvenilia is one of the better-known examples here
Kerning - Manually adjusting the spacing between individual characters
Laddering - Describes an abundance of punctuation on the right-hand margin, which can look aesthetically unpleasing (*cough cough* ugly).
Leaf - The term to refer to a page of a book. “Turn over a new leaf.”
Line editor - Specializes in improving an author’s language for style and clarity. Copy and line editors are collapsed into each other more frequently than other editorial roles (in my admittedly limited experience).
Literary agent - Represents the author and their work to publishers; an increasing number of publishers, usually quite large, will only look at “agented” submissions.
Managing/senior editor - Reports to the EIC/executive editor; a similarly flexible role, although their name will be less synonymous with the publication as a whole.
Manuscript - Originally meant “a text written by hand,” although now it usually means an unpublished document intended for publication. You’ll still hear manuscript in the original sense of the term when reading historical research—even historical research about books.
Margin - The edges of text on the page.
Marketing Manager - Oversees the marketing process for books, including social media, ad campaigns, author talks, and so on.
Mass market paperback - The darlings of genre-readers, mass market paperbacks (MMPBs) are small (usually 4”x7”) books with teeny font (like pt. 10 or smaller) printed on low-quality paper. You seem them on those spinny things at the front of tourist-trap stores at your local airport, or tucked into the forgotten, half-broken shelf at a thrift store. Supposedly pocket-sized, even though it seems like 90% of the books published as MMPBs were originally 500-pages long, and now at 1,000 pages, they would only fit into the pocket of a giant. Still cheap, though.
Monograph - A book that delves into a particular area of research, which is typically purchased by libraries and constitutes a significant amount of the university press’s income
Non-profit - These publishers still earn a revenue stream from their book catalog, but they have the advantage of fundraising: their sales margins (hypothetically) don’t determine the success of their company. This allows them some leeway when it comes to making risky publishing decisions. Thus publishers can put out books that tend not to do well profit-wise, require a lot of economic input, or fail to cater to an existing profitable market.
The degree to which a nonprofit depends on its revenue stream publications depends on the publishing house: many university presses, although non-profits, rely almost entirely on their sales revenue.
Because non-profit publishers are, well, non-profits, they’re also supposed to serve the public good. This means that non-profit presses will have some mission driving them—like Blair Press uplifts Southern voices, Orion Magazine draws attention to the connection between the human and natural worlds, and Ohio State University Press (and most university presses) aims to increase knowledge in the humanities and social sciences.
Orphan - The opposite of a widow; “when the first line of a paragraph sits at the bottom of a page by itself.”
Production manager/production editor - The person who shepherds the book from .docx to the file to be sent off to printers. Production editors are essentially project managers and form the connective glue between author, house, and freelancers. They oversee editorial and logistical aspects of publishing.
Proofreader - After the manuscript is typeset, designed, and ready for print (i.e., put through InDesign), it is now considered a collection of “proofs.” Proofreaders comb over these proofs for errors. This can be painstaking work, especially in an era where most editors’ eyes have deteriorated due to an overreliance on spell/grammar check. At this stage, no stylistic adjustments should be made, and very few errors should be found (but inevitably some will be unearthed).
Prospectus/pitch - An explanation of a book or idea sent to a publisher to be picked up; in my experience, prospectuses tend to be longer and about work that is already in progress, while pitches are shorter and about works that haven’t yet been started.
Publicist - Advertises the book by working closely with the author to arrange book tours, interviews, or personal essays.
Publisher - Often refers to a press or periodical (e.g., Penguin is a “publisher”) although some houses list individuals as “publishers” (e.g., Milkweed, Princeton UP, Ecco, etc.). I’ve found it difficult to find a unified description of this role, but broadly, it's the person who's in charge. At the very least, they're ultimately responsible for establishing the vision for the press and allocating resources. The editors-in-chief and executive editors report to them.
Ragged margin - When the text is left-aligned, rather than justified, resulting in an uneven right-hand margin.
Reader/Intern - Not interchangeable terms, but if I didn’t reference that classic image of the intern poring over the slush pile, I would be failing my duty as a student of publishing. Readers ultimately advise a publisher on the publishability of a submission, writing up reader’s reports with recommendations to the author as well as a final publishing decision (usually “publish with few edits/authorial discretion/as is,” “publish with substantive edits,” “revise and resubmit,” “reject,” although these terms can vary). The managerial team will compile these reports and make the final decision. Sometimes these reports are passed along to the author.
On the slush pile... The "slush pile," or backlog of unsolicited submissions, doesn't really exist at most major publishers. Many publishers only take "agented" submissions.
Recto and verso - Often used in textual and bibliographic studies, describes the sides of a page. Recto means the front of the page, while verso means the back. When you open a book, the recto page will be on the right, while the verso is on the left.
Rivers - Imagine a long paragraph of text, where spaces happen to line up across the lines of the text, creating a “river” of blank space throughout the text. Visually distracting for a reader.
Royalties - The payment an author receives for each book sold after enough royalties have "paid off" the advance.
Runt - When the last line of a paragraph ends on a single line, an awkward typographical event regarded as an error.
Self-publishing - The author takes on all the financial risk of their book; this includes paying for—or doing—every task that might be covered by a traditional or hybrid publisher, including editing, formatting, cover design, marketing, etc. Depending on the platform that the author publishes on, they will retain full rights over their work and earn a substantial publishing royalty rate (70% on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, compared to the 10-15% most traditional publishers offer). That being said, self-publishing means you lack a house’s huge resources, and AI is currently flooding the digital marketplace with cheap “novels” that crowd out real people’s work. While the royalties are generous, the sales seem like they’re not. And I say seem because despite the “200-250 copies sold per year” figures cited on Reddit, Quora, Substack, and other similarly scholarly websites, there’s very little real, hard data on this, and as low as 200 is, the real average copies a self-published book sells per year might be lower.
Signature - A large sheet of paper folded into several pages for a book and sewn into the spine of a book. Signatures usually fold into at least four pages and no more than 64 pages.
Slush pile - The accumulation of unagented submissions to a press; usually combed over by an intern or a volunteer reader, if they are read at all. Increasingly, publishing house only consider agented manuscripts.
Small press/medium/big press - By far the squishiest terms on this list; there is no standardization here and any of them can mean kind of whatever you want. From what I can tell online, a press is most frequently considered “small” if it makes under $50 million per year (although PW seems to prefer $20 million as the small press magic number). PW defines mid-sized publishers as presses making more than $20 million but are not part of the Big Five. Which leaves “big presses” as essentially a synonym for the Big Five.
Social Media Coordinator - Falls under the general marketing team. Runs a press’s social media page, posting about upcoming releases, book fairs and editorial events, new hires, and so on.
Softcover/paperback - A version of a book that is cheaper to produce and often comes after the hardcover. In my experience, “paperback” and “softcover” are synonymous terms, but one source claimed that “softcover” basically referred to higher-quality paperbacks.
Paperback vs Softcover | American Print & Bindery - see for softcover as higher quality paperback.
Spine - The bound edge of the book, usually including the title, author name, colophon, and a continuation of the cover art if it’s especially fancy.
Sprayed edges - Outward-facing edges of pages (usually all edges, but sometimes just opposite from the spine) are colored or otherwise decorated. Thanks, Fourth Wing! Sometimes, “sprayed edges” is taken to mean just a block color, while “stenciled edges” refer to more intricate designs.
Stenciled edges - Outward-facing edges of pages (usually all edges, but sometimes just opposite from the spine) are intricately decorated. Thanks, Fourth Wing! “Stenciled edges” as a term has mostly fallen out of favor, with “sprayed edges” being a much more popular term. However, sometimes, “sprayed edges” is taken to mean just a block color, while “stenciled edges” refer to more intricate designs.
Stet - Literally means “let it stand,” an editorial note meaning that a previous edit should be ignored or reversed.
Style sheet/guide - The list of stylistic choices a journal or publishing house has made to maintain consistency across articles/books. For example, a style sheet will include guidance on whether the Oxford comma is to be retained, which words should be “closed” (for example, “birth mother” or “birthmother”?), whether dialogue takes single or double quotes, etc.
Subsidiary rights agent - Negotiating all the rights relating to producing "subsidiary" or secondary products, separate from the primary product of the book itself, subsidiary rights agents negotiate with the author on merchandising, movie deals, translation, and audio rights.
Testimonial - A review from another author or a magazine to tantalize the reader into buying the book, usually on the back of the book, but short pull quotes might be integrated into the cover design.
Title page - A page before the start of text including the book’s title, the author's name, the publisher and city of publication, and the date of publication. May also include the colophon and information about editors and illustrators.
TK - Meaning “to come,” indicating portions in a draft where the author plans on adding more material. “TK” rather than “TC” because plenty of words have “tc” in them (waTCh, twiTCh, eTCh), and “TK” is more rare. CTRL+Fing “TK” is thus more efficient.
Trade - Presses that produce books for a general audience (think the Big Five, like Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster)
Traditional publishing - A “publishing house,” which is a company (non-profit or for-profit) that takes on an author’s project through a book deal, funds it, edits it, produces it, advertises it, and gives the author an advance/royalties for their work.
Tracking - Adjusting the spacing between all characters in a portion of text (a word, a paragraph, pages, etc.) in equal increments.
Typesetter - The person who arranges the text on the page, usually through InDesign
Typesetting - Arranging text on a page, now done through layout software like InDesign.
Typography - The arrangement of type on a page.
University presses - An academic press affiliated with an academic institution (a university). All university presses are academic presses, but not all academic presses are university presses. Note, too, that while nearly all academic presses are non-profits supported in part by their institutions, only about 15% of a university press’s budget comes from university subsidies. The purchase of academic works by universities is currently the backbone of the industry.
Vanity press - Considered universally in publishing to be a scam—if you ever find yourself considering a book deal with a company you know little about, make sure they’re not a vanity press. Vanity presses succeed by making the author take on the financial risks of publishing, charging the author for services like editing and marketing. They offer contracts that result in few authorial rights. Vanity presses are not economically incentivized to take on projects fit for publication or work with the author to improve their project for their audience, since their profit is made through the author’s wallet, not the audience’s. Vanity presses have also been caught in shady business practices, like lying to their authors about being part of a traditional publishing house. These are not to be confused with hybrid or self-publishing models (although some vanity presses have started to masquerade as hybrid models. Do your research and ask around if something seems suspicious. Or even if something doesn’t seem suspicious. Do your research in general). Vanity presses are notorious for taking advantage of authors, and while the mainstream publishing industry isn’t exactly lucrative, you’ll be in the hole with a poorly produced book if you work through a vanity press.
Wholesaler - Book depots, essentially; buy books in bulk, store em, and sell to retailers
Widow - The opposite of an orphan; when the last line or two of a paragraph runs over to the next page, an awkward typographical event regarded as an error.
Zine - A short, small-batch, and independently produced and published pamphlet-like thing. Usually doesn’t make a profit.