Episode 64: Publishing Jargon Demystified
K
Hello, my beautiful cinnabar moths or any kind of moth you’d like to be. Welcome to the Writers Triangle, a podcast about publishing and all things books. And today I’m super excited to be talking about industry jargon. Something I’ve come to notice is because we do a lot of first time authors, which you know, I’m super passionate about I love first time authors. But it tends to be a little bit of mystery in terms of when I ask for things, what it is I’m asking for. So I thought it might be cool to talk about industry jargon, and sort of demystify some of the jargon that’s used on the professional side of the industry. I think everybody knows, like, TBR, my to be read list and all of that. But I was surprised by a term that I thought was universal, that is not and that’s the back blurb. That’s a jargon term that is for what is written on the back cover of books, that’s a back blurb. And I found that authors are really sort of confused about what the blurb means, because I think a lot of different people are asking for different blurbs, because you need to include a blurb about the book, in your query letter, which a query letter is the first piece of, of communication that you send to someone about your book, you’re asking them the agent, would they represent you? Or you’re asking the press? Would they be interested in purchasing your book? And so those are the two different types of blurbs. There’s also a third type of blurb that I don’t really I don’t ask for authors to create, but some authors do create this type of blurb. And as for the press release, or the press announcement, and then there’s a fourth type of blurb that I just popped into my head that wasn’t even on my mind, but I’m happy it did pop into my head, and that is for specific. Advertisers. They want different types of blurbs. So we advertise to libraries. We advertise to bookstores, and we do industry advertising and all of those have different blurbs. And what a blurb is is a specific word count that describes your book and details what happens in your book, and how much detail it has depends on what the blurb is for and what the purpose of the blurb is. The back blurb is supposed to cover the entire story without any spoilers, but make it interesting enough for the readers to know what they’re getting into and set proper expectations. So the backlog nearly needs to be representative of what the book is going to be about. For example, we have a bilingual book that I’m super excited about Icarus over Collins, it’s coming out in March of 2023. And for that back blurb on the back, it has a really short English verb blurb, because it also has a Spanish blurb. Because if you’re not bilingual, you’re not going to enjoy the book, we really wanted to set the readers expectation on what their Spanish level needs to be to be able to enjoy this book. The reason we’re so excited about publishing as because I think language switching needs to be normalized the majority of the world is bilingual or trilingual, speaks multiple languages monolingualism is kind of going by the wayside. And so I want to normalize bilingualism and language switching in multilingualism and have people be more comfortable with the concept that people do language switching in everyday lives. So that’s really exciting for me, but that blurb every single blurb about this book has to have English and Spanish in it to set the readers expectations and also let them know this is why your Spanish level needs to be with the type of blurbs that that’s the back blurb and then there’s also the arc blurb, which is a little bit more than the blacker than the back blurb. And the arc blurb can also include excerpts and an excerpt is sort of like a blurb or stuff. It’s taken exactly from the book. So with the with the blurb experts are is excerpt search is a difference. So I’m going to stick with blurbs for just a minute longer. The other blurb is that we were talking about is the blurb for advertising and that blurb is dictated and the dynamic and structure of it really comes from wherever you’re advertising for and press releases. Wherever you’re doing that press release, they will also dictate to you so everybody, every time you need to have a blurb about your book, except for the query letter, somebody is going to tell you how to write it, how many words that should be and what it should contain. So understand blurb as a snippet or your elevator pitch about your book and kind of have that in mind when you’re writing it. It’s one of the things that we ask authors to create their At blurb after they’ve gone through the edit of their book to see if they agree with the edit. And we’re finalizing the cover, we need the back blurb and the tagline. The tagline is also used in advertising. And the tagline is one sentence about your book. And if you go on cinnabar moth.com, you can find every single one of our books has a tagline. And they’re all varying lengths. And we’ve gotten stricter in the past year of having them all be more uniform. And one sentence long as more and more advertisers are limiting the space that they’re willing to give you for your book. And so we’re really wanting to streamline that. And if you do book sirens, you have to have that tagline for your book, and it needs to be catchy and grabbing. You can look on our website, all of our books have it just to sort of get an idea of what a tagline for a book looks like. And that’s something that our editing team, if you’re one of our our authors, our editing team does help our authors with the same as with the back blurb or Engine team helps with that. And that’s the benefit of having an editing team to support what you’re doing is that they can help you pull out and decide what the blurbs should be what information to keep and what information to let go up. And if you have critique partners, they can also help with that letting you know what to include in your book or whatnot. And asking them to look over your blurb or your tagline. That’s the one sentence descriptor of your, your book. We have some that are as many as four sentences, I think. But one sentence is all they give you on like a book sirens and one sentence is is all they give you a lot of advertising spaces to promote your book. And also, it makes for a great tweet with the cover of your book if you have a tagline. And it also with the timeline, we use it on social media quite a lot to create content. And it’s really helpful, especially if you’re doing something like sales. And if you’re reporting on other sales of your book, you can use your tagline to give some more content than other than my books on sale, which lets the readers gives the readers a sneak peek into what your book is going to be about.
K
Another way that we give readers a sneak peek into our book is our experts. And with like book sirens, they have they say the first 10 to 15 pages, which is usually chapter one of your book. But if you’re doing a virtual tour, and again, some advertising will allow you to do excerpt as well as some press releases depending on where you’re releasing, it will let you do an excerpt. And also if you’re doing in person book readings, I usually advise authors to not read the first chapter at book readings because I don’t find the first chapter to be the most dynamic. And also you want it to be that 15 minutes that we talked about in the episode about speaking. So picking up the excerpt is about picking at 10 to 15 pages that really represents your book well, and will again set the readers expectations on what they’re going to find inside the book. So that’s what an excerpt is, and we help me help with that. The editing team that we have, we have we talked about copying, editing and development editing, and you published a book. So now what so go check that episode out if you’re looking for a description of editing, I want to keep talking about about jargon. So we talked about blurbs and excerpts and I want to talk about arcs because I’ve talked about book sirens. And an arc is an advanced reader copy. And it is the for us it is the finished version of your book. For some people an arc is pre final editing and they’ll send out for some process send out advanced reader copies that haven’t been edited yet, we don’t tend to do that we tend to like to wait until the books are are edited. And we send those advanced reader copies out and when in advance reader copy is is just a book that sent out for us is the finished book with the cover sent out before the release date. And we have advanced reader copies usually about between three and four, three and five months before the book is published. And that’s something that some people also do galley copies, and bound galley, galley copies, and a galley copy like an ark is an for some people is an earlier version before the final edit of the book to get reader feedback. And a bound galley copy is that earlier version with the cover and we don’t do galley copy 3d arcs, but some people call them galley copies, if you send them, when we send them out to industry magazines, sometimes they will call them galley copies, and you can send the galley copies electronically. And if they like it, and they’re going to review your book, then they ask for a physical copy. And I love those kinds of magazines the most, because you don’t have to pay to send them a book that just goes into the void, and they never get back to you. And a lot of really big name, magazines will let you do an E copy. And I think it’s worth it, I think, because you can send the E copies for free. And so I think that’s really cool. And it’s something that I really enjoy. And something I always take advantage of the difference between an ecopy and a PDF is the EPUB can be is what goes is the data that goes on to like a Kindle or an electronic device. And a PDF is a type of an E copy. But it’s not the EPUB. PDF is just, you know, an unchangeable file that you can send out that has all of the words of the book and any illustrations and such and both of them serve as as E copies from the EPUB that has all the data necessary to transfer it to a Kindle, and the PDF, which anybody can open anywhere that they can open their email on any device that they can open their email. So knowing the difference between a PDF and ePub is important if you’ve uploaded your book to Amazon, or if you’ve uploaded it to Barnes and Noble, and you have a notebook or you have a Kindle book, then you have an EPUB. And you also need the ePub file to do something like book siren. So I would say it’s worthwhile to look at how to create an ePub for your book, if you’re self publishing is something if you’re working with a publisher that your publisher will take care of for you. And the three forms that most publishers do books in is a paperback and a paperback as a as a smaller trim size than the hardback. And the trim size is the size of the paper that the book the actual book is printed on and also the size of the cover for that soft cover book. So if you have a book, and you can bend it and flex it, that’s a soft cover. If you have a book that when you knock on it has a really sturdy sounding, you can’t really bend and manipulate it. That’s a hardcover book. And the hardcover books also have a trim size are usually hardcover books are usually a little bit larger, and so they’ll probably have fewer fewer pages than the paperback book. So those are hardbacks paperbacks, ePubs, and the blurb and bound galleys and unbound galleys. The other thing is, is book genres or book categories. And the category is the type of book that it is. And what the category does is, it lets people know what to expect when they’re reading their book. And we talked about this in episode on genre. So I’m not going to go too in depth here, but the category just tells them if it’s fiction, and if it’s fiction what type of fiction it is. So example Southern Gothic is really dark, and usually filled with lots of violence and graphic gory details of violence. A great example of Southern Gothic is Prophet’s debt, one of our books and it is quintessential Southern Gothic at a at its finest hands down.
K
So Southern Gothic doesn’t have anything to do with about being in the South. It was it did originate from somebody who was from the south. And that’s why it’s called Southern Gothic prophets that happens to take place in the south, but you don’t have to take place in the south to be Southern Gothic. And then you have historical fiction. And I think that historical fiction is really confusing for a lot of people because historical fiction can also be where people are talking about the future or present, but they have changed and event in the past. So for example, the next witness as historical fiction, even though it takes place and what is supposed to be present day, but its present day if the United States had become a totalitarian regime, and that regime change just like the man in High Castle, that’s a historical fiction book, and alternative history book. So those two genres are really misunderstood. So when promoting your historical fiction, if you have an alternate history fiction, it might be better to promote it as a thriller or an adventure, whichever there is most because I find that most readers aren’t really well versed on the subtleties of the day. different genres. However, the subtleties of those genres are super important when you’re uploading your book to any platform, they’re going to ask you what genre is your book in. And the better you are with the type of genre for those nuanced readers who understand genre a little bit better, they’re going to enjoy that. And also, if you understand your genre, it will give you great comp titles. A comp title is a comparison title of title that is comparable to your book, and what your book is about. So if you’re choosing a comp title, be sure that it has the same level of trigger warnings if your book has trigger warnings, and if your book has no trigger warnings, I find that how jarring it is and how triggering it might be is super important in those comp titles, and also, gender norms for whatever the gender norms are in your book. And for me, gender norms are every gender anybody wants to be all of the time. If you have a non binary character in your book, it is important that any of the Comp titles do you use have non binary non binary characters in your book, because I find that when people go into a book, if there is a non binary character, and your comp titles that you list do not have a non binary character, you’re going to have people reading your book, who are uncomfortable with us moving beyond the binary which bums me out and makes me sad. And I don’t always follow that rule of of warning people, I think exposing people to it will help normalize it and help make beyond the binary gender norms, the universal gender norms. And that’s something that you really need to think about for yourself. When you’re looking at comparison titles, my rule of thumb is to have at least one other if you’re doing three or four comparison titles to make sure at least one of the other titles also has non binary characters, and I find it it really bums me out. But the same for autistic characters, we have three or four bucks with actually autistic characters, not my raucous profits, debt, and the Sunrisers off the top of my head all have actually autistic characters, and making sure our comp titles have that has really limited any sort of commentary about the point of view or the perspective or actions of that character. I do think it’s important for us to read characters that are outside of what we normally experience in our everyday life to broaden our horizons. And having a title that does that will prepare the reader so that they understand it. And also I’m thinking about you as an author when you get those reviews back. The one that I forgot to mention was from the lighthouse. And I didn’t include it in the first round of books I was talking about with artistic characters, because from the lighthouse specifically has a non binary artistic character that may or may not be a dragon. It is wonderfully written it is a fabulous story is magical realism at its best. It’s just really outstanding to me. And I love the book, people who aren’t used to reading magical realism people who aren’t used to thinking about gender outside of the binary and people who aren’t open to artistic perspectives, really struggle with the book and feel lost chapter one, and they tend to not finish it. And they tend to be very unhappy. And their reviews reflect that. Talking with the authors about what I’m doing with if I’m doing something that I know may cause backfoot backlash or may lead to negative reviews, if I haven’t warned the audience enough and completely set their expectations to be open to this kind of thing. If I’m putting it out there for the purpose of I want to open minds, I want to reach people who wouldn’t normally read this type of literature. So I’m not doing these comp titles as a strategic thing during the advanced reader copy phase, then know that you’re going to get confused and upset reviews. And you have to decide as an author when you’re doing those advanced reader copies. Are you going to set expectations specifically to get positive reviews?
K
Are you going to set expectations to get the full spectrum of reviews negative and positive? And then stand by your decision and be strong in that? When it comes to press packages? I say don’t do that when you’re reaching out to bookstores don’t do that be very clear about what they can expect that something we’re always really clear with our distributors. We’re always really clear with our retail outlets. Our distributors are the people who buy the books and sell them to retailers. The retailers are Barnes and Noble, Walmart, Amazon on their retailers that sell the book and physical bookstores, any bookstores? Hey, patchouli, Joe did yeah, that’s any bookstore that carries all of our books. I absolutely love Patchouli Joe’s. So indie bookstores are also retailers. So distributors, what they do is they have your book, and then they go out and make the sales calls for you. If you can’t pay to have individual to have someone who works for you distribute then it is worthwhile to pay a distributing company to handle those sales calls for you. We’re very fortunate to be on every continent except Antarctica, and I’m working on that. They’re opening a bookstore in Antarctica and one our books in that bookstore. That’s kind of also a bummer, right? We should leave Antarctica alone, the ice is fragile enough that anyway, I digress. There are companies that do distribution that you can get that Salesforce team, and you can get a sales team and on every continent so that your book can have a farther reach. If you’re going to do that, make sure that your printer, and the printer is different than the distributor. The printer is the company that prints your book, there are some printers that print and distribute. And you have to decide whether the print distribute model is what’s best for you and your book and what you want to do. But the printing house has their printer set up and they just mass print things, the printing houses that we use around the globe, they do not print color, other than the book covers. But inside the book pages, they have very limited selections, we can get beige, off white, white and cream for the color of the pages. And then we just have standard text. And we can’t choose the font that the text is in or any of that they choose all of that for us. They also choose the trim size for us. And that’s really common with every publisher that you do. We don’t do picture books.
K
So I didn’t feel the need to pay the higher costs for having that ability for all of our books as we also don’t do graphic novels. So I didn’t see the point of that a picture book is a book that has pictures in it, and usually has a picture on every page. Some young middle grades are a hybrid picture book and middle grade book when we’re helping readers transition from the primarily pictures on the page to primarily words on the page and reading chapter books. And they’ll start to have fewer pictures. And I think like the magic treehouse and the Magic School Bus are good examples of the hybrid chapter book picture book. So when we’re looking at that, that hybrid is for young and middle grade, and that’s about first and second grade. Some third grade books also have pictures in them. We do have books that have illustrations, the secret benefits of invisibility, they have a few illustrations, and then they are black and white illustrations. So we do have the ability to do illustrations provided that they’re black and white, and an illustration of anything that is in picture form inside the book. That’s an illustration. So it can be a map or a calendar. Again, the secret benefits of invisibility, it is a calendar because volume is on a different calendar than us. And they have different seasons, and they have more months in their year. So it’s completely different. And having that visual representation of the calendar gives people a touchstone so that they can see it. And also there’s journal entries that are typeset, a little bit different than the normal texts. So we do have a wide variety of printing options and not printing options that type the types of things we can do at the printing level of the book, the physical creation of the book, looking at printers versus distributors. If you’re going if you’re separating your printer and your distributor, your distributor will get the books from the printer, the printer will charge you for all of the books that go to the distributor. And then the distributor when they sell the book, they will get a piece of your sales profit and sales profit is the money that you make after the book has been sold the difference and the amount of what it costs for you to print it and what you charge a retailer and what you charge a retailer is not what the retailer charges. So your profit is the difference in what it costs you to print and what you sell your book at. There are some retailers I believe that Amazon lets you set your own prices and Barnes Noble and Walmart, but some of the independent bookstores they may go off the list price and the list price is when anybody looks up your book the price as listed and all of the, the various ways that people can look up books when you register your book, and that is let the world know that you have a book. There’s automatic cataloging that goes on, and there’s tons and tons of list that your book will be on. And those lists will include the price for your book, and that’s called the list price. Some retailers and some bookstores do not sell the book at list price. We have like I think thrift books will often discount books, there are a lot of companies that will buy books and eat into their own profit, because that’s their business model is that they make a little less money than than other retailers. But they discount to hope to make up for it in volume sales. So discounting a book, you have to decide whether or not you’re ever going to discount your book and whether or not your retail partners do. That’s neither here nor there. It doesn’t affect what you sold them the book for so it doesn’t affect your profits. There are different types of books, there are chat books, which are usually smaller books and are usually poetry. And that is different than a chapter book, which chapter book is a term for middle grade books, when you transition from reading books with pictures to reading books that don’t have pictures, that is a chapter book for for middle grade, and the chat book is something different. Looking at the type of press that we are, we are a traditional micro press, what traditional means is that we pay an advance, we do not ask our authors to give us any money ever. I think if anyone is asking you to give them money, it is a scam. Beware. They are collaborative and CO publishing types of publishing houses. And that’s where the author and the publisher share publishing and distribution classes. And you’d have to look at what the contract says, look at if they’re asking you for money, if it’s a co publishing arrangement, or cooperative publishing, where a group of people have gotten together and create a publishing house, if they’re not sharing any of the cost, if they’re asking you to pay them. What are they giving you for the money that you’re paying them is going to be so important for you to be aware of, I personally don’t like authors to spend money on anything if they’re going with a publishing house, I think coop publishing or CO publishing can be a way to go to get some to get some relief for some of the costs of publishing a book because publishing a book is quite expensive. And I do think it’s worth exploring. But us being a traditional publisher, it means we don’t ask for money, we pay for all of the advertising, we pay for all of the marketing, we submit to awards, we pay for the editing, and we pay for the book cover. Some of our authors have invested their own money into their book and decided to send copies to more to a different PR list that they have or hire a publicist. And that is completely within their rights. We don’t expect that an author does that. And we don’t require that our authors do that. And with us being a traditional publishing house, that means that we don’t we do not allow our authors to commit the press, or myself to anything, because our authors are not agents of the press. And I think with some cooperative publishing, you are allowed to commit the publishing house or people who work there to do different tasks. And that’s because you’re paying them and it’s a way to basically share the cost on what it would be like to have a full, the full press is backing behind you and have more control and more decision making and deciding where your comp titles and your PR list what those are going to be for you. So comp titles are titles that they have kind of two meanings comp titles or titles that you put out for free. And comp titles are your comparison titles.
K
So when you’re using comp titles, make sure you know which one of those you’re you’re using. And a pie list is the the press release list. And it’s also the preview list. And it’s reviewers who get copies of books before the publication date and We have a list of different bloggers and based on what they’ve shared with us that they like to read, those are the books that we send them a blurb or snippet to, and they’re part of our press release package. So part of the press release package is getting together, we do a press release package at the end January of every year. And the January press police press release package includes a snippet, or a blurb about all of our titles, that it’s about three or four sentences long. And we have the author, the genre, and the snippet for all of the books, and we give those to everybody on our press release list. So that includes magazines, periodicals, advertisers, and reviewers. And then people can request the books that interest them. And if you have the relationship with magazines, you can send out a press release to magazines, do not send a press release to a magazine who’s not interested in receiving press releases, or open to a cold call, press release. If you don’t have a relationship with them, it won’t strike up a relationship. And it will just be confusing, and it may sour a relationship that you could then capitalize later. If you want to have someone interested in your book, get interested in them. And they’ll usually return that interest as my advice. If you want to build up your PR list, it really is about being part of a writing community or being on some type of social media and getting to know reviewers on that media. And it does, doing a press release list and all of that we have somebody full time on our team that that’s their focus is our press release, because it is so labor intensive. And we’re very unfortunate to have staff. And that’s the benefit of signing with a traditional press or doing a co op press thing rather than self released or self published is that you get a team of people to do things that are really labor intensive and take a lot of time to do everything on your own to release your book by yourself at the level that the press does is a 60 to 80 hour work week for one person. And I really have a lot of empathy for that it shouldn’t be. That shouldn’t be the case it should be simplified. But I think as new technology comes on board, and as people are on different platforms and get their their media on their books, different ways that the demand is is going to increase. And the time is going to increase. So if you’re self publishing, I think it might be worth looking at Co Op publishing deal or a co op press or submitting to us when our subs are open. So submitting to us a sending query letter, and the first three chapters of your book if our submissions are open, so check out cinnabar moth.com. I don’t know when you’re listening to this. But our subs may or may not be opening you can check us out on cinnabar moth.com To find out if our submissions are open. So I hope that I sort of do mystify some of the industry jargon. And thank you all for listening to the end. And since we got to the end, go ahead and smash that like button and be sure to subscribe and turn on the notification bell so that you get notified every time we upload a fabulous new demystifying the industry when it comes to publishing, and I want to thank all of our beautiful cinnabar moths for listening could be any type of or any kind of moth you’d like to be and you can even be a butterfly, but I’m not Mariah Carey and I’m not trying to bite her rhyme bye