In hindsight, this post may have been better earlier in the year? But my blogging is not the end-all-be-all to writing, so for all I know, this could be a reader’s very first post by me that they’ve read. In which case, congrats! You’ve won the learning lottery today!
Because this week (and the next two) will be basically a glossary for everyone—writing terms that writers throw around with abandon that everyone may not know. Or even terms other writers don’t know; there’s a lot of genre bubbles and jargon in the writosphere. And because of that, this is far from comprehensive. I’m constantly googling and urban dictionary-ing things myself.
AUTHOR TERMS:
author/writer: This is the person who writes the things! There may be subtle nuance between them—if they’ve published versus haven’t, what they’ve written or published, etc—but for the most part, these are largely interchangeable.
alpha (reader): Alpha readers are the first people you give your manuscript to to read over. Their duties vary and there is a lot of overlap with beta readers (the more often used term, imo), but at a basic glance, they proofread and provide basic feedback to the author.
beta (reader): Betas are similar to alpha readers and there is much overlap. See the above definition, plus my blog post on them, for more details. But basically proofreaders, editors lite, and potentially more.
agent: A person who, in exchange for a cut (usually 15% ish) of royalty/advance payments, they use magic powers to throw your manuscript at publishing houses. Magic powers, or amazing insight into the publishing world and/or existing connections. Or all of the above.
editor: An editor can be part of a publishing house or independent, and they could be an agent or publisher or illustrator or any number of other things as well. But they edit your book! (There are a lot of different types of editing, which I will not get into here, because I barely understand them myself.)
publisher: This is the company, service, or group who is turning your book into something that can be bought and read. Also possibly using magic.
royalty: The percentage of money you get from sales (after an advance has been paid out, if applicable). The entire book’s price does not go to the author, sadly. Printing costs, distribution costs, and so on factor into the pricing and all these people, in addition to the author, need to get paid.
advance: This is an up-front payment (though it commonly is split into several smaller payments if a larger sum) to the author for writing their book. The advance must be “earned out” before the author gets royalties—as in, they must earn that much money before they get any more. Still, a very nice thing to have!
wip: It stands for “Work In Progress”. Many authors guiltily have many.
backburner: A WIP that has a little less urgency, importance, or time committed to it compared to other projects.
discontinued: You will mostly see this more in online spaces, but it means a project that has been dropped, while usually available in partial format online. It could apply to series, too.
editing/revision: Hell. In a longer definition, this is the process by which the manuscript is tweaked. There are many different types of editing but I am not the person to explain them. This is to correct things such as typos and grammatical mistakes, but also plot/character inconsistencies, pacing issues, word usage, and more.
draft: What “version” of the book you are on, in technological terms. The first draft is the one you have once you are done writing it for the first time. A second draft would be after a first pass of editing, revisions, and potential rewrites are done. A third draft is that, again.
