I looked back some of my Tuesday blog posts and thought I might be getting too serious, so I wanted to lighten it up a bit with some practical, helpful information that should help you navigate and understand the complicated world of publishing.

Here are words you might hear in relation to publishing or describing a particular book and its real meaning:

• “A must-read” – Acquisitions editor job is on the line
• “Latest release by the author” – marketing hasn’t read the manuscript.
• “Incredible Literary Feat” – passive aggressive statement from publisher aimed at an author who missed their deadline by three years.
• “Much anticipated release” – passive aggressive statement from marketing department of publisher aimed at the production department for messing up printer files causing a delay in delivery.
• “Great crossover title” – Christian bookstores won’t stock it.
• “Great for all ages” – Publisher has no idea who will read it.
• “A message for the ages” – Marketing thinks book will blow the lid off of something, but they don’t know what.
• “A message you need to hear” – the book is like drinking a big tall glass of Metamucil.
• “Ground-breaking” – book has borderline heresy in it, but maybe not, we’re not sure.
• “100,000 Books in Print” – publisher over-printed and has a lot of copies in the warehouse…a lot of copies.
• “Research-based findings” – publisher held a focus group and gave participants pizza and chocolate cake to say they liked the book.
• “Just like Purpose Driven Life, The Shack, Prayer of Jabez, Left Behind, and The Bible” – Ad copy written by someone who just returned from a seminar on Metadata Key Word Search and Internet Discoverability.
• “Revised and Updated Edition” – we corrected the mistakes we made in the original edition.
• “Best-selling author” – the author did all the marketing and bought 20,000 copies and sold them at their seminars.  We just printed them! Woo-hoo!

Any words or phrases you would like to have explained? (I can be serious…really)