Publishing glossary

It is why a well made book feels calm. When the text is locked to the grid, the lines on the left-hand page line up with the lines on the right, and a reader holding the book open sees one rhythm instead of two. Headings and images break it, because they rarely stand a whole number of lines tall. Size their spacing in multiples of the leading and the grid holds.

Printers cut through stacks with a tolerance of a millimetre or two, so anything that stops exactly at the page edge will show a white sliver on some copies. An element meant to touch the edge has to overshoot it, usually by about an eighth of an inch. Novel interiors rarely need bleed at all, since the text sits well inside the margins. It matters for covers, and for the occasional full page image or map.

It is the style of letters, reports and the web. Novels do not use it, because over three hundred pages the spaces add up to a lot of extra paper and the page loses its texture. The place it does turn up in fiction is an epistolary passage where a letter is set apart from the prose around it.

Chapters conventionally start a third of the way down the page rather than at the top, and the space above the title is what signals a beginning, without needing a rule or an ornament. The first paragraph of a chapter is also not indented, because there is nothing above it to separate it from. Indenting it is the single most common tell of a book set by somebody working from a word processor.

A blank line on its own is not enough, because the moment the break falls at the foot of a page it vanishes and the reader has no idea the scene changed. The usual fix is to drop the ornament when a break lands on a page boundary and let the white space do the work there instead. Three asterisks is the safe choice. Anything more decorative starts competing with the prose for attention.

It is decoration with a job: it tells the eye where the chapter starts. Two or three lines deep is normal, and the letter should sit on the baseline of the last line it occupies rather than floating. The two details that give away an amateur setting are a drop cap that leaves an awkward gap next to a letter like A or W, and a quotation mark left dangling outside it when the chapter opens on dialogue.

A chapter opening has no running head, so the page number has nowhere to sit at the top. Dropping it to the foot keeps the page numbered without putting a header on a page meant to look clean. Most novels do this on chapter openings and use full running heads everywhere else.

British and American house styles disagree about spaces around it. Pick one and hold it for the whole book. It is longer than a hyphen and longer than an en dash, and a manuscript that types a hyphen where it means an em dash hands a copy editor several hours of tedious work. Most editors convert a double hyphen for you. Check yours does before you rely on it.

This is the one people miss, because on a keyboard it passes for a hyphen. Ranges are the common case, so page and chapter references take one. A hyphen there is not a disaster, but a proofreader will mark every occurrence, and finding them all at that stage is slow.

A novel indents and puts no space between paragraphs. A business document does the opposite. Doing both is the clearest sign a manuscript was typeset by someone who typesets documents. The first paragraph after a chapter opening or a scene break goes flush left, since there is nothing above it to separate from.

Conventions worth knowing: odd folios belong on recto, even on verso, and the two must never disagree with the actual side of the sheet. Pages that carry no folio at all, such as a chapter opener or a blank, are called blind folios and still count in the numbering. Front matter is traditionally numbered in roman numerals, restarting at arabic 1 with the first page of the text.

It has to grow with page count, because a 500 page paperback swallows far more of the inner edge than a 200 page one does. Print on demand services publish a table for this and it is worth obeying rather than estimating. Get it wrong and the text runs into the fold, which no reader forgives, and which no printer will catch for you because from their side nothing is wrong.

A line beginning with an opening quotation mark looks indented if the mark sits inside the margin, because the mark is mostly white space. Pushing it out fixes the optical gap. In a novel it shows up most in dialogue, where several lines in a row start with a quotation mark and the left edge starts to look ragged.

Justification and hyphenation are a pair: turn hyphenation off in justified text and you get rivers of white running down the page, because the spaces have to absorb everything. The rules typesetters hold to are no more than two or three hyphenated lines in a row, never hyphenate the last word of a paragraph, and never break a word across a page turn. Ragged right can do without it, which is part of why large print settings use it.

It is the default for novels and it is what a book looks like, but it only works with hyphenation switched on. Without it the spaces do all the absorbing and you get rivers, those pale channels wandering down a paragraph that you cannot stop seeing once somebody points them out. Narrow columns make it worse, which is why justification on a phone screen often looks so much uglier than it does in print.

It is a pair by pair correction, not a global one, and that is what separates it from tracking, which opens or closes a whole run of text. Good text faces carry thousands of kerning pairs already, so at body size the work is mostly done for you. Where it becomes visible is at display size: a chapter title or a drop cap with an unkerned pair sitting in a gap is one of the most obvious tells in amateur book design.

It is pronounced like the metal, because it once was: strips of lead placed between lines of type. As a rule of thumb, book text wants roughly 120 to 140 per cent of the type size, and longer lines want more of it than short ones do. Too tight and the paragraph turns into a grey slab; too loose and the lines stop reading as a single block. It affects how a page feels far more than the choice of typeface does.

Book faces ship them and good typesetting leaves them on, or the dot of an i crashes into the hood of an f on every other line. Standard ligatures are safe. Discretionary ones like ct and st are period costume in a contemporary novel. Check they survive export, because some pipelines drop them quietly.

They are not wasted paper, they are where your thumbs go, and a book with mean margins is genuinely harder to hold and read. The traditional proportions are unequal on purpose: the outer margin larger than the inner, and the bottom larger than the top, so the text block sits slightly high and towards the spine. Setting all four equal is the fastest way to make a page look like a document rather than a book.

Somewhere around sixty to seventy characters is the range most book pages settle in. Go much wider and the eye loses the start of the next line on the way back. Go much narrower and you hyphenate constantly and open rivers in justified text. This is what you are setting when you set the margins on a page.

They belong in prose, where a date or an age set in full-height numerals shouts at the reader. Lining figures, which are all the same height, belong in tables and anywhere numbers have to align in a column. Most book faces carry both. Which one you get by default depends on the face.

Like a widow it is a typesetting fault rather than a writing one, and the same remedy fixes both: never leave fewer than two lines of a paragraph together at a page break. The names get swapped constantly, including by people who set type for a living, so it is worth saying which one you mean rather than trusting the label to carry it.

A novel usually sits somewhere between ten and twelve points, though the number means less than it looks, because two faces at the same point size can look very different. What matters is how big the lowercase looks and how many characters fit on a line. Set a page, print it, and read it at arm’s length before deciding.

Because the word spacing stays constant, it never produces rivers, and it works without hyphenation. That combination makes it the standard choice for large print and a defensible one for narrow measures. In a conventional novel it reads as informal, closer to a manuscript than a printed book, which is either wrong for you or exactly the effect you want.

Recto is the page the eye lands on first, so it is where anything that matters belongs: the half title, the title page, the first page of the text, and conventionally the opening of each chapter. Insisting that every chapter opens recto is what produces the occasional blank left hand page in a printed novel. That blank is deliberate, and it is not an error in the file.

They come from justification, which stretches the word spaces to fill the line until several stretched spaces stack up. Narrow columns make it worse, because there are fewer spaces to absorb the stretch. Hyphenation helps, a wider measure helps, and ragged right removes the problem. You will see them everywhere once you have seen one in your own book.

Whether the title sits at the head or the foot is a design decision, not a rule. Putting it at the foot leaves the top of the page clear, and it then competes with the page number for the same strip of space, so the two have to be laid out together. Most novels use a running head with a drop folio instead.

The usual arrangement is author on verso and title on recto, though chapter titles on the recto are just as standard and more useful in non-fiction. They are suppressed on chapter openers and on blank pages, which is a detail that often gets missed. A running foot is the same thing at the bottom of the page, and is worth considering when the folio sits down there too.

The break itself is the white space; the ornament is only insurance for when the white space is invisible, which is any time the break falls at the top or bottom of a page. In a manuscript going to an editor the convention is a hash or a centred asterisk, because a blank line will not survive being pasted between programs. Whatever you choose, use the same mark throughout.

You see them in the first few words of a chapter, carrying the reader out of the drop cap and into the prose. Check whether your face has real small caps or whether the software is shrinking full capitals to fake them. Faked ones have the wrong stroke weight and sit thin against the text. Most readers notice without being able to say why.

Setting margins is really choosing this rectangle. Its width fixes how many characters fit on a line, its height fixes how many lines fit on a page, and together they fix the page count. Page count sets the spine width and the print cost. Too wide is the usual fault in a self-typeset novel, because the page looks efficient and reads badly.

Kerning fixes one pair. Tracking moves the whole line. A touch of negative tracking can pull a stubborn widow back onto the previous page, and a touch of positive tracking opens up a line of capitals, which need more air than lowercase. Use it to force a justified line to fit and the reader sees a patch of text greyer or darker than the page around it.

It is the first decision because everything downstream depends on it: margins, page count, spine width and unit cost all move when it changes. Genres have strong conventions, and readers notice a book that is the wrong shape for its shelf even if they could not tell you why. Decide it before you set a single page, because changing it later reflows the entire book.

By convention the verso holds what supports the text rather than what leads it: the copyright page sits there, behind the title, and the author name usually occupies the verso running head. Blank versos are normal and deliberate, since insisting a chapter open on a recto will occasionally leave the preceding left hand page empty. That blank is a decision, not a mistake.

It reads as a mistake because it is one, and it is the kind of thing you stop being able to see in your own book somewhere around the fortieth read. The standard remedy is keeping at least two lines of a paragraph together at every page break. A single short word alone on the last line of a paragraph is a related nuisance, sometimes called a runt, and pulling the previous word down fixes it.

Novels put them at the back. Non-fiction often puts them at the front. Check every name twice, because this is the page where a typo is personal.

It goes in the back matter, after the last chapter and usually before the acknowledgements. A note on sources, on the real history behind the novel, or on a decision a reader might query. If the story needs it to make sense, the problem is further upstream.

Fantasy and historical fiction use them most. The risk is always the same. If a reader has to go to the appendix to follow the story, the story is not carrying itself. As a reward for the reader who wants more, they work.

That is where the author note and the first chapter of the next book belong. Ordering is looser than in front matter, but two conventions hold: acknowledgements before the author biography, and anything that refers to the text before anything that sells something else.

It is optional and almost nobody reads it, which is precisely why it is worth including. A colophon is a small signal that somebody made deliberate decisions about the object rather than accepting whatever the defaults were. Traditionally it names the type and says something about who cut it and when. Two sentences is enough. The one way to get it wrong is to imply the book was letterpressed when it came off a digital press.

It sits on the verso directly behind the title page, set small, and it is the page self publishers most often get subtly wrong. The notice itself is three parts: the symbol, the year of first publication, and the name of the rights holder. The “any resemblance to actual persons” disclaimer is convention rather than a requirement, and it will not protect you from anything if you have in fact libelled someone.

It goes after the copyright page, before the contents, on a right-hand page, and it gets that page to itself. Keep it to a line or two. Once it runs to a paragraph you have written an acknowledgement and put it in the wrong place.

The hard part is rights, not layout. Those words usually belong to someone else, and a few lines of a living poet or a song lyric is what a publisher will ask you to clear. Song lyrics are the expensive one. Nobody thinks of four words as a quotation until the invoice arrives. Sort the permission before you get attached to it.

It is the one part of the front matter that is not yours, which is the point of having one. It is signed, and it goes before the preface if the book has both. Novels rarely carry one outside a reissue or an anniversary edition, where the interest is in who is doing the introducing.

The order is more settled than most writers expect, and getting it wrong is one of the quiet signals that a book was not made by someone who has done it before. Half title, then title, then copyright, then dedication. Front matter is traditionally numbered in roman numerals so that chapter one can begin on arabic page 1. Keep it short. Nobody has ever bought a novel because of its front matter, and a long run of it delays the only page that matters.

It is an old convention that survives mostly in illustrated editions and reissues. Because it faces the title page, it has to be on a verso, which fixes where it sits and can shift the pagination of everything after it. A map often ends up here in fantasy, though a map is usually better placed where the reader will look for it again.

It is a survival from when books were sold unbound and the top sheet protected the title page underneath. It has no function now beyond convention, and convention is reason enough: its absence is one of the things that makes a self published book feel thin at the front. It is always a recto, and the page behind it is normally blank.

That is what separates it from a preface and a foreword, and it is why an introduction is usually paginated with the main text rather than with the front matter. Skip a preface and you lose nothing. Skip an introduction and you may have missed something the rest of the book assumes. Novels seldom have one.

The distinction people trip over is that a preface is about the book and an introduction is part of it. Skip a preface and you have lost nothing from the story. A reissue often gains one, which is how the second edition of a novel ends up opening with the author explaining what they now think of it.

Every meaningful image in an ebook needs it, and a purely decorative one should be marked decorative so a screen reader skips it instead of describing an ornament. Several markets now require this. Write what the image tells the reader. A map’s alt text is the places on it and how they sit together, not the word map.

It survives because of track changes and margin comments, which is the whole working vocabulary of an edit and which no other format handles as well in practice. A DOCX going out for editing should be plain: one typeface, no fancy layout, nothing that will explode when somebody opens it in a different version of Word. Save the design for the file you publish.

The retailer applies it at sale time, so it is a checkbox at upload rather than something you produce. It does not stop determined copying, because stripping it is trivial for anyone who wants to. It does stop a reader who bought the book moving it to another device. A good number of publishers have decided that trade is not worth making.

Underneath it is a zip archive of HTML and CSS, which is why an EPUB is closer to a small website than to a document. The consequence writers keep running into is that you do not control the page: font, size, margins and line length all belong to the reader, and any design that depends on a line breaking in a particular place will not survive contact with a real device.

These are the schema.org fields that say, in machine readable terms, that a book is all text, that it has a logical reading order, and that nothing in it flashes. Retailers increasingly surface this on the product page, and European rules have covered ebooks as a consumer product since June 2025. It costs nothing to declare accurately and it is one of the few compliance details a solo publisher can simply get right.

The name collides with the printed spine and the two have nothing to do with each other, which catches people out the first time an error mentions it. When an ebook opens on the wrong page, skips a chapter, or puts the copyright page after chapter one, this list is where the order actually lives. The visible contents page can be perfectly correct while this is wrong.

Stores run it whether or not you do, so running it first turns a rejection into a message you can act on. Errors are hard failures. Warnings are usually fine and occasionally the reason a book behaves oddly on one device. A file that passes can still be badly typeset, because validation checks structure and not craft.

It exists for books where the page is the content: picture books, cookbooks, comics, anything with text sitting on an image. For a novel it is close to always the wrong choice. It disables the reader’s control over type size, it behaves badly on small screens, and it produces enormous files. If your book is words in a row, reflowable is what you want.

A print PDF has to embed every face it uses or the printer substitutes something else, and the book arrives set in a font nobody chose. Ebooks are different, because most devices let the reader override the font anyway and many EPUBs name no font at all. Check the licence as well as the mechanics, since not every typeface may be embedded and distributed.

The advice online has not caught up. Guides written a few years ago still tell you to convert to MOBI before uploading, and Amazon stopped taking it. Send a valid EPUB and let the store convert. A service still offering you a MOBI file has not been updated in a while.

It is separate from any contents page printed inside the book, and the two can disagree. That is how an ebook ends up with a visible contents page that is right and a device menu missing half the chapters. Older files carried an NCX for the same job and some stores still want one alongside. When chapter navigation is broken on a device, look here first.

It holds the metadata, a manifest of every file in the package, and the reading order. Most validation errors about a missing or unreferenced file are really about this one. You will not edit it by hand unless something has gone wrong, and knowing it exists turns an opaque error into a specific place to look.

It matters in education and in book groups, where somebody says which page a passage is on and everyone else has to find it. Several markets treat it as an accessibility requirement. It needs a print edition to map to, so it only becomes possible once the paperback is set.

It is the opposite of an ebook in the way that matters: every line break, page break and hyphen is already decided and will never move. That is why the page setup has to be right before the file is made rather than after. Fonts must be embedded, or the printer’s machine will substitute something and you will not find out until the proof arrives.

This is the correct format for a novel and it requires giving up control you may not want to give up. You do not own the page: the reader picks the typeface, the size and sometimes the margins, and your careful line break is a fiction on their device. Design in terms of structure and hierarchy rather than position, and anything that depends on where a line lands will break.

A screen reader uses those labels to say you have reached a new chapter, or to skip a block of front matter you do not want read aloud. Without them an ebook is one long stream that happens to have bigger text in places. It costs nothing while you are producing the book and cannot be added convincingly afterwards.

This is what review copies and beta reads use. The file stays a normal readable file on any device and carries something identifying who it went to, so a copy that turns up in public can be traced back. It discourages sharing instead of preventing it, which for a manuscript in front of a handful of readers is enough.

It is deliberately ugly, and that is the point. It is built to be easy to mark up and easy to estimate length from, not to look like a book. A submission that arrives typeset like a finished paperback reads as somebody who has not done this before, and it makes an editor’s job harder rather than easier. Italics where you mean italics is fine now; the underlining convention belonged to typewriters. To put an existing file into the format, the Shunn manuscript format generator does it in the browser.

You pay the print price and the shipping rather than the retail price, and you earn no royalty on them. They are how you get physical copies for a signing, a review, or a shelf. Ordering them is not a sale and does nothing to a ranking, whatever anyone tells you.

Print on demand usually adds one for you in a reserved patch of the back cover, which is why cover templates keep that corner clear. Supply your own and it has to encode the ISBN of that exact edition, since the paperback and the hardback are different books here. Leaving artwork under the reserved patch is the usual mistake and it comes back as a rejected cover.

It opens flatter than a paperback and lasts longer, and it costs more per copy however you print it. In print on demand you are usually choosing between a case laminate hardback, with the artwork printed straight onto the boards, and a jacketed one. Each needs its own cover file with its own spine width, because the boards add thickness a paperback does not have.

Gloss is brighter and makes colour pop, and it shows every fingerprint. Matte is softer and hides handling, and it can leave a dark cover looking slightly washed out. Look at what your genre does before you decide, because a reader scanning a shelf reads the finish before they read the title.

It is not simply the same file with the font size raised. Bigger type means fewer words per line, so the line breaks change, the page count grows considerably, and justification usually has to give way to ragged right because there is no longer room to distribute space evenly. It also gets its own ISBN, since it is a distinct edition. Libraries buy it, which is a market most self publishers never think about.

Printing and cutting both have tolerance, so anything near the edge might be trimmed off. Background art runs past the edge into the bleed. Text stays inside the live area. On a cover there is a reserved patch for the barcode as well. Rejected cover files are almost always art that stops short of the bleed or text that strays outside the live area.

Digital printing, which is what print on demand uses, has no plate cost, so one copy and a thousand copies cost about the same each. Offset spreads a large setup cost across the run, so the price per book falls as the run grows. The crossover is usually somewhere in the high hundreds. Below it, offset means paying for a garage full of books.

Cream is warmer and easier on the eye over a long read, which is why most fiction uses it. White is brighter and suits books with images. The two are not the same thickness, so switching after you have made the cover changes the spine width and the cover has to be remade. Print on demand offers a short list, and the list differs per printer.

Heavier paper feels more substantial and shows less of the printing on the reverse. It also makes a thicker book, which widens the spine and raises the unit cost. Print on demand gives you two or three options, not a number you pick.

Nearly every print on demand paperback is perfect bound. The pages do not open flat, so the inner margin has to be wider than the outer one or the text curves into the fold and gets hard to read. That extra inner margin is the gutter. Underestimating it is the most common fault in a self-typeset paperback.

It removed the part of self publishing that used to ruin people, which was paying up front for a thousand copies that then lived in a garage. The trade-offs are a higher unit cost, a smaller range of trim sizes and papers, and no say over which machine in which country prints your book. For a first novel it is almost always the right answer anyway.

Order one. Screens lie about books in every direction: margins that looked generous turn out cramped, the type you chose at 11 point reads small on cream paper, and the cover is a different colour in your hand than it was on your monitor. It costs the price of one book and a week of waiting, and it catches things no amount of zooming in on a PDF ever will.

It is why a printed page count often rounds up, and why some novels end with blank pages. Print on demand is digital and does not fold sheets the same way, so the constraint is looser than it was. Page count can still move in steps depending on the printer, and it still changes the price. Find out before you fight to lose two pages.

It is derived, not chosen, and it cannot be settled until the interior is final, because adding two pages changes it. That is the ordering trap in cover design: a spine laid out against an estimated page count will be wrong, and the text on it will sit off centre in a way that is obvious on a shelf. Finish the interior, then get the exact figure from your printer’s calculator.

It is one image, not three. Its width depends on the spine, the spine depends on the page count, and the page count depends on the interior. Change the trim, the font size or the paper after the cover is made and the spine moves, so the text on it drifts off centre. Finish the interior, take the final page count, then make the cover.

It sits under the description rather than replacing it, and it suits comparison points, series order, or review quotes that would be unwieldy as plain text. It is not indexed the way the description and the keywords are, so it works on a reader who has already arrived. Whether you can use it depends on the account, not the book.

Kindle editions get an ASIN whether or not you supply an ISBN, which is why plenty of self published ebooks have no ISBN at all. That is fine on Amazon and awkward everywhere else, because most other retailers and every library system still expect one. A print book keeps its ISBN and picks up an ASIN as well, so the two are not alternatives so much as separate filing systems that happen to overlap.

You normally pick two or three, and they decide which shelf your book sits on in every store that uses the standard. The temptation is to choose the largest category you can plausibly claim. The better move is usually the most specific one that is honestly accurate, because a small category is one you can actually rank inside, and a reader browsing it is already looking for the thing you wrote.

It is not a synopsis and it is not a summary. It is the situation, the hook and the stakes, stopping before the answer. The most common mistake is explaining the plot, which quietly removes the reason to read the book. The second most common is writing it last, exhausted, the night before publication, which is how a decent book ends up sold by bad copy.

It is the least romantic work in publishing and it does most of the selling. Nobody finds a book they have never heard of by browsing; they find it because the metadata put it in front of them. It also propagates slowly and unevenly, so correcting a typo can take days to show up everywhere, and some aggregators will keep serving the old version for considerably longer than that.

Programmes vary by country and most are limited to publishers above a certain size, so a self-published novel usually cannot get one. Commercial services sell a similar looking block under a different name. If you cannot get the real thing, leave the space empty rather than print something that imitates a national library record.

You own the copyright the moment you write the book. No registration creates that. What it can do, in some countries and notably in the United States, is strengthen what you can claim in court. Elsewhere it usually buys very little. Nothing on your copyright page depends on it.

It makes the book orderable, which is not the same as a shop stocking it. The royalty drops meaningfully, because the wholesale discount comes out of your share, and some channels expect the book to be returnable too. Take it for reach. Do not take it expecting revenue.

Two things about it are worth holding onto. It is a defence rather than a permission, which means you find out whether you were right in the room where it is disputed. And it is jurisdictional: the United Kingdom has fair dealing, which is narrower and enumerated, and other countries differ again. There is no word count that makes quotation safe, whatever you have read. Song lyrics in particular are where confident writers get expensive letters.

Self publishers frequently invent one, and there is nothing improper about that as long as it is not pretending to be somebody else’s. It looks tidier in a catalogue than your own name repeated three times, and it gives you something to put on the spine. Be aware that in some countries a trading name carries registration or disclosure obligations, so it is worth ten minutes of checking before it is printed on several hundred copies.

Worth knowing before you buy a pack of ten: some countries hand them out free through a national agency, and others let a commercial registrar charge you properly for a single one, so which applies depends entirely on where you are publishing from. The other thing that catches people is that the ISBN belongs to whoever registered it, and a free one from a retailer usually names that retailer as publisher of record.

They are phrases, not single words, and repeating what is already in your title and subtitle wastes them, since those are indexed anyway. The ones that work describe what a reader looking for a book like yours would actually type, which is usually a mood, a setting or a trope. You can change them after publication, so do not agonise.

It applies to self-published books in plenty of countries, including ones where writers assume it does not, and it usually means sending a small number of copies within a set period of publication. There is no payment. The rules are national, so the only source worth trusting is the national library of wherever you publish from.

They are strong across much of Europe and narrower elsewhere, notably in the United States. In some countries they have to be asserted, which is why so many copyright pages carry a sentence doing exactly that. They generally cannot be sold, only waived, so they behave differently from the rights a publishing contract transfers.

The trap everyone hits is song lyrics. Music publishers are organised, they charge per territory and per format, and a single line of a well known song can cost more than the book will make. Poetry is nearly as bad. Clearing takes weeks or months, so it belongs at the start of a project rather than the week before you publish, and the answer is sometimes just no.

Stores want the final file well before the release date, and missing that deadline can cost you the ability to run pre-orders for a while. Sales pile up to release day instead of landing when they happen, which concentrates the ranking. For a first novel with no audience, a long pre-order window is mostly a long wait with a deadline attached.

The rule of thumb most people carry is wrong somewhere, because terms vary by country and by when the author died, and there are separate rights sitting on top. A specific translation, a critical edition or a particular typographic setting can each be in copyright even where the underlying text is not. Sound recordings follow their own clock entirely. Check the edition you are quoting, not the work.

For a print on demand title, allowing returns can be a condition of being orderable by shops, and the cost of a returned copy lands on you. Plenty of writers leave it off and accept that shops order less often. A returned book you have already been paid for turns into a charge later, so decide with that in view.

In a traditional deal these are negotiated separately and a publisher may take some and leave others. Self-publish and you keep all of them by default, which matters less than it sounds, since holding a right and being able to exercise it are different problems. Audio comes up first for most writers, translation second.

A traditional contract carves the world into territories and a publisher buys some of them. Self-publishing through a global store usually means selecting worldwide rights, which is right unless you have licensed a territory to somebody else. The mistake to avoid is claiming worldwide rights you have already sold, and it is easy to make when a foreign edition gets signed years later.

The trade expects a substantial discount, and print on demand platforms generally fix it rather than letting you choose. It is why a print royalty looks so much smaller than an ebook one. When you set a list price, the number that matters is what is left after the discount and the print cost.

ARCs go out weeks or months before release, usually before the final proofread, which is why they carry a line saying so. The point is timing rather than generosity: a review that lands on publication day is worth several that arrive a month later. Expect a low response rate. Sending fifty copies and getting eight reviews back is a normal outcome rather than a failure.

The useful brief for a beta reader is three questions: where you got bored, where you got confused, and where you stopped believing someone. What they are not for is line editing, and a beta reader who hands your draft back with the commas moved has misunderstood the job, usually because nobody told them what it was. Three or four is plenty. Past that you get contradictory notes and start writing by committee.

It comes after the structural work is done, because there is no sense perfecting a sentence you are about to cut. A copyeditor queries rather than rewrites, and the good ones leave your voice alone even where they disagree with it. This is also the pass that catches your protagonist changing eye colour in chapter nine, which is exactly the sort of thing no amount of rereading your own book will ever surface.

It comes before the line edit. Doing it the other way round means paying to polish chapters that later get cut. The output is usually an editorial letter rather than marks on the page. It is the most expensive pass, it changes a book most, and it is the one most self-publishing writers skip.

It runs to several pages and it deals with structure, character, pacing and what the book is trying to do. Read it twice and leave it a week before you start cutting. The first read is the one where you argue with it, and most of what you argue with turns out to be right.

Endnotes keep the page clean, which is why fiction and trade non-fiction prefer them. The cost is real though: a reader has to leave the page to collect the note, and most simply will not. So an endnote is the right home for a citation or a source, and the wrong home for anything you actually want read. If it matters to the sentence, put it in the sentence.

You ask for these months ahead, with a finished manuscript, and most requests go unanswered. The ones that work come from writers in your own genre whose readers overlap with yours. A quote from a name nobody in your category recognises takes up cover space and does no work.

The advantage over an endnote is that it gets read, because the reader’s eye can reach it without losing their place. The cost is that footnotes have to be paginated: the note must land on the page carrying its marker, which constrains where the text can break and is why they are more work to typeset. In fiction they are rare enough to read as a deliberate device, which some novels use extremely well and most should avoid.

The name comes from the long metal trays that held set type before it was made up into pages, so a galley proof was literally a print pulled from the tray, running continuously with no page breaks yet. Galley proofs are still called that although nothing metal is involved any more. In current usage it overlaps heavily with the advance reader copy, the difference being that a galley is for correcting and an ARC is for reviewing.

It is the most expensive edit and the one most likely to change your book. A line editor is not looking for errors, they are asking whether the sentence is doing what you wanted, and the notes tend to be uncomfortable in a useful way. It also happens before the copyedit, which surprises people. There is no point regularising the punctuation of sentences that are about to be rewritten.

The boundaries are conventions rather than rules, and they move by genre and by who is counting. What is fixed is that the length affects how the book can be sold. A novella is a hard sell to a traditional publisher on its own and it is awkward to price in print, since the spine is thin and the unit cost does not fall much.

It happens on the laid out pages rather than in the manuscript, which is the whole point: a proofreader is checking the book as an object, not the text as a document. That is why it catches a chapter title in the wrong running head, or a page that opens on a scene break ornament. Do not use this pass to rewrite. Any change here moves every line after it, and a fresh error will follow.

It reads as a craft note, not a legal check. The reader tells you where something is inaccurate, dated, or doing something you did not intend, and what you do with that is yours. It works best after the developmental edit, when the book is structurally settled but before the prose is polished.

Its value is not planning, it is continuity, and it compounds with length. One novel you can mostly hold in your head; three books in, you cannot remember which brother was the older one or what year you said the fire happened. The version that gets used is the one kept beside the manuscript rather than in a separate program, because a reference you have to go and open is a reference you stop updating.

Every copyeditor builds one whether you give them one or not, and it covers the decisions no dictionary settles: whether it is grey or gray, toward or towards, serial commas, how numbers are handled, which invented words are capitalised. The one rule that matters is that it records decisions rather than enforcing rules. A character who says “towards” while the narration says “toward” is characterisation, and a style sheet that cannot hold that is worse than none.

It is not a blurb. A blurb withholds the ending to sell the book; a synopsis gives everything away so somebody can see whether the plot works. Present tense, in the order the book tells it. One page is the usual ask and two is the usual reality. The hard part is that it has to make the story sound like it makes sense, which you would rather find out now than after submitting.

Categories have real ranges and readers have real expectations inside them, which is why the number goes near the top of a query letter. It counts the manuscript, not the printed pages, and the two do not track each other once the design is set. Software counts vary slightly, so a borderline number really is borderline.