A Bunch of Acronyms

This is very cool.  Nicole, in her blog, Feed Your Fiction Addiction, listed all of these acronyms associated with book world.  

Last week I posted about OTPs and several people said that they didn’t know the acronym. It occurred to me that there are LOTS of book blogging terms that aren’t particularly obvious. When I first started out as a blogger, I often stared in puzzlement at words or acronyms that meant nothing to me. Heck, even nowadays I still run across terms I’m not sure about. I thought it might be fun to try to gather together as many of these as I could and explain them … for those of us just starting out or anyone who’s not sure what some of these mean!

Bookish Relationship Terms:

OTP: One True Pairing (that couple that you will root for till the end of time)
NOTP: (Pronounced No-TP) Basically the opposite of an OTP. You do not want this couple together!
BROTP/Bromance: A friendship (between guys) that you adore!
Ship: If you ship a couple, it means that you want them to get together (comes from the word “relationship”).
HEA: Happily Ever After
Book Boyfriend/Girlfriend: The fictional boy (or girl) you only wish could be your real-life love.
Insta-love/Insta-lust: The phenomenon that happens all too often in books when the couple meets and instantly falls in love (or, sometimes, lust).
Love triangle: When the main character can’t decide between two romantic partners—most frustrating when this is drawn out for multiple books in a series.

Other Reading Emotion Terms:

The Feels: This means that you were overwhelmed with emotion when reading the book often meaning that lots of different emotions were involved. It’s high praise to say that a book gave you all the feels!
Book Hangover: When a book leaves you emotionally drained. Often this leads to the reader not being able to jump right into another book and sometimes leads to a …
Reading Slump/Blogging Slump: Feeling uninspired to read and/or blog. Or sometimes just a slump where you read a string of underwhelming books or post a bunch of unimaginative posts.

Character/Plot Terms:

MC: Main character (book is told from their POV)
POV: Point of view (the perspective that the book is told from)
POC: Person of color
Twist: An unexpected event in a book—typically one that changes the direction of the plot or characters dramatically
Info-Dump: When the author gives you lots of background information all at once via narration or dialogue.

Genres/Age Ranges:

PB: Picture book
MG: Middle Grade (typically geared toward ages 8-13 or so)
YA: Young Adult (typically geared toward high school aged readers—or features main characters in that age range)
NA: New Adult (typically geared toward college age or just out of college—or features main characters in that age range)
SF/F: Sci-Fi or Fantasy
PNR: Paranormal Romance (usually adult)
UF: Urban Fantasy
Contemp: Contemporary fiction, meaning that it takes place in modern day and generally doesn’t have any magical, sci-fi or fantasy elements

Format/Publishing Terms:

ARC/Galley/Uncorrected Proof/eARC/DRC: These are all terms that refer to an Advanced Reader’s Copy—a (typically unfinalized) copy of the book that publishers provide to reviewers before the publication date. eARC and DRC (Digital Review Copy) both refer to electronic copies of a book.
Physical Copy: (Often in reference to an ARC) Means that you have a hardcover or paperback version of the book, not an ebook.
Finished Copy/FC: The book in its final, published form
PB: Paperback
HC: Hardcover
Self-Published: Published by the author (often via Amazon)
Traditionally Published: Published by one of the major publishing houses
Indie/Small-Press: Published by a small independent publisher
ISBN: International Standard Book Number. A unique number that identifies a published book.
MS: Manuscript (the copy of the book that’s actually written or typed by the author)
WIP: Work in progress (a book that the author is currently working on)
Blurb: The synopsis that you find on the back of the book and sites like Amazon and Goodreads
Street Teams: A team of bloggers and/or readers who enthusiastically promote an author or a series. Sometimes street team members get special perks from the author like first dibs on ARCs.

Memes:

Meme: According to Merriam-Webster a meme is defined as “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.” In the book blogging world, it’s typically a link-up centered on a theme where lots of bloggers participate and link up to a master post. There are lots of these. Here are just a few that I could think of:

• TTT: Top Ten Tuesday. (A different bookish top ten list every week)
• WoW: Waiting on Wednesday (Lists an upcoming book the blogger is looking forward to)
• Sunday Post: A weekly wrap-up.
• StS: Stacking the Shelves (Books that have been newly acquired)
• It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?: Tell what you’re reading that week.
• Teaser Tuesday: List a teaser sentence from the book you’re currently reading.
• That’s What He Said Thursday: Share a line from your current book boyfriend.
• Cover Characteristic: Features a different type of cover element each week.
• Feature & Follow Friday: A meme that encourages following back.

Tag: Usually a post with a list of quick categories or questions around a theme. The blogger puts up their post and then “tags” other bloggers, encouraging them to complete the list as well.
Blog Hop/Giveaway Hop: A linky that is designed so that participants “hop” from blog to blog visiting many of the linked posts. (Often this is done with a giveaway, so that there is a link-up of lots of blogs participating in a giveaway and people can hop to all of them to enter many different giveaways)
Buddy Read: When a group of two or more people read a book at the same time so they can discuss it as they go.
OTSP Secret Sister: A monthly bookish secret sister project put together by a few bloggers as part of their “On the Same Page” feature.

Tours

Blog Tour: An organized publicity tour for a book where multiple bloggers post about the book on their blogs. Usually tours take place over a short period of time (typically two weeks or less), often near the release date. Blog tours often include a giveaway (but not always). Tour stops might include:

• Spotlight: A tour stop that just gives basic information about the book such as cover, description, release date, author info, buy links, etc.
• Guest Post: Where the author writes a short guest post about a topic relevant to the book that’s included in the tour stop.
• Interview: An interview with the author (usually questions are written by the blogger)
• Excerpt: A tour stop that includes an excerpt of the book
• Review: A tour stop that includes a review of the book

Cover Reveal: An organized reveal of the cover for an upcoming book where the cover is featured on blogs and 

Bookish and Social Media Abbreviations/Terms:

NG: NetGalley (a site that provides digital review copies)
EW: Edelweiss (another site that provides digital review copies)
GR: Goodreads (a site where you can post reviews and more!)
FB: Facebook
BookTube: Bookish vlogs (video blogs) posted to YouTube
Bookstagram: Instagram feeds that are dedicated to pictures of books
TBD: The Book Depository (you’ll see this abbreviation on international giveaways a lot)

Book Conferences:

There are TONS of book conferences out there, but these are the ones I hear bloggers talking about most:

ALA: American Library Association (Technically this is the name of the organization, but when bloggers say they’re going to ALA, they’re talking about the organization’s bi-annual convention.)
BEA/BookCon: Book Expo America (which is now being renamed to just Book Expo, I believe). Book Expo is the main conference, which is only open to industry professionals (including bloggers, though that’s being limited a bit more than it was in the past). BookCon takes place immediately after BEA and is open to the public.
RT Booklover’s Convention: This is the Romantic Times convention, which focuses mostly on adult romance (though it’s branched out into more YA in recent years). It has lots of break-out sessions for aspiring writers, bloggers, and readers and also features author signings and tons of fun parties and activities!
Apollycon: Jennifer Armentrout sponsors this conference.

Other Random Terms:

Blogoversary: The anniversary of your first blog post!
Shelfie: A mixture of “shelf” and “selfie”—basically a picture of your bookshelves.
Book spine poetry: Creating a poem from the titles of your books. Often done using a pictures of all the books stacked up to show the poem.

Book Title Abbreviations:

We book bloggers are busy people and we can’t be expected to constantly type out long book titles, right? Besides, when Twitter’s 140 character limit is involved titles like A Court of Thorns and Roses are just darn impractical! So, what do we do? We abbreviate them, of course! ACoTaR is a really common one I see all the time (notice that the words that aren’t capitalized in the title often aren’t capitalized in the abbreviation either). But this abbreviating can be seen all the time, especially in comments or when the name of the book has already been mentioned once. Usually this treatment is reserved for long titles, but sometimes we just get plain lazy—I’ve seen people abbreviate two or three word titles this way from time to time.

Whew! Any of these new to you? I’m sure I’m missing some important terms and abbreviations here. If you think of any that I should add to the list, let me know in the comments!

YALC: the UK’s Young Adult Literature Conventionin social media.
Book Blitz: This type of tour typically includes a giveaway and lots of spotlight posts (sometimes all on the same day or over just a couple of days up to a week) but features no reviews, guest posts, interviews, etc.
Social Media Blitz: A tour that is organized just to be featured on social media (just spotlights).
Top Post of the day: If a tour company says that the tour post needs to be your top post of the day, that means that it should be the last thing you post that day (most tour companies ask that you post by a certain time, say 10AM, so that would mean you couldn’t put up any other posts after 10AM on that day).

The post A Book Blogger’s Guide to Acronyms, Terms and Slang appeared first on Feed Your Fiction Addiction.