A Glossary of Publishing Terms, Part II

Here's my flex: the staff of Belt Publishing is extraordinarily talented. But only one of us has a 'real' background in publishing, or worked in the trenches of New York publishing. The rest of us, including me, teach ourselves as we go. Sometimes that means surreptitiously googling after a meeting to figure out what the hell that term the designer just threw out meant.

Print Run: The number of copies of a book you order from the printer, usually referring to the initial print run, or the wild guess you make months before a title publishes about how many books will sell. The initial print runs for Belt titles ranges from 1,000 to 10,000 copies; Big Five publisher numbers dwarf ours. Fire and Fury had an initial print run of 250,000 or something.

Deciding on the initial print run is an art at which I suck: I have had to order a second printing, or second print run, of a title before publication date, based on initial orders, and I have a (secret) wall of books in the Belt office o…