🤫 The Secret Handshake of Publishing

Language can build barriers. View in browser Hey, I have two things for you this week: a video on promo-stacking, and an offer to help. If you ever wondered what promo-stacking is, why it's so important to do, how it works the way it does, and all the ways you can do it – and which is most effective! – then this brand-new video is for you: Promo Stacking FTW. While you are over there at YouTube, make sure to hit that subscribe button. I get a good number of views on my videos, but my subscriber count is still relatively low. If I can boost subscribers a little more, I get access to a pretty sweet YouTube feature that will allow me to do some very fun things. Everyone should understand what promo-stacking is after watching that video. If you want even more jargon broken down in ways everyone can understand, read on. Jargon is the secret handshake of the professional classes and relatively new fields like digital self-publishing can accumulate crazy levels of jargon in a short space of time. I had a friend step away from writing for a couple of years because of… life stuff, and she said it sounded like everyone was speaking an alien language. Promo stacking is a relatively tame one, but examples include comp authors, buyer personas, and squeeze pages. And then there's the alphabet soup that comes with the world of advertising: you might be familiar with CPC and CTR, but do you know your ACOS from your ROAS? Can you tell the difference between a frequency cap and a recency cap? I've been doing this for ten years (and come from a marketing/tech/online advertising background) but I still stumble across new jargon all the time – which often has me reaching for Der Google. Luckily, that professional background allows me to translate a phrase like "inbound marketing works best for top-of-funnel customers" into plain English – and most importantly into useful insights to grow my business – but those coming into publishing from other fields must be mystified by some of these crimes against clear expression. And while this newsletter has an unapologetic marketing focus (genuinely not sorry at all!), the jargon juggling goes beyond the marketing aspects of digital publishing. A diligent beginner might know their metadata from their MOBI, but would you blame them for looking confused when someone asked them about title-keyword stuffing or popularity list algos? So, here's my offer to you: Reply to this email with one acronym or phrase or piece of jargon from the world of writing, publishing, or marketing. I might do a blog post, an email, or a video – or some combination thereof – but I'll try and slay all these jargony jeremiads at once. Dave P.S. Writing music this week is The Move with Blackberry Way. DavidGaughran.com Broomfield Business Park, Malahide, Co. Dublin, Ireland You received this email because you signed up at DavidGaughran.com. Unsubscribe