Let’s Talk Bookish: All About Acronyms

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme that was originally created and hosted by Rukky @ Eternity Books starting in August 2019, and was then cohosted with Dani @ Literary Lion from May 2020 to March 2022. Book Nook Bits has hosted since April 2022.

April 28th: All About Acronyms
(Aria)

Prompts: TBR, DNF, ARC, YA… the list of bookish acronyms goes on. What are some acronyms you think readers and book bloggers should be aware of? Were you ever confused about acronyms when you started blogging? 

Well to start with – the ones mentioned here are pretty key ones! I would say these are fairly important to know if you’re getting involved in the bookish community, whether that’s as a reader, reviewer, writer, etc etc. It’s interesting how many are out there, really – it reminds me of the early days of the internet when you had so few words on texts and we found it easier to type out brb on MSN rather than “be right back”. Even now I find myself accidentally using some acronyms around people who don’t get them, but others have stuck around! LOL and LMAO spring straight to mind. But, right, bookish acronyms!

TBR – to be read! The huge pile of books that possibly reach the ceiling, which you are definitely without a doubt going to get to one day. Of course, the TBR isn’t just physical – this can encompass digital bookshelves, or even books you don’t own but hope to read at some point in the future.

DNF – Did Not Finish. A book usually so bad, or so not-right-for-you-right-then you cannot finish it. People have different rules and reasons for DNF’ing a book – for me, it normally means I struggled a lot to get to the point where I finally said enough is enough and put it down.

ARC – advanced reader copy/advanced review copy/probably something something else I can’t quite remember…these are books you get prior to release, in order to review. You can request ARCs direct from authors/publishers, on sites like NetGalley, etc. They might not be fully formatted/corrected, but to me, they should be as close as possible to what you’d read on publication day.

YA – Young Adult. Age category (not genre!) for books. When I was in this age range I got very confused and didn’t realise YA was 13-17, as I assumed YA was 18+ – you know, a young adult! But in the UK ‘teen’ was used for 10-14 (ish?), in the US this is more ‘Middle Grade’, and YA is more the core teenage years. I don’t know who decided this was so. NA tends to be New Adult.

Let’s touch on a few more – MC is the Main Character of a novel. POV is Point of View. LI means Love Interest. FMC = Female Main Character with MMC = Male Main Character. SFF is Science Fiction & Fantasy. POD means Print on Demand, HEA is Happily Ever After and HFN means Happy for Now – both of these are usually used to refer to Romance, which must have one of these two to be a Romance.

There’s probably a lot more I’m missing from here, but to me these are the key ones, and some I often use without really thinking about it! When I first started, there were some terms that confused me, but with the internet this kind of information isn’t far. The things that most confused me, however, were acronyms for book titles – those could get pretty confusing pretty quick, especially when it felt like there were so many that just went over my head completely! Seeing AKSP or TAOGTL or even RLFROTALMETYUM (these are all completely and totally made up, but it felt like that sometimes!) all across Twitter and on blogs had me baffled! But you kind of get used to it, and often if it’s within the genres you quite like, you pick up on what they are fairly quickly.

What are your most often use acronyms? Did any confuse you when you started out? Are any of the above ones you use frequently or were there any there you didn’t know?