Metadata, Part I
Guidance for Book Self Publishing
Today’s Shelf Life—and Thursday’s!—are about metadata and the first, most important thing to know about metadata is this term is plural. A single piece of information about your book is a metadatum. Metadata is the plural; the metadata are right or they are wrong. Not “is.” Are.
That’s technically correct (the best kind of correct) but don’t make this your hill to die on because everyone else uses data and metadata as singular nouns and it turns out you can’t make people follow the grammar rules, which is a good thing, actually, it’s why I have a job.
Metadata are information that provide information about other information. They are the data about your data. When you self-publish a book, you will need to provide metadata about that book. This does not go only for books that publish in an electronic format, but for all books.
Metadata is a technical-sounding word, which is why I’m clarifying that it’s not just for digital books. Authors and publishers sharing metadata about books with librarians and booksellers predates the advent of the digital book—by a long time.
Let me put it this way: If you are my age or older, then at some point in your life you probably went into a library and had to use the card catalog. This was a big wooden cabinet with drawers that contained 1 index card representing each book in the library’s collection. Printed on the card—usually with an actual typewriter—were the book’s metadata, including things like:
Title
Author’s name
Year of publication
Dewey Decimal call number
If you’re younger than me you’ve never seen this card catalog of which I speak and your libraries always had computers, but you’re tech savvy, you can Google it and see what I mean.
If you publish your book with a traditional publisher, the publisher will handle the metadata aspects for you. If you’re self-publishing, you’ll have to handle these yourself. No technical knowledge necessary! (At least, not too much). Usually you’re just filling out a form. Today I will go over what metadata you should expect to provide, to whom you provide it, and its use.
For instance, if you’re asked to fill a description of your book it helps to know where you can expect that text to populate. Is this for readers to decide if they want to read? Is it for booksellers to decide where to place the book in the store? If you provide a “brief description” and a “main description,” where will each one be used?
Further, different self-publishing platforms may use different terms to describe the same thing (eg, “BISAC codes” and “categories” are probably the same thing)—so if you’re ever in the position of moving your content from one platform to another or you’re comparing requirements on different platforms, it’s helpful to know what all these pieces of metadata mean and what they are used for, practically.
So metadata, as I already said, are used by librarians and booksellers to figure out (A) where to shelve your title among all the other titles they have, and (B) how to get your title in front of the readers who are most likely interested in reading it. This is sometimes done by a human being and more often done by a computer. That’s why the metadata have to be provided in a very specific and granular way—so a machine can use them effectively.
Metadata also provide information about your book to the customer and the end user (who may or may not be the same person) to help them decide whether to buy and/or read it.
Although all these different people need your book’s metadata, you don’t have to give it to all of them directly. You will usually give it to the platform on which you are self-publishing your book (eg, Amazon Kindle or Ingram Spark) and that platform will store and disseminate the metadata to anyone who needs it via an ONIX feed. There will be some cases where you have to provide metadata to another outlet—for instance, the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress. But for the most part, the metadata you enter at your publishing platform will go out automatically to all waiting recipients, like libraries and bookstores.
ONIX is an XML standard and the industry-standard XML standard for classifying books. I know I said this was not technical and no technical knowledge was required but I’m going to backtrack on that just a tiny bit for one second. Because book metadata are carried in an ONIX feed, that means you can’t just enter information willy-nilly. You have to enter the information in a way that ONIX can understand it. This will likely not impact anyone who is using a publishing support platform like KDP or IngramSpark because those sites will walk you through entering your metadata and they won’t let you do it wrong enough to mess up your book. But if you find yourself going it alone, this is important to know.
For instance, when ONIX asks for you for your book’s “Publishing Status” and your book is available for sale, you can’t say “available for sale” or “on sale” or “in print,” because ONIX wants to hear “Active.” Actually ONIX wants to hear “04” which is the code for Publishing Status=Active. If you decide to truly go your own way and publish without the aid of a platform that assists self-publishing authors, be prepared to learn a little XML.
We’ll talk a bit more about ONIX on Thursday but for now let’s get to the meat of the metadata topic.
For most authors, though, it’s enough for your metadata to be right; and then if you have a little extra effort to give, it’s important for your metadata to be complete; and then if you have a little more bandwidth, it’s also important for your metadata to be optimized. To get your metadata right you have to check your own work as you’re entering it to make sure you haven’t entered any typos or put anything in the wrong field. This just requires care. To get your metadata complete just takes some diligence; don’t enter three keywords when the system allows you to enter seven—enter seven. Don’t skip optional fields unless you truly have no data for that field. The more data you enter, the more people will find your book.
To enter optimal metadata, for some fields, you may have to do some research and workshopping. I know! You thought the research and workshopping were behind you when you finished writing and revising your book. I’m sorry to say, there is always more.
With the time and space left to us today, I’ll cover a few of the most critical metadata fields. I’ll get to the rest, along with a more detailed discussion of ONIX, on Thursday. But before we get into any individual fields, remember: Not every platform will request the same pieces of metadata from your or ask for them under the same name. Amazon may request different things than IngramSpark, for instance. Don’t panic if you never get asked for one of the fields below, or if you get asked for something that’s not on the list. That’s normal. I can’t cover every piece of book metadata that exists so I’m trying to cover the highlights.
Title and Subtitle
Fortunately, you know your title. And, if you have one, your subtitle. For the purpose of metadata entry, your subtitle is anything that comes after a colon or a dash in your title, or a part of your title on your cover in a smaller, separate line of text from the main title. When you’re entering your title and subtitle, do not include the colon either at the end of the title field or the beginning of the subtitle field. Just omit it.
This will seem to go without saying but it doesn’t: Make sure you are 100 percent certain about every word of your title before you submit your metadata. The title needs to match in all the following places: Cover, half title page, title page, copyright page, metadata title field. It’s easier than you think to put “Chronicle of A Rising Star” in one place and “Chronicle of THE Rising Star” in another place. Unfortunately authors do this all the time and I know because I have been the person at the publishing company who fixes that.
Author Name
This is your pen name as it appears on your book. It does not need to be your legal name. As with the title and subtitle above, please make sure you have decided exactly how you want your name to appear before you hit submit and ensure it matches in all the following places: Cover, half title, full title, copyright, about the author, author name metadata field, author bio metadata field. Please don’t put Arthur Clarke in one place and Arthur C Clarke in another place and AC Clarke in a third place. Use the version you want to be your full and correct author name in every instance.
This is even more important than getting the title right. Because once a record of your author name has been created, it may not be going away (depends on the system it’s stored in). So if you want to be “Arthur C Clarke” but you accidentally submitted your metadata as “Arthur Clarke” the record was created for author “Arthur Clarke” with all your relevant info. A fix later might move your book title from the Arthur Clarke record to the Arthur C Clarke record but that incorrect record may hang around linked to your book forever.
ISBN
Unless you are selling your book only as a digital book on Amazon only, you will need an ISBN. Amazon issues an ASIN for Kindle titles that is proprietary only to their site and stands in for an ISBN in that one environment. But you cannot use an ASIN to sell a book anywhere other than Amazon. Every other retailer and library needs an ISBN. This is a thirteen-digit number you purchase from Bowker. Please note that you will need one for each product type—one ISBN for the trade paperback; one for the hardcover; one for the mass market paperback; one for the e-book, and so on.
Don’t buy just one unless you’re sure you’re only publishing one product type for this book. Try to buy all the ones you need at once to save money and get sequential numbers. Bowker sells kits of ISBNs for this purpose.
Series
If your book is part of a series, you will need to identify the series title in this field. Once again (Bernie Sanders voice) I am asking you to please make sure this is exactly right before submitting. If you published the first two books of “The Rising Star Chronicles” under that series title and then you publish book three with the series title “A Rising Star Chronicle” then as far as the entire digital world is concerned, those books are not part of the same series.
That’s it for today but check back on Thursday for more of the obscure but important metadata fields you’ll need to know and a discussion of ONIX and a few pro tips for handling it if you find yourself in that situation.
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