Metadata, Part II
Discoverability for Books at Retail
In Tuesday’s Shelf Life I promised more information on metadata, or information on the information about the information. I also promised more information about ONIX and what it is and what it’s used for, but I am going to do a low-effort job of that because I am super sick. Please send healing vibes.
After a brief and low-effort attempt to explain ONIX, I’ll get into those last few metadata fields that you really need to know to succeed in self-publishing your title.
ONIX for Books, as I mentioned on Tuesday, is an XML standard used for selling books. All the people who work in book sales and book distribution live and die by the ONIX feed, at least all the ones I know. Let me tell you a bit about how this works in the publishing company.
If we’re setting a book up for sale and distribution, we create a record for it in an ONIX editor. This is software that puts a user interface on top of the ONIX background so normal people (non-tech-savvy people like me) can use it. Once the ONIX record is created for the book, it travels digitally to anywhere that book is bought or sold—bookstores and libraries, mainly. The ONIX record feeds retailers and librarians all the information they need to know about the book to shelve it and sell it.
If you’re self-publishing, you likely won’t have access to a full-featured ONIX editor, and that’s okay! Wherever you are setting your title up for sale, such as Amazon, will prompt you for metadata about your book. I can only assume (I would look into this more but, again, super sick) that the metadata Amazon collects from you through their web form are stored as an ONIX record in the background.
On Tuesday I talked about the first few—and most obvious—metadata fields you’ll be asked to fill in. Today I’m going over some of the more opaque ones so you will know, after reading, exactly what to fill in these fields.
Price
Your book’s price. You may also be asked to specify the type of price you’re giving—for instance, is this the recommended retail price, a fixed retail price, or a wholesale price? Is it inclusive or exclusive of sales tax? Make sure you figure out your price before you have the metadata entry form in front of you and you have to type it in.
Publication Date
This is the nominal date of publication—the date you have decided in advance will be your book’s publication date. Note that this does not need to be the first date the book is actually available for sale, or that preorders are fulfilled. The publication date is used to plan your book’s launch. It is not an embargo date—if your book does not have an embargo date specified, then retailers may begin to sell the book whenever they receive stock—even if your publication date hasn’t yet arrived.
If it is critically important to you that your book not be sold before a specific date, you need to also specify an embargo date. This would normally be done when there’s some kind of rights or permissions issue and you can’t begin selling the book before a specific date due to permissions agreements, or because information in the book is confidential till a certain date. Otherwise, there’s no real reason to set an embargo date. Publication date is for planning purposes and is not intended to be a hard-and-fast date before which your book nay never see light of day.
Sales Territory
Sales territory refers to the countries in which your book may be sold. If you’re self-publishing, and you own all the rights, you can decide where you want to make your book available for sale. If you don’t wish to restrict sales by territory, you can enter or select WORLD. You can also add countries, and in some cases regions within countries, individually if you want to restrict where your book is available, for some reason.
For instance: If you have sold rights for your book to be published in Peru to a Peruvian publisher, but retained all your other rights, then you can self-publish your book and make it for sale everywhere except Peru—someone else holds the rights to publish in Peru. In that case when setting up your sales territories you could include WORLD and exclude PE.
Page Count
Your book’s page count is an important piece of metadata and my only advice is to count your book’s pages correctly before entering this number. Do not flip to the end of your book or proof, see that the folio on the last page is 265, and enter 265. You should also count any unnumbered or Roman numbered pages in the front matter of your book. You do should not count the front and back cover, dustjacket flaps, gatefolds, or endsheets. You should count pages that are tipped-in at the printer (for instance, a photospread printed on a different stock).
Ultimately, your page count should be close to the actual, and dead on if possible, but it’s not tragic if your page count metadatum isn’t correct.
Main and Brief Description
You may (or may not) be asked for both a main description and a brief description of your book. If you are prompted for only one description, you should assume that is the main description.
The main description is a summary of your book written for readers to entice them to purchase. It is often the same copy that appears on the back cover or inside dustjacket flap of a book and describes the plot without any spoilers. This is also the same copy you see on retail book websites usually right after the title and author’s name—because it’s pretty much the most important piece of metadata for folks to decide if they want to read.
If you have prepared a query for your book, you are familiar with the book’s synopsis. While the synopsis you may have sent off to agents or publishers can be a start for creating your description, they shouldn’t be used interchangeably. For one thing, the synopsis should contain spoilers and explain the plot all the way through. Your book description for use on the cover, website, and marketing materials, obviously should not do that. It should contain enough information to get readers invested in reading the book but not so much that it spoils any surprises.
There is a whole universe of book descriptions out there for you to study as preparation for writing your own.
If you are also prompted for a brief description, you’ll need to condense further. I don’t believe Amazon requests this metadatum so most authors who self-publish won’t need to prepare one. If you do need to prepare a brief description, I recommend you study up on how to write a good log line because it’s basically the same thing.
BISAC Codes/Categories
Unlike your keywords, which we’ll get to in a moment, and which can be chosen by you from all the words in existence, BISAC codes, or BISAC subject codes, or book “categories” must be chosen from a list. The list is maintained by the Book Industry Studies Group (BISG), and BISAC codes are often used by bookstores and libraries to figure out where to shelve a new title they have received.
The Library of Congress, in their cataloging-in-publication application, also asks for BISAC codes, which become part of the book’s CIP data if you are eligible and apply.
I have applied for CIP data for a good number of books in my career and I would like to assure you that there’s rarely a BISAC code that fits your book perfectly. For instance you can choose FIC009050 (FICTION / Fantasy / Paranormal) or FIC009090 (FICTION / Fantasy / Romance) but there’s no code for Fiction, Fantasy, Paranormal Romance.
You can choose up to three codes if you need to, to get the all the important classifications for your book down, but sometimes that still won’t be enough. If you are able to use fewer than three BISAC codes to describe your book accurately, you should do that. Fewer is better, in this case.
BISG maintains a BISAC FAQ for authors and publishers with best practices to follow, and you can also review the complete list of BISAC codes on their site to prepare your choices ahead.
Keywords
So, then, what’s the difference between BISAC codes and keywords? First, as I already alluded, keywords can be anything you want them to be. There’s no list to choose from. If your book is a paranormal romance between a werewolf and a mermaid you can go ahead and make your keyword “werewolf mermaid paranormal romance” and no one will stop you. As you may have noticed, keywords don’t have to be words, they can be phrases. You can use multiple words to make up one keyword.
While BISAC codes are used to categorize your book and make sure it is shelved near other books in the same category, the keywords are what your readers will use to search for your book. This is one of the most important metadata categories for discoverability. It’s critical to get the keywords right so readers who are searching for “werewolf mermaid paranormal romance” can find your opus, Fins Under a Full Moon.
Choosing the right keywords for your book—how to do that—probably would be a whole Shelf Life on its own, but a great place to start is to browse for books like yours on Amazon (you could begin with your comp titles) and see what Amazon categories they’re in. For instance, this book that I found on Amazon might be a comp title for Fins Under a Full Moon:
Cover Image
Your book’s cover image may be requested as part of the metadata, and you should include it. This is the image that will typically be used as the thumbnail on retail websites and social sites like Goodreads. Make sure you follow any directions you are provided about the resolution of the image—that is, how many pixels per inch (PPI) make up the digital image at the size you intend it to be used. An 72 PPI image that is 4 inches wide by six inches tall and a 72 PPI image that is 2 inches wide by 3 inches tall have the same PPI at full size, but if you scale up the smaller image to 4 inches by 6 inches it will have fewer PPI, and be lower resolution.
My recommendation is to upload a 72 PPI image at the full size of your cover. That is, if your book’s trim size is 4 inches by 6 inches you should upload an image that is 72 PPI when rendered at 4 by 6 inches.
You should upload only the front cover of your book unless prompted for additional panels like the back cover, spine, and flaps. Most of the time retailers only want the front cover. Make sure you don’t include the spine by accident—that looks like amateur hour.
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