By Hannah Johnson
What if you could tag your books with regional codes so that booksellers know when a local author’s book is coming out? What if online book retailers could display media mentions, excerpts, and external links for the books they sell? What if a simple search on Facebook for an author could return the dates of the author’s next reading tour, the prizes the author had won, and the titles of the author’s previous books?
Digital Book World 2011
All of these scenarios sound like big projects for a digital marketing team, but actually it’s all about metadata — enhanced metadata to be exact. At the most basic level, metadata describes a book by basic descriptors, such as ISBN number, title, author name, publisher and publication date. Core metadata also includes information such as price, page count, format, language and rights information. The Book Industry Study Group identifies 31 data points that can be considered core metadata in its Metadata Best Practices guide.
But what we are talking about here is enhanced metadata — author bios, excerpts, media reviews, etc. — the kind of information that might influence someone’s decision to buy the book, or help a bookseller recommend the book. At Digital Book World in New York City yesterday, a panel of metadata experts spoke about the great things publishers can do with enhanced metadata. This was one of the strongest panels at the conference because it provided actionable steps for publishers as well as an overview of the future of metadata.
Including even simple pieces of information like author bios, jacket copy and media reviews can make a big difference to sales because this information gets delivered along with the ISBN and title to distributors, bookstores, and beyond. Noah Genner (President and CEO of BookNet Canada) said that regional information is both easy to include and very beneficial. For example, if Amazon knows that your author is from a particular place, Amazon can recommend your book to readers who have bought books about that region before.
Genner recommended that all publishers begin including the following enhanced metadata points: country of author, regional code, links to external sites, table of contents, jacket copy and/or blurbs, excerpts, reviews, prizes and both national and local media mentions.
Some of this information can already be included in ONIX, and now the release of ONIX 3.0 will make it easier for publishers to add enhanced metadata. ONIX 3.0 is, according to Fran Toolan (CEO, Firebrand Technologies), a response to the shifting publishing market created by digital content and digital distribution. It also includes a way for publishers to link print and e-book ONIX entries, alerting data users to the presence of both formats.
Not all retailers use the enhanced fields in ONIX, but some do and more will begin to as publishers populate these fields with valuable information. (For more information about using enhanced metadata in ONIX, download BookNet Canada’s guide, ONIX for Marketing.)
The panel members also pointed out that publishers used to know exactly who was using their metadata, but that is no longer the case. Digital distribution and online information means that more people than you think can see and use a publisher’s metadata.
Amazon and Google have APIs, said Genner, that give web and app developers access to publisher metadata. So the better your metadata is, the better chances your books have of being discovered and bought.
Adoption of enhanced metadata is beginning, but only slowly, said Toolan. Mainly, this is because it requires changes not only in publishers’ workflow, but also for distributors, booksellers and anyone involved in getting books to customers. However, Peter Collingridge (Co-Founder, Enhanced Editions) said that putting this enhanced metadata on a publisher’s own website can be very powerful. It creates keyword-rich content, which search engines and social networks like Facebook love to find. With hundreds of thousands of new titles published every year in countries across the globe, helping readers discover your books is the first step to selling your books.
So even though metadata has a less-than-cool reputation (think solitary librarians checking ISBN numbers in their card catalogues), digitization is making it very cool and very critical for discoverability, marketing and sales.
9 Comments
Metadata has a “less than cool reputation”? And the height of this uncoolness is “solitary librarians checking ISBN numbers in their card catalogues”?? If this is truly a publishing perspective, then publishing is in a worse situation than I had feared! Please tell me its not so!
So… Ms. Johnson, do you actually know any librarians? Just curious about the source of your negativity.
I do know some librarians, and their knowledge of organizing and finding information far exceeds what most publishers care to know. No negativity was intended towards librarians. And I do appreciate your feedback on this issue.
The reference to “card catalogues” was meant to show that perceiving metadata as “less-than-cool” is antiquated, which I believe it is. As more readers turn to search and online sources to find books, organizing this information and making it discoverable is a crucial component to marketing and selling books.
My impression in talking to some publishing folk is that they would rather spend time with the text and the ideas in the text than with the metadata, which in the past, has been their primary role. But that is no longer the case. Everyone in the supply chain uses metadata and needs to be involved in making sure it is accurate and helpful.
Of course there are many people in publishing who work a lot with metadata, and they are the people leading the industry forward on this front. I hope that more people in the publishing industry will start to work on cleaning, standardizing and innovating their metadata.
For people interested in more info on metadata, see Nick Ruffilo’s piece in PW: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/soapbox/article/45844-five-degrees-of-metadata-small-changes-can-mean-big-sales.html
Sadly the task completing metadata tags for existing books in a publisher’s catalog would be given over to individuals with little insight and sensitivity to either utility or accuracy (no fault of their own, they’ll be recent college grads with little experience to draw from and just looking to make the next leap into another department). For the average size publisher’s list, this “project” would take years to complete and might be hard to justify to budget conscious scrutiny. The promise land is always a lot farther off than hype. Look at Google’s book scans as a comparable example — its not hard to find pages at sharp angles, missing a third of the text, and the rest blurry. And that’s with a machine doing the heavy lifting. So sure, they hype volume, but quality?
I’ve never heard of metadata before, but it sounds like a great way to find new books, and maybe get out of your comfort zone if you’re dedicated to one or just a few authors. I always look at the book recommendations when I’m browsing through Amazon, mainly out of curiosity, but I had no idea how deep these connections ran. Thanks for sharing!
This is an excellent piece, Hannah, and it speaks directly to the power of the AC Showcase(TM), an essential tool in any book marketing program. Each AC Showcase(TM) is focused exclusively on the author and their book – with excerpt, summary, reviews, ISBN, pricing, author blog and website links, author bio, author photo, book jacket cover, fun facts, keywords for metadata, etc.
The integration of all these tools is the answer for publishers and authors, and they all come together in one cost-effective piece called the AC Showcase(TM) from Author Connections, LLC. http://www.authorconnections.com
Cheers to you,
BKW
Really a great way to make each book discoverable for the potential buyer.
The metadata tagging can make a difference in sales. As the supply-chain (in print and digital)gets dynamic with faster adoption of new technologies, content creators need to take efforts to integrate the tools as metadata. Providing enhanced metadata for each book will be the first step in making the content intelligent.
It’s fantastic to see the publishing industry awakening to the possibilities of technology and the use of metadata is a great one. Since publishing has a long history squarely in the liberal arts, it’s difficult to imagine publishing houses hiring technology people or knowing what to do with them once they get there. But, this is a perfect example of how the industry must not only see the problems of marketing in a digital and segmented world, but identify how they will move forward.
First, metadata is hard to capture. As John Cleese said in an article he wrote in the 90′s for an IT magazine, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him enter field codes in column 42 to facilitate reporting on the back end.” Metadata is also hard to mine for. Spin up an experienced database administrator (DBA), fluff his pillows for a year and you might have something useful. And metadata is hard to design and analyze. Try getting said DBA, a business analyst, a client or user and a PhD in mathematics in the same room and see if they can even communicate without a buffet of Goody’s headache powder next to the bottled water. But, I digress.
Market segmentation, sales and forecasting are practices that can be borrowed from other industries. I worked for a company back in the 90′s that did this for the airline industry. See http://www.amazon.com/Revenue-Management-Robert-G-Cross/dp/0553067346/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1296929492&sr=8-2 published in 1996. This was a Malcolm Gladwell style book before Malcolm Gladwell was cool. Today’s version of Bob Cross’ book is The Numerati http://www.amazon.com/Numerati-Stephen-Baker/dp/0547247931/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1296931518&sr=1-1 Publishing should be knocking down the doors of small companies and cherry picking all their operations research staff, system architects, DBAs, software engineers and business process analysts.