This week, I had another surprise pop up about Hurricane Baby: Stories–it’s now available online from Target.com! I was so STUNNED. I immediately wrote my publisher asking HOW she pulled this one off. She said it was likely because it was available at the wholesaler Ingram and that I had done such a good job collating my metadata. That was flattering, as was her comment that I should write something about metadata and its role in publishing.
Now, some readers may be wondering what metadata is and with good reason; I didn’t know anything about it until I started working for my job at a publisher. Metadata is information sent to online retailers such as Amazon, Barners & Noble, Ingram, etc. that makes use of search engine optimization (SEO) to enable readers to find a certain book.
Much metadata has to do with information the publisher will determine and supply–ISBN, title, cover image, shelving headers, BISAC codes, dimensions of the book. Other items of metadata that can be entered into your book’s electronic record are comparison titles, excerpts, and keywords.
Comparison titles are where the author indicates the book sits in the marketplace–books with similar themes, audiences, and writing styles. I used Amazon to search out mine for Hurricane Baby–I typed “Hurricane Katrina fiction” in the search bar and found several titles I thought would work. I then read the summaries and decided what books would match mine most closely. Other considerations include the amount of sales, the number of reviews the book had, and what format the book was published in; they needed to be as similar to the format as the book I was working on as possible.
Excerpts are important to give everyone reading the metadata the flavor of the book. I took a scene from the middle of my first story, “Still Waters”, where the hurricane hits Hattiesburg, Mississippi full force. It summed up the serious issues from the storm and showed the style of my writing.
Keywords are search terms for the book–a word or phrase that is electronically attached to the book as it goes out into the world. My keywords for Hurricane Baby were: 2005, climate change, destruction of the Gulf Coast, hurricane baby, Hurricane Katrina, loss of faith, post-traumatic stress disorder, Southern literature. The keywords can be a set of phrases or single words that someone might use as a search terms when looking for information/books on my topic. The key player in this case is Amazon–it has a fifteen-keyword limit for how many search terms you can attach.
So that’s a quick rundown of what I know about metadata and how I used it for my book. Hope the information can be helpful to someone else. And may it work in your favor as it seems to have done in mine! Happy writing!
Julie Liddell Whitehead 