Good Metadata for Book Sales
Good Metadata for Book Sales
Good metadata for book sales is a strategy that needs to be part of an author’s marketing arsenal. Quality metadata helps the discoverability of your book. This in turn can boost sales.
Incorporating quality metadata into your sales strategy is basic for all successful indie authors.
What is metadata
Metadata is information that describes your book. It includes the title, subtitle, price, publication date, ISBN, author bio, book description, and any other relevant information that readers use to find your book.
Metadata lets librarians and booksellers know which category to place your book and where to shelve it. BISAC codes, for example, explain a book’s genre and help its positioning.
Metadata is information that can be used in many places.
A lot of time and energy might be spent creating good book metadata but once it’s done, you’ll have a great marketing tool that helps customers discover your book.
Metadata, together with relevant keywords and phrases, enables you to write a good author bio and book description. This helps search engines bring attention to your book when users search for relevant words or phrases.
Once you’ve created the metadata store it in its own, dedicated document file. This is a huge time saver. Draw on this metadata when you need it because there are just so many places this data can be used and placed.
Keywords
Make a record of words and short phrases that you think potential customers might enter into a search engine or website to find you and your book. The more specific the keywords and phrases are, the more likely the person searching for those specific words will be happy to find your book among the search results.
There are different ways for finding keywords. You can do a search on Amazon; you can use the Google Keyword Search tool to help you think of other keywords for your book; there is Publisher Rocket which is another great way.
Book description
Not only should your book descriptions grab the attention of customers, but they should also be informative, compelling, and full of keywords. When a customer comes to your sales page it should lure the customer in to make that buying decision.
Similarly, the author biography, should be succinct and keyword-rich. This author bio and the book description are your opportunities to make an impression, so make sure you’re using the right book metadata and keywords to do it.
Create a dedicated document
Create a dedicated document containing your book’s metadata. Keep this in a safe place and then draw on it when you need to use it to disseminate your book information to all kinds of places:
- ISBN record
- Pre-publication data at the National Library
- Publishing platforms like IngramSpark and Amazon
- The online retailer where you’re selling direct
- Website, author page, and book pages
- Your Amazon Central author page
- Public Lending Right(PLR) and Educational Lending Right(ELR)
- Goodreads profile
- Social media profile pages
- Online interviews, guest blog posts, and other promotional appearances
This master document with all your book’s metadata is invaluable. As I’ve already mentioned it will save you time; it will provide consistency; and, you will have a resource and information about your book that can be easily retrieved and disseminated. This exposure will always mean a greater chance of sales.
Author and Coach
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