Get Your Book Listed & Discovered
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This document discusses how authors can get their books listed on search engines and industry databases. It recommends that authors identify their goals, find self-publishing partners or distributors to help with tasks like assigning ISBNs and keywords, and ensuring good quality metadata. The document also provides tips for marketing books online through social media, blogs, and free circulation of metadata.
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Get Your Book Listed & Discovered
- 1. Get Your Book Listed On Search Engines & Book Industry Databases! Rebecca Albani Rebecca.Albani@bowker.com
- 2. Agenda What is your Goal? Who can help you? Good and Bad Metadata Marketing Online
- 3. What is Your Goal?
- 4. Who Can Help You? Self- Distributor Publishing Partner
- 5. Self Publishing Partner 1. Do they supply the ISBN or do you bring your own? 2. Do they supply the barcode or do you bring your own? 3. Do they register your title with Library of Congress and Bowker? 4. Do they attach key words to your titles? 5. Do they do view inside the book?
- 6. Distributor 1. Who do they distribute your data to? 2. Do they set the price of the title or do you supply the price? 3. How do you advertise my title? 4. What percent of the sale price do they keep? 5. How do they keep track of your sales and how do they relay the sales data to you?
- 10. Good Metadata
- 12. Cover Images
- 13. Author Biography
- 15. Reusing ISBNs
- 17. Check Your Work
- 18. Market Your Titles Online
- 20. Facebook
- 21. Twitter
- 22. Author Sites
- 23. Widgets
- 25. Recap • Identify your goal • Find partner(s) to assist you • Manage your metadata • Take advantage of free ways to circulate your metadata
- 26. Thank you Rebecca Albani Rebecca.Albani@bowker.com Renee Register reneeregister@datacurate.com
Editor's Notes
- Your goal is to get your data out to the readers which you can do in a few ways. Here is a chart that shows the flow of metadata. It starts with the publisher creating the metadata. The publisher then gives the title data to the data aggregators, ebook aggregators and wholesalers. Once they have done this, then the data gets sent out to the online retailers, retail stores and libraries and it then reaches the readers. You can see that the publishers/authors also need to get the data directly to the readers themselves.
- So, now you know who you have to get your data to in order to sell your titles but you have to know who can help you do this.
- First you have the Self publishing partners. These companies will help you create your titles as well as get your title data out to the appropriate peeople. But you have to be careful when choosing self publishing partners. There are some key questions you want to ask yourself before choosing the company to go with.First, does the self publishing company supply the ISBN or do you supply your own ISBN? This is a major question because who ever supplies the ISBN will be recognized as the publisher. So if you use the companies ISBN, the publisher will come up as them. If you purchase your own ISBN and bring it with you to the company then you will be the publisher. This is a major factor to think about when deciding on who to go with.The same thing goes with Barcode.You want to find out if they register your title with the library of congress and Bowker or do you have to do this yourself.Will they index your titles and attach key words to them or do you have to supply the standard 5 or so key words.These are only a few questions you want to ask yourself when deciding on which self publishing partner you will use.
- Your distributor will also help you get your titles to the appropriate person. Here are a few question you want to think about when deciding on which distributor to use.You want to know who they are distributing your title to so you can fill the gaps if need be. Example, do they distribute to both libraries and retailers?
- Bowker is another resource to use to get your titles out to the customers. Here you can see who Bowker’s customers are and the end goals they have.
- This is the process we have for the data to get our customers the data they want.
- Besides the basic core metadata (title, author, price etc) you want to make sure you have some of the more enhanced metadata attached to your title. There is a difference between having metadata and having good metadata. Here is an example of good metadata from the publisher’s website. You can see that they have the cover image, the description about the book, reviews about the book, along with the page count, trim size and other metadata about the book.
- Good metadata includes product descriptions.When looking at this title you would have to ask yourself why would you buy this book with just the basic title info?You wouldn’t. You would want to read reviews about the book and the book description to make sure that this title is something you are interesting in reading and purchasing.
- One of the main parts of enhanced metadata is the cover image. You should make sure you have a high quality decent sized cover image. Metadata recipients might have different guidelines for images. You should make sure you check with them to see what size and format they require the image to be in before sending it.
- Author biographies can be simple, include images, or be in the form of a discussion. Try to ensure basic information is included in your bio such as affiliated organizations, places of interest, award mentions, and previous book titles. This way even if a bookseller or library only features a paragraph as in the first example, your title will be discoverable via all of those appropriate keywords.
- Also, ensure you make metadata unique per title. This example shows that title and author alone may not differentiate multiple books within a series. In this case, the only difference in the metadata supplied by the publisher to Bowker is the cover image. There is no differentiation in the descriptions. Since cover image is not a text field, there is no way to search on the differences in the cover images.Inspired Entrepreneurs should be noted as the series title and each individual book subject should be mentioned in the title field to allow users to search on the names of each entrepreneur featured.
- This publisher reused an ISBN for an item that was older and out of print. But in today’s world, libraries and used booksellers still have record of the previous title and its details. This leads to confusion over what the real title of the item is and whether it is a new book or an out of date book.
- Missing cover images may already cause frustration for buyers and put them on alert about a title. But the placeholder that the retailer puts in for your missing cover image may cause your record to look even worse. Ensure you supply your cover images as soon as they become available to all parties you send your basic metadata to in order to ensure your records are appealing to customers.
- I was searching for a book that was recommended by a colleague. I found that the description in no way matched the title, but it took me awhile to realize it. My first response was I don’t think this book appeals to me.So check and double check what you are sending out to your trading partners is correct. Also, check it after it has been processed by trading partners to make sure it looks the way you thought it would.
- Librarything.com and goodreads.com are social media websites where a reader can review books and rate them. It gives all titles a chance to be reviewed not just the best selling list titles. You can encourage your readers to talk about your book in these forums.Beside the reviews not being referenced from some retailer and library websites…
- You can create a facebook page per title, author, or publishing house so that you can engage in a conversation with your readers.
- Twitter is another way to provide news about your titles to readers. The voice should preferably be the author rather than an institution or brand so that your readers can relate to the voice.
- Creating an author site is another way to advertise your titles. It could be title specific or across the entire list of an author’s work.
- Further, adding a tool such as a widget where readers can buy your book or share it with their friends allows them to talk about your author website.
- Book review blogs is another great way to get your titles out there. Again it gives people a chance to find your titles, review them and recommend them to their friends. Try searching on your own and finding the different website where you can have your title reviewed.