eBOUND Canada conducted a pilot study using a sample of ebooks published by Canadian publishers, to gauge the efficacy of adding audience-driven keywords to the metadata for a sample of fiction and non-fiction titles. Using a combination of AI and manually-generated keywords, we tracked the impact of keywords on discoverability and sales on Amazon over a two-month period. eBOUND’s Manager of Technology Shannon Culver and key consultant on the study Amanda Lee will present the results of the study, and make recommendations as to how publishers can utilize their metadata to work with vendors' algorithms and improve the discoverability of their titles. March 20, 2019 techforum.booknetcanada.ca #TechForum

1. EFFECTS OF KEYWORDS
ON EBOOK SALES AND
DISCOVERABILITY
IN THE CANADIAN CONTEXT
Presented by Amanda Lee and Shannon Culver

3. KEYWORDS
A piece of bibliographic metadata
typically not displayed to the consumer
● Similar to a keyword used in Search Engine
Optimization to drive traffic to a website, but
utilized differently by Amazon than they are by
Google and other search engines
● Limit of 250 bytes on Amazon

4. The Birds Rained Down
Jocelyne Saucier
Coach House Books
2012
Deep in a Northern Ontario forest live Tom and
Charlie, two octogenarians determined to live out the
rest of their lives on their own terms: free of all ties
and responsibilities, their only connection to
civilization two pot farmers who bring them whatever
they can't eke out for themselves. But their solitude is
disrupted by the arrival of two women. The first is a
photographer searching for survivors of a series of
catastrophic fires nearly a century earlier; the second
is an elderly escapee from a psychiatric institution.
The little hideaway in the woods will never be the
same. Originally published in French, And the Birds
Rained Down, the recipient of several prestigious
prizes, including the Prix de Cinq Continents de la
Francophonie, is a haunting meditation on aging and
self-determination.

5. Keywords for The Birds Rained Down
CoreSource Metadata Template

6. Keywords for The Birds Rained Down
ONIX 2.1 and 3.0

8. IMPETUS FOR THE
PROJECT:
To conduct a large-scale
analysis of the impact of
adding keywords to
metadata for Canadian books
sold in the domestic market

9. TECHNOLOGY PARTNERS

10. STEP ONE:
TITLE SELECTION
Firebrand’s Audience Analysis
service
● Predictive analysis model
● Keywords generated from
consumer vantage point
● Algorithm gathers data from
Amazon and Goodreads reviews

11. Narrowing down the list:
● Selected ebooks within a specific range of
the median score
● Selected ebooks with similar BISAC
categories:
○ Fiction (FIC main category)
○ Youth (JUV, JNF, YAF, YNF main categories)
○ Nonfiction (BIO, CKB,HIS,POL,SCI,SOC,TRU)
STEP ONE:
TITLE SELECTION

12. ● Control
(ebooks with no keywords assigned)
● Human
(trained contractors who created
keywords for their assigned ebooks)
● Machine
(ebooks run through Firebrand’s
Audience Analysis service)
STEP ONE:
TITLE SELECTION

13. ● Distributed keywords at the end of
September 2018
● Tracked data for three months
October, November and December 2018
● Collected sales data and discoverability
data
● Analysed data
STEP TWO:
STUDY

14. ● Only Amazon
Amazon is currently the only retailer
using keywords
● Only ebooks
eBOUND has access to ebook sales, not
print sales
SALES:
LIMITATIONS

17. SALES:
RESULTS

18. SALES:
RESULTS

19. SALES:
RESULTS

20. SALES:
RESULTS

21. SALES:
RESULTS

22. ● Sales decreased across the board
● Keywords seemed to have no effect
SALES:
RESULTS

23. The number of times an Amazon
Product Detail Page is viewed.
● Includes all Amazon markets
● Only includes the format (in our case, ebook
only)
DISCOVERABILITY:
GLANCE VIEWS

24. DISCOVERABILITY:
RESULTS

25. DISCOVERABILITY:
RESULTS

26. DISCOVERABILITY:
RESULTS

27. DISCOVERABILITY:
RESULTS

28. DISCOVERABILITY:
RESULTS

29. DISCOVERABILITY:
RESULTS

30. DISCOVERABILITY:
RESULTS

31. DISCOVERABILITY:
RESULTS

32. ● Keywords outperformed no keywords
significantly, but especially on…
○ Youth categories
○ Frontlist ebooks
● Human-created keywords performed
better in most cases, but especially…
○ Frontlist ebooks
○ Nonfiction ebooks
DISCOVERABILITY:
RESULTS

33. DISCOVERABILITY:
RESULTS

34. DISCOVERABILITY:
RESULTS

35. ● Adding keywords to the metadata did not
improve sales during the pilot period
● Discoverability went way up, though!
● Human-generated keywords performed
better than AI-generated ones
● No real difference in results across
different genres, or frontlist vs. backlist
CONCLUSIONS

36. ● Strategic pairing of keywords in tandem
with other marketing promotions
● Was our pilot too short?
● Improving other metadata in conjunction
with keywords
AREAS FOR FURTHER
INVESTIGATION

37. READ THE FULL REPORT
Available on the Sched page for this presentation
or on the eBOUND Canada website at
https://bit.ly/2TQa7v7

38. QUESTIONS?

39. THANKS!
Shannon Culver
shannon_culver@eboundcanada.org
Amanda Lee
amandajlee@gmail.com