Kristin Discusses The Importance Of Metadata
From agent Kristen Nelson on Pub Rants:
I sat on a panel with my fellow agents Jane Dystel, Steve Axelrod, and Jay Mandel.
My question was this: “What should Publishers be learning from authors who are self-publishing?”
My answer was twofold:
1) Authors who are successfully self-pubbing release a lot of content and a variety of content regularly. For example, one of my authors publishes 2 novels a year but also publishes short content in between the major releases to keep the momentum going. Also, successful self-pubbers do a VARIETY of content. If one work is building (and therefore more appealing to the audience), then the author will set aside the other content and focus on what is building momentum. Because the author is in full control of the publishing, she can make that decision quickly and immediately act on it.
Publishers need to find a way to do the same.
2) Second, success is all about the metadata. Most editors input the metadata tags when the author contract is submitted and then don’t think about it again. Well, that’s not what successful self-pubbers are doing and that’s not what we do at NLA digital either. We are constantly tweaking.
For those of you wondering what the heck is metadata, these are the descriptive tags included in product description and in a lot of cases, embedded in the content file itself of electronic books, that allow a novel to be searchable and discoverable on distribution venues such as Amazon, BN, and Kobo.
Link to the rest at Pub Rants and thanks to Eric for the tip.
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Metadata is important, but if you follow her advice, you might just get banned from Amazon. She talks about putting the names of famous authors like E.L. James into your metadata to get a sales boost.
The big A comes down hard on stuff like that… sometimes.
Yeah, I had a title taken off sale temporarily because of a “quality assurance check” which found “misleading keywords.” I have blurbs from several well-known authors, and I asked if it would be permitted to use their names as a keywords? The answer was expected: no. Funny thing is, major publishers do it all the time. Oh well.
That’s the thing about breaking the rules, Robert. You have to be big enough to get away with it, or become big enough as a result.
Few readers question the practices of the big publishers. They might suspect every five star review of an indie book but never think twice about a newspaper owned by a mutimedia conglomerate publishing a review of a book produced by a subsidiary of the same multimedia conglomerate.
No more tags on Amazon at all, right? I thought they were gone.
If you tag something, you can then click on tag and see books other people tagged like that — in theory, from Amazon’s “help” pages. Otherwise, tags are invisible, yes.
Putting E.L. Jame’s name in my matedata? This kind of crap is exactly why Amazon discontinued tagging.
Well, I like what she is saying in general, even though I am sort of against giving Publishers good advice gleaned from indie experience on principle.
I certainly understand why agents would want to start training Trad. Publishers on how to sell books and develop authors and readership.
And she’s right. Fast (as opposed to taking two years to publish a book), flexible, and discoverable is the way to go.
“success is all about the metadata”
No.
Success is all about having a good product that people want.