How readers actually search for books
Metadata advice usually starts with the fields. That is the wrong end. The fields only make sense once you know what the person on the other side of the search box is doing, and they are not all doing the same thing.
The mechanics — which field takes what, how many phrases you get, how categories work — belong to Categories and keywords, without the folklore. This page is about the reader.
The five searches
They know the exact title. Someone was handed your book, or saw it in a newsletter, and types the title. You do not need to do anything for this reader except exist. They will find you. The only way to lose them is to publish under a title that is also a common phrase, or to let the title drift between stores — a subtitle on one listing and not another, a series number in the title field here but not there. Consistency, not cleverness.
They know your name. This one you can break. An author who is "J. R. Whitlock" on one store, "JR Whitlock" on another and "Jamie Whitlock" on the third has three partial author pages and no complete one, and a reader who found one has no way of knowing the others exist. Pick a form of your name, including the spacing of your initials, and use it on every book, every store, every profile and your site. If you also write under a pen name, keep the two apart deliberately rather than accidentally.
They know the shape of the book, not the book. "Cozy mystery bakery series." "Viking historical romance." "Beginner sourdough book." This is a reader with money out and no specific title in mind, and it is the only one of the five where keyword fields earn their keep. They are describing a book they want. Your job is to have written the same description they typed.
They know a feeling, or a comparison. "Books like X", where X is whatever they finished last week. "Slow burn romance no cliffhanger." "Sad books that end happily." This is the largest and least tidy group. They cannot name the thing they want, so they name something adjacent to it, and comparison titles do a lot of the work. You cannot claim another author's name in your fields, but you can use the vocabulary that grew up around those books: the tropes, the pacing words, the promises. A reader searching a feeling is searching in the reader's language, which is rarely the language of a publishing catalog.
They are not searching at all. They opened a category and started scrolling. There is no query, no keyword, and nothing you wrote in a field is doing anything. The cover is doing all of it, and a description that only gets read after a thumbnail earns the tap.
In the Cover Maker. The thumbnail check shows your cover at the size a browse grid actually displays it, which is the only size that matters for the reader who arrived without typing anything. Start your cover → · about the Cover Maker
What follows from this
Write the way readers talk, not the way you would describe your book at a party. In conversation you say your novel is "a meditation on grief and inheritance." Nobody types that. They type "family secrets novel" or "books about losing a parent." The party sentence is for the party. The field is for the search box.
Use your subgenre's actual vocabulary, even when it sounds like jargon. "Enemies to lovers", "found family", "cozy", "grumpy sunshine", "cultivation", "hopepunk", "clean and wholesome" — these feel like insider shorthand, and that is precisely the point. They are the words the audience uses to find each other. Leaving them out because they sound unliterary means being invisible to the people who buy the most of what you wrote.
Read the reviews of books like yours. Not the blurbs — the reviews, and especially the four-star ones. Readers describing what they liked are handing you the phrases they would have searched for. Twenty reviews will give you more usable vocabulary than an hour of thinking about it alone.
Do not stuff. Filling every field with variations of one phrase, or padding with unrelated popular terms, is against the guidelines at most stores; check the ones you publish through. It also fails on its own terms, because every repetition is a phrase you did not get to add.
Write the first line of the description for two jobs. Search results and browse listings usually show a truncated description — sometimes only a line or two before a "more" link. That opening sentence is both the hook and the preview snippet. Starting with "In a world where" or with the publisher's own name wastes the one line most readers will ever see. See How to write a blurb that sells the book.
Where it ends
Notice where all five searches finish. The reader who typed your title, the reader who typed a trope, the reader who typed nothing at all — every one of them arrives at the same place, which is a grid of thumbnails on a phone.
Metadata decides which grid you appear in, and how often. It has no influence at all on what happens next. Once your book is on the screen, it is competing on one image, at the size of a postage stamp, against fifteen others chosen by the same query. Good keywords get you into more of those grids. The cover decides how many of those appearances turn into a tap.
That is the division of labor, and it is worth respecting in how you spend your time: an afternoon on metadata, done carefully once, and the rest of the effort on the thing the reader is actually looking at.
Make your cover
The Cover Maker is free to use: name your book, bring your artwork, and it draws the full wrap — front, spine and back — to your printer's own measurements. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: The thumbnail test · More: Categories and keywords, without the folklore · Search engines and your author site · How readers actually choose a book