Metadata: the fields that decide who ever sees your book
Your book exists twice. Once as the thing you wrote, and once as a record: a couple of dozen fields in a database, copied between retailers, wholesalers, library systems and aggregators, most of which you will never log into.
That record is the metadata. Readers never see the form, but they see everything it produces — search results, the series list, the catalog entry a librarian orders from. Filling it in badly does not produce an error message. It produces a book nobody finds.
The fields that describe the book
- Title. Indexed, searched, and matched against every other record in the system. Type it exactly as it appears on the book, with no added words. Authors sometimes pad the title field with a genre or a series note to catch searches; stores treat that as manipulation, and it makes your record disagree with every other record of the book.
- Subtitle. A separate field, separately indexed. In fiction it is usually empty. In nonfiction it carries the promise — who the book is for and what it does for them — and it is the field that decides whether a search for the problem finds your answer. Plain beats poetic here, every time.
- Series name and number. This is how a store groups your books into one series page, orders them, and shows a reader who finished book one where book two is. Spell the series name identically on every volume — not "The Ash Cycle" on one and "Ash Cycle" on the next — and number them with plain integers. A series that does not group is a series that only sells its first book.
- Edition statement. Second edition, revised edition, anniversary edition. Fill it in only when the text has changed enough that a buyer would be annoyed to receive the wrong one — and a new edition usually needs a new identifier too.
The fields that describe who made it
- Author name. The name you publish under, spelled the same way in every store, on every book, forever. "J. A. Mercer" and "JA Mercer" are two authors as far as a matching system is concerned, and your books end up on two author pages with the credit split between them. A pen name is a reasonable choice, but treat it as permanent: it becomes your entire searchable identity, and merging or renaming an established author record later is slow and not always possible.
- Publisher or imprint. Whose name appears as publisher of record. If you took a free printer-supplied identifier, this is usually the printer's name rather than yours — see Do you need your own ISBN? and Should you invent a publisher name?.
- Language. The language of the text. It decides which regional stores index the book and which search index it lands in — a one-click field that is quietly load-bearing.
- Publication date. What the store treats as the book's age. New releases get surfaced as new, so backdating a date to look established throws the book out of every new-release list. Changing it after publication can also disturb pre-order and release-day behavior. Set it once, deliberately.
The fields that sell it
- Description. The blurb, and also indexed text. Write it for a reader first — see How to write a blurb that sells the book — but know that the phrases in it are searchable, so the words a reader would actually type belong in the prose rather than jammed in at the end.
- Categories and keywords. Where the book shelves and what it answers in the search box. They have their own guide: Categories and keywords, without the folklore.
The identifiers
The ISBN identifies one edition of one book in one binding, and it is the key every professional system matches on. Stores also assign their own internal identifier — Amazon's ASIN, for example — which lives alongside the ISBN and belongs to that store, not to you.
Print your ISBN on the copyright page, and make sure the number printed inside the paperback is the paperback's number, not the hardcover's. That specific mistake ends in a reprint. What belongs on a copyright page has the rest.
In the Cover Maker. Title, series and author stay live vector text, so the words on the cover are the same words you put in the listing — and the ISBN you type drives the barcode area on the back. Start a book → · about the Cover Maker
Rule one: the record has to match itself everywhere
Retail and library systems match records across sources to work out that two entries are the same book. They match on the identifier first, then on title, author and publisher. Give them a title with an extra word at one store, or an author name punctuated differently at another, and the match fails.
When it fails, your book splits into two listings. Reviews land on one, sales rank on the other, and a reader following a link arrives at a near-empty page. Retailers will not always merge them on request.
So keep one text file holding the exact strings — title, subtitle, series, number, author, publisher — and paste from it every time. It takes a minute and removes an entire class of problem.
Rule two: some of it is close to permanent
A cover can be replaced this afternoon. Metadata is not uniformly like that.
Titles, author names and identifiers are difficult or impossible to change once a book is out in distribution, because other systems have already copied them and will keep serving the old values. Descriptions, categories and keywords are easy to edit. Publication dates sit awkwardly in between.
Most authors spend weeks on the cover and four minutes on the fields that cannot be undone. Spend an hour on these instead. Then check the book agrees with itself: the title page, the cover and the listing should carry the same title, the same subtitle and the same author name, character for character. A print buyer comparing the physical book to the page they ordered from should find nothing to query.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Categories and keywords, without the folklore · More: Do you need your own ISBN? · What belongs on a copyright page · Series covers: the same shelf, three books along