Episode 042 - The Importance of Metadata with Joshua Tallent
September 1, 2020
Joshua Tallent, acclaimed expert on the role of data in publishing, discusses changes Amazon has made to how it uses keywords, and how authors can capitalize on those changes; the value of the long tail search; and when authors need to focus on producing more content rather than on tweaking metadata.
Joshua Tallent is a vocal advocate for high quality book metadata. He serves as the Director of Sales and Education at Firebrand Technologies, where his focus is on helping publishers of all sizes learn about, and find solutions to, their workflow and metadata problems. In his spare time, Joshua enjoys playing complex board games, playing Minecraft, and fiddling with his 3D printer.
"My book description doesn't matter really that much at all, if at all, but my keywords will matter tremendously." --Joshua Tallent
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Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast, today my guest is Joshua Tallent. Hey, Joshua, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Joshua: Great, Matty, how are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I am doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you.
Joshua Tallent is an acclaimed teacher and guide on the role of data in publishing, and a vocal advocate for high quality book metadata. He serves as the Director of Sales and Education at Firebrand Technologies, where his focus is on helping publishers of all sizes learn about, and find solutions to, their workflow and metadata problems. In his spare time, Joshua enjoys playing complex board games, playing Minecraft, and fiddling with his 3D printer.
[00:00:38] So the background I think suggests that Joshua is the right person to talk about the topic for today, which is the importance of metadata. And I learned about Joshua's expertise through a presentation he gave called Conquering Your Metadata Challenges: Increasing Sales with Better Data, and I will provide a link to that presentation as well as the slides in the show notes.
[00:01:01] But before we dive into some of the details of metadata, Joshua, what about book metadata originally captured your interest?
[00:01:11] Joshua: That's a good question, actually. I got my start in publishing in the ebook world. So I was an ebook developer for 15 years or so, actually was one of the first professional ebook developers to really handle the Kindle format in a complex way, in a specific way, wrote a book about that format and became known as the Kindle guy for a long time in the publishing world.
[00:01:31] I've always had a really deep interest in the digital side of publishing and obviously metadata is a big part of that. And at Firebrand Technology is where we focus on metadata quite a bit because our company is a service provider for publishers who are trying to get their data out into the trade and get the data to look correct and work correctly where it needs to go.
[00:00:06] Joshua: Great, Matty, how are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I am doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you.
Joshua Tallent is an acclaimed teacher and guide on the role of data in publishing, and a vocal advocate for high quality book metadata. He serves as the Director of Sales and Education at Firebrand Technologies, where his focus is on helping publishers of all sizes learn about, and find solutions to, their workflow and metadata problems. In his spare time, Joshua enjoys playing complex board games, playing Minecraft, and fiddling with his 3D printer.
[00:00:38] So the background I think suggests that Joshua is the right person to talk about the topic for today, which is the importance of metadata. And I learned about Joshua's expertise through a presentation he gave called Conquering Your Metadata Challenges: Increasing Sales with Better Data, and I will provide a link to that presentation as well as the slides in the show notes.
[00:01:01] But before we dive into some of the details of metadata, Joshua, what about book metadata originally captured your interest?
[00:01:11] Joshua: That's a good question, actually. I got my start in publishing in the ebook world. So I was an ebook developer for 15 years or so, actually was one of the first professional ebook developers to really handle the Kindle format in a complex way, in a specific way, wrote a book about that format and became known as the Kindle guy for a long time in the publishing world.
[00:01:31] I've always had a really deep interest in the digital side of publishing and obviously metadata is a big part of that. And at Firebrand Technology is where we focus on metadata quite a bit because our company is a service provider for publishers who are trying to get their data out into the trade and get the data to look correct and work correctly where it needs to go.
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[00:01:50] Basically it's as part of my role as the education director, I dove really deep into that side of the industry, the metadata side, and tried to become as much of an expert on it as I could. And after talking to a lot of publishers about what they're doing and what's working and what's not, and doing a lot of testing and doing a lot of discussions with trading partners and everyone else, I think I've come to a pretty good understanding of how things are working and where publishers can make a difference and send their data if they focus on it properly.
[00:02:18] Matty: So keeping in mind that most of the listeners of this podcast are going to be either individual indy author publishers or small houses -- we probably don't have a lot of listeners from the big five on this podcast -- can you just describe what you mean by metadata and how it gets out in the world and how people are using it?
[00:02:38] Joshua: Sure. Metadata is just data about data. It's the data about your book. So the title, the author, the keywords, the book description, the cover image is considered metadata. All of that is the information that whoever's selling your book needs to know in order to market it appropriately, or even just to display that information appropriately. And all of the metadata ideas and tips and all the details that I talk about apply to any book. It doesn't matter if it's published by an individual author or published by a big five publisher or anything in between, data is used by everyone in essentially the same way. As far as the retailers are concerned, they need the same types of data. And in some ways, good data practices are needed more by indy authors and smaller publishers because they're competing more directly with some of the much larger houses.
[00:03:28] As far as how data gets out there, it really depends on the size of the publisher or the author and the opportunities that are available to them. Some systems like Amazon KDP have a form that you fill out and that form is your metadata. If you're a publisher, a lot of times you're using an XML format called ONIX. That's a text-based format that's specifically designed for book publishing data that has specific fields for the title and the book description and everything else. That format is utilized by all the major publishers and most of the kind of midsize and smaller publishers to send their data out into retail and other trading partner sites.
[00:04:06] So that's how data gets moved around. Obviously, there's a lot of potential issues with how the data can be overwritten by other people sending data. There's a lot of kind of fun stuff that happens in the actual world, in the real world. But as far as how the data gets out there and how an author or a publisher can engage with it, it's typically going to be one of those two options, filling out a form on a website at the specific retailer or trading partner or sending an ONIX file, sometimes Excel or some other format as well.
[00:04:34] Matty: One of the things that I suppose I would have realized if I thought about it enough but didn't really think about it until I watched your presentation, is the differing ways the different online retailers use the data and what data they use. So for my own purposes, I have a spreadsheet where I keep my book description and the editorial reviews, and I have a folder for the cover images and so on. And I always figure that if I have one of those, then I'm going to use it everywhere. Is there ever a circumstance where an author publisher should consider providing different data for the same data field to different online retailers?
[00:05:12] Joshua: Yeah, definitely. It depends a lot on how far and how broadly you're sending that data. In general, if you're sending data for a book to US-based retailers or US trading partners, I would just say normally you're going to send the same data to all of them. It makes your job easier as a publisher and author. It also keeps the complexity of the data management down as well. I think there's some value though, when thinking especially externally, if you're looking internationally. Let's say you're selling your book in England, you're going to put it up for sale in some UK store, you might want to consider changing the spelling of certain words to match the UK spelling. You might want to consider changing the examples that you provide in the book description. If you're talking about some sort of US political thing, it may not apply in the UK as easily, or it may not make as much sense.
[00:05:58] A good example of this actually was one of the publishers that we've worked with in the past, they published a book both in Australia and in England and in the US, and it was written by a celebrity chef in Australia who was not well known at all in the West, in America. So they actually had to change the book description for the American audience to explain who he was just to make sure that people knew this is a celebrity chef and here's the name of his TV show. Those kinds of little changes can make a big difference when you're trying to market to a specific area. So that's one example of when you might change the book description.
[00:06:32] There's obviously also other examples for different formats of a book. Your ebook may have a little different description than your print book, especially if you're doing any new enhancements or you had to remove some content from the print book that you included in the ebook or vice versa, there are some things that you might want to consider in that regard as well. In general, though, the goal is to be as consistent as you can be just to keep your job from going crazy and having to manage all of that different data everywhere.
[00:06:58] Matty: I'm just thinking about the places I go to manage data, and I think I understand correctly that author bio needs to be maintained separately on each Amazon market. So, for example, if I'm entering my author bio in Author Central, there's an Author Central US and then there's a separate Author Central for UK, let's say. But most of the other data I'm thinking about, I can only picture one place on KDP where I'm entering it. If I wanted to enter a different book description for different Amazon markets, how would I go about doing that?
[00:07:31] Joshua: Yeah. Typically, it's not available for indy authors to be able to do that for Amazon specifically. But if you were selling the book through, say, Waterstones in the UK, then that would be an example of a UK market that would possibly require or desire a different book description. Yeah, the thing about Amazon KDP is it's kind of a one size fits all platform, which has its benefits, but also has its limitations as well.
[00:07:53] Matty: I think it's pretty obvious how online retailers use the metadata you enter, but talk a little bit about how that data gets to brick and mortar bookstores.
[00:08:04] Joshua: So the brick and mortar bookstores are going to receive the data. Many of them have online systems where they're receiving the data from you anyway. Barnes and Noble would get some of your data from the data use and them as well. Especially on the publishing side, they're going to get their data from your distributor, they're going to get it possibly from Bowker, there are a lot of different potential places that data can come to a brick and mortar store. Some brick and mortar stores, especially smaller stores, will subscribe to some sort of data feed from Bowker or from someone else, they get it from Ingram directly. There's a lot of ways for different data sets to come from different places.
[00:08:37] One of those struggles that a small independent bookstore has compared to say a Barnes and Noble chain, is that very issue. Where do we get the data? How do we make sure the data is up to date? In most cases it's not coming directly from the publishers, unless they're a bigger publisher that's able to send the data to them. So a lot of times the smaller stores don't have that same quality of data or have the same ability to get those same quality data.
[00:09:00] I think it really depends on who you're sending the book to and who's buying your books, right? So if you're an indy author and you're struggling to get your book into bookstores, your metadata is going to actually be less important than your sales efforts. It's going to be less important than finding a distributor potentially to help you sell your book, getting up into Edelweiss or into another platform where book buyers at bookstores go to look for content, go to look for books to sell.
[00:09:28] I think there's some value, obviously, in the quality of the data, there's value in having the data very broadly distributed, but in a lot of cases, actually your biggest issue is just being in the door in the first place.
[00:09:38] Matty: So would an individual author publisher have the option then of getting their books into a platform like Edelweiss? I'm not familiar with that. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
[00:09:49] Joshua: I would be surprised if they didn't have an option for getting your data into the system. But Edelweiss is basically like an online catalog, and it's utilized in a lot of cases by buyers at bookstores, especially like Barnes and Noble, they use that as the place where they can find new content. If you're a seller for a major publisher, you're going to be sending Edelweiss information to the Barnes and Noble rep for them to see that information about the book. I don't know for sure if there's an option for indy authors on that side, but the point really is that when it comes to the data, your goal as an indy authors is not to get into every individual mom and pop store, it's really to define your niche and be able to get into the stores where it makes the most sense for your content.
[00:10:29] If you're a nonfiction indy author writing in a specific area of the country, it makes more sense to go personally and talk to those bookstore owners at those indy stores and say, Hey, here's a book about our region. I would love for you to carry this book. That might actually be more beneficial to you than trying to get into some other kind of system that's online, just because there's a personal connection. Now, obviously corona virus makes it a little difficult, you can't walk into the store and talk to the owner directly, but that's the idea.
[00:10:57] And as far as data, though, then how that store gets your data is going to depend a lot on how they're making the sale and how they're working with you. If they're working with you directly, working through a distributor that you have, getting the data from Ingram, getting the data from somewhere else. There's a lot of options for them in using that data and getting that data.
[00:11:16] Matty: Most of the bookstores that I've spoken with about carrying my books, once you tell them that it's on Ingram, they're pretty happy and they're willing to go there for that information.
[00:11:27] If someone is distributing to platforms through an aggregator like Draft2Digital, are there any different considerations for metadata management?
[00:11:35] Joshua: The question with an aggregator mostly is going to be how much data and what kinds of data they're able to send, because they're going to, in some ways, come down to a lowest common denominator. They may not send all the data that you could potentially give to a specific retailer. It depends a lot on how the distributor or how the aggregator works. I would caution you about things like HTML in your book descriptions, trying to be sure that whatever you give to your distributor or give to your aggregator actually is what shows up on the websites, cause every website is different on how they handle that. You have to be really careful about not going crazy under your design. If you're trying to do bold and italic and things like that, that's usually okay in a book description, but sometimes it doesn't translate well, so pay attention to how that works within the system that you're putting the data into and also on the trading partner sites, the websites where it ends up showing up. Make sure that there's a good translation between those two.
[00:12:29] Matty: Do you have a recommendation for a site or a tool to use for non-programmers to be able to create the HTML that, for example, KDP looks for for book descriptions?
[00:12:41] Joshua: I would actually recommend that everyone who handles metadata get comfortable with some basic HTML. It's really not that hard. You're just wrapping the text in little tags that say, this is a paragraph, this is bold, this is italic. It's really not that difficult to learn. You don't have to know a lot of HTML, really. Whenever I do presentations on this, I usually tell people there's six tags that you need to learn, and if you can handle that and get comfortable in it, then it's really simple to do it. And you can do it in Notepad if you're on a Windows PC, or you can use it in Text Editor in the Mac, you don't have to have a special program or anything like that. You can do it in very basic systems.
[00:13:19] And make sure that whenever you're putting that HTML code up into whatever system it is, whether you're going to KDP directly, or you're going to Draft2Digital or you're using Ingram or whatever it is, make sure that if you're pasting in that code, that you're pasting it in in a way that's going to be understood as code and not going to be understood as text, cause that could be problematic. You'll have a whole bunch of code showing up on your book description instead of it being bold and italic and stuff. So just make sure you select that source code option or whatever it is on that site.
[00:13:47] Matty: That is good advice because I have seen people who obviously have not done that and it's off-putting. One of the very interesting things you talked about in your presentation was Amazon keywords and how those have changed over time. Can you talk about that and where that has landed, today, August 2020, and what authors should be doing to act on that status?
[00:14:09] Joshua: A lot of people don't understand how Amazon handles keywords in the first place. And I think that's the first thing you need to understand as an author or as a publisher. Anybody who sends out data about books has to understand how Amazon uses keywords in their search. Because Amazon search doesn't work the same way that say Google search does.
[00:14:26] So Google search, the way it works is it takes all of the text on a page and it analyzes that text and tries to pull out data from all of that text, and it'll pull out basically keywords, but it ingests all of that content, and then when you go and search on it Google, searching actually is searching against all of the text. Let's say we're looking at a book page on Amazon. The book description, the reviews, the excerpt, all of that information is used by Google when it's trying to give you good results.
[00:14:57] The search on Amazon really doesn't do the same thing. It doesn't really take into consideration any of those long form, descriptive copy fields, like the book description or the excerpts or the reviews. The search on Amazon is using the title, the author, the publisher, and the keywords as basically most of what its data is based off of, most of its search results are based off of. So when you're thinking about how do I make sure my book is going to show up on the first page of results for certain types of searches, you have to think about it from the context of my book description doesn't matter really that much at all, if at all. but my keywords will matter tremendously. This also leads some authors, some publishers, to say, Well, I'm just going to put a whole bunch of keywords in my subtitle fields, or things like that. And that's a bad practice. I don't recommend doing that either but take advantage of the keyboards fields that you have.
[00:15:48] And it's going to differ as to whether, you're on KDP versus if you're a publisher sending through ONIX, because if you send through ONIX, you actually have a much bigger set of data, of keywords, you can deliver. They accept up to 210 characters or 210 bytes of data in an ONIX file. That's what Amazon will ingest and use as part of their keyword searching algorithm. If you're on KDP, you just have the I think it's seven fields or whatever that you can fill out with keywords in the system. So take advantage of as much of that as you can.
[00:16:17] And take into consideration how do you want your book to be understood, and also how is it already understood. And this is where thinking about how your key words are created comes into play. For most authors, you think about your book in a certain way, but your audience is going to think about your book in the way that they're going to think about it, regardless of whether you think they should in that way.
[00:16:41] So a good example of this is we have a publisher that we help with a lot of different things, and they specialize in books about autism that are intended for teachers. So their books are really for the classroom and trying to help teachers understand how to deal with children who are on the spectrum. They found after doing an analysis of all of their reviews of their books that were on Amazon, they found that actually it was parents who were mostly writing the reviews, not teachers. It was parents who were reading the books, not teachers, not nearly as much as they thought. So they actually had to change their marketing and change their thought process about how they market their books for those types of situations to target parents. And so the key words that they came up with and the key words that they used were specialized toward parents in some ways, thinking about, How would a parent do this?
[00:17:28] You can do it this yourself as well. If you go to Amazon and you pull up an Amazon search page and you start typing, you'll notice that Amazon provides a bunch of auto-complete options. Let's say you're a romance author. You start typing in romance. You're going to see a lot of different options. Those options in the autocomplete are based on actual searches people do on Amazon for that term. So you can use that as a foundation for understanding a little bit more about how to market your book, how to write keywords for your book. If you see an option and that drop down that fits your title, then it would make sense to use that key word as one of your keywords that you're using on your title.
[00:18:02] There's other things as well you can do. You can use Amazon Marketing Services to find keywords. The higher priced the keyword is, the more valuable a keyword is, potentially the more likely it is to actually return results. So you can use that as a guidebook for coming up with those ideas.
[00:18:18] And think about how people search on Amazon. Most people don't go to Amazon and type in romance in the search bar. They're going to think a little bit more deeply than that. I was looking for a shaker bottle the other day for shakes and you don't go and just search for shaker bottle, you search for I want one that's a certain number of ounces. I want a certain type of material, BPA free or whatever it is. And the more data, the more information you put in that search string, the more valuable your search results are going to be, the more specific they're going to. And people know that kind of naturally when they go on Amazon, they're doing what we call it long tail searches. So as an author or as a publisher, you should be thinking about what kinds of long tail searches will help people find my book.
[00:19:00] What really is my book about and what are people saying about my book to help me understand what my book is about. And then use those as keywords. So you'll get a much more very specific set of keywords for historical romance in Florence than you would for just the word romance.
[00:19:16] It's a very specific example. I'm typing in a very specific thing in that search bar, and that's going to help me find a very specific set of books. So figure out whatever you're publishing, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, figure out what people are saying about your book. Go read your reviews, go read reviews of similar titles and see what they say about those books.
[00:19:34] Try to find some commonality in the language because the language, the audience language, is going to make a huge difference in how someone also searches for those topics as well, and then play around with it.
[00:19:45] Then the biggest problem I think a lot of publishers have is they don't change their data up enough. They don't pay attention to, Okay, so every six months, every three months, especially for a front list title, I should be going back in and tweaking some things. Can I find a different keyword or take a keyword that I didn't really know if it was going to work or not? So I kept it off the list, throw it on there, replace something else. See what happens.
[00:20:07] That does a couple of things for you. One is actually Amazon pays attention to changes to metadata and that will help cycle a book back up, to filter it back up to the top because they're seeing that you're paying attention to the data. They're more likely to actually show that book more frequently because they want to see if the data is going to help, because their goal is to sell products. They don't care. They just want to sell it. So they know as far as their algorithms are concerned, if data's changing, that's actually helpful to their system as well. So that's one benefit.
[00:20:35] And the other benefit obviously is that you will see the benefit or the detriment of those keywords over the course of time. So if you change out a bunch of keywords and you try some new ones and your book doesn't sell any better, well, go back a couple months later and do it again. It's always helpful to try new things and that focus on, Let me tweak a little bit here. Let me tweak a little bit there. That benefits you in so many different kinds of non-tangible ways behind the scenes that I think it's one of those key things that publishers should remember to do and authors especially should remember to do as they're trying to focus on better quality data and more visibility.
[00:21:07] Matty: When you were talking about the key words and you were talking about the fact that there's generally between, I think, 210 and 2000 bytes of information that in certain circumstances people use. Is that different if you're using KDP and the specific the thing I'm thinking about is the example you gave, where the idea of phrases isn't as important as it used to be, that perhaps if you were writing a Japanese cookbook, you would put Japanese ingredients and Japanese recipes, but the way that Amazon is treating that data, now just putting a Japanese ingredients recipes would achieve the same thing. Does that apply if you're putting the data into KDP as well?
[00:21:48] Joshua: So as far as I know it does. Now obviously KDP is a little different than sending an ONIX file, which is where most of my examples come, is from ONIX. But KDP has a couple of fields you can use to put in your keywords. Amazon's algorithms care less about the phrase itself than they do about the words, because the algorithm is taking the words you provide and remixing them in a variety of different ways to try to match more searches for those words, in whatever order you give them. So like the idea of Japanese recipes, Japanese cooking, you don't have to repeat Japanese every time because Japanese is understood. It's already there. And actually, it would even give the book as a result if you had recipes Japanese, regardless of what order it came in.
[00:22:34] Again, the goal for Amazon's algorithm is to match as many products as they can, which is why at least on the ONIX side they've removed that whole idea of separating out phrases with a semi-colon or having any kind of distinction there. At this point, that's not beneficial to their algorithms, so they just said, don't worry about it. I don't know for sure on the KDP side if it's the same, but I imagine it is because it's the same search algorithm that's used being used regardless of where the data's coming from. So focus more on the words themselves and less on the phrases and more on how you can get good words and valuable words into those fields.
[00:23:11] Matty: I believe that the KDP user interface still shows the seven blocks. I'm not positive that's true, but if it does, should indy authors be just entering the applicable words independent of the phrase consideration as you just described, to the extent that field allows them to enter it?
[00:23:30] Joshua: Yeah, I would say take the maximum you can take if you have that ability, I would also look at the documentation. It's been a while since I looked at the KDP documentation specifically to see what it says about those keyword fields, but I imagine you could put multiple words in there, and it won't cause any problems.
[00:23:45] Again, the search algorithms are the same, regardless of where the data's coming in. I can't imagine that they would do something different with the searches for KDP books compared to how they would do it for an ONIX file that was delivered. All of it's going into the same database, all of it's being used in the same searching. So provide as many words as you're allowed and follow the rules that they have, and you should be fine.
[00:24:04] Matty: So if you've put in as many keywords as you can, and you're being a good steward of the data and you're going in periodically to check it, is there a way you can tell which of those keywords are working and which aren't so that you can swap out in an informed way?
[00:24:20] Joshua: You can try searching yourself for those keywords to see if they're actually being utilized and see where your book shows up for those keywords. You can also try to find searches that you find are helpful or not helpful for your book. If you've used a certain phrase by putting in certain words, go search for the phrase and see if the phrase works. So I would go search for Japanese cooking and Japanese recipes and see if my book is showing up, hopefully on that first page of results. There's no tried and true way to do this because that positioning will change constantly.
[00:24:51] It's also your visibility on Amazon is not just based on your keywords. It's based on your sales rank as well. So you have to have good sales in order to make better sales. So there's a give and take, it's a chicken or the egg situation. So I would say the best way to look at it that I've seen is just put in the keywords, see what happens to your sales and visibility. And over the next couple of weeks, you should see a bump or you will not see a bump. And if you don't, then go try again and do something different. Again, the change itself can sometimes trigger more visibility, but also you're probably going to get more results and better results if you tied into marketing campaigns that you're running.
[00:25:28] So if you're running a marketing campaign for specific words, whether that's using Amazon Marketing Services or not, even if you're just putting up a Facebook campaign or a Twitter campaign, whatever words and nomenclature you're using in those campaigns, make sure those words are also keywords because when someone goes and searches for the text, they're going to be looking for your book and you want your book to show up highly.
[00:25:49] So if more people go searching for some very specific phrase that you gave or some word that you're using as your exciting phrase for your marketing, you want that to be your books. And so you have to make sure that you're actually utilizing that keyword as well.
[00:26:05] Matty: I know this is I'm going to make you cringe, but let's say someone has been optimizing away and they feel like they have the best set of keywords or metadata that they can, or they just don't have the time to do the research that you're describing--they're not making the time to do the research you're describing--if they just go in and make an arbitrary change, like swapping around words, does Amazon recognize that as a change? And do you get that same benefit of maintaining your data as you would if you were making a substantive change?
[00:26:35] Joshua: Yeah. If you're changing the words in any way, then it's going to be triggered as a change. Again, the bump is going to only be as beneficial as it can be. It's not going to suddenly change your sales rank. It might boost some visibility, especially for the new keywords that you're adding. Changing around the order of the keywords won't matter very much, but definitely changing a couple of words out would probably make a bigger difference.
[00:26:58] My biggest thing, like I would highly recommend that as authors, especially if you're trying to make a splash, you're trying to get the most bang for your buck, is to focus your efforts within a specific timeframe on the marketing of the book, because your marketing is more important than even your keywords are. Your keywords are an add on to your marketing. They're a cyclical thing that you can use to benefit everything else you're doing. You can't expect keywords to do the work for you. You have to actually put the marketing effort in.
[00:27:28] And that can be things like Amazon Marketing Services, or it can be other stuff. It doesn't have to be just that. If you're doing an author tour of some kind, you're doing a webinar of some kind, whatever it is that you're doing to generate interest in the book, make sure that you're doing that and your keywords, cause the keywords will help build that flywheel.
[00:27:45] And at some point, I think a lot of indy authors, and I've worked with a lot of indy authors when I was an ebook developer, I think a lot of indy authors focus too much on the one book. There's a point at which you just have to go on, move on to the next product and move on to the next project and go do something more. If you're finding after the course of a year that you still haven't sold the book, it might be time to go write a new one, find another topic or expand on the topic you've already written on and find something else that will generate interest. Cause there's a limit to how much you can get the market to pay attention to something that they're just not willing to pay attention to.
[00:28:15] But also there's more visibility and more capability that comes when you have more content. You can see this with the really successful indy authors typically are writing on a consistent basis. They're publishing a lot of content because that's what draws more people. I've got a series of titles that I'm writing on a specific topic or a specific genre I'm following, this one thing or whatever. And they have a lot of content that they're coming out with. That's a really beneficial way to approach an indy publishing business.
[00:28:43] You can't just have one book cause one and dones typically don't work. The vast majority of people who write a single book never go on to success. There's gotta be more consistency. And I think that's when you combine the idea of the marketing and the idea of focusing your content and writing more content, those are actually much more important than the keywords, because in the long run, you have to have the visibility to make people want to go search for your type of content or for your content specifically. And that takes more than just filling out some keywords and trying to tweak things here and there.
[00:29:15] Matty: You had guarded or warned against packing keywords into a subtitle. Is that just because it looks stupid or is there an actual database reason that people shouldn't do that?
[00:29:28] Joshua: Yeah, it's both actually. The keyword packing happens mostly on non-book products. If you look at book data, the standard in the book industry, and this is actually the Book Industry Communication Group in the UK, wrote a really solid article about this and said, Hey, this is a bad idea. Don't do this. The reason is because the supply chain needs to have consistency in those fields, specifically things like subtitle field. The subtitle field is intended to be where the subtitle of the book goes. It doesn't help to put in bestseller or whatever. It is just not helpful for the selling of the product. And essentially, you're trying to game the system instead of using keywords, do exactly the same thing, but are invisible and therefore don't give your book that look of, oh, this is someone who's just trying to game the system.
[00:30:14] And readers are actually pretty knowledgeable about that stuff. I think they figured it out pretty well that if your book looks a little odd or it looks a little different, they will treat it that way. They're less likely to treat it as, Oh, this could be published by any number of other publishers. You want your book to look as similar to the big five publishers books as you can, because you don't want them to think about who published this. You want them to think about, Is that a story I want to read? or Is that a topic that I'm interested in? So the more you can make it fit within the model of standard traditional publishing, the more likely you are to have people not care about the fact that it was published by an indy author.
[00:30:48] Matty: If you have a word in a subtitle, for example, one of my series is the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, so suspense is already in the subtitle. Should I put suspense in the keywords also, or should I use that space on a completely new word?
[00:31:02] Joshua: I would use it on a completely different word. You also want to think about, sometimes more unique words and keywords are better. Obviously, suspense is already in the title. That's great. Don't think about using the same words you have in your subject categories. So if you're in a suspense subject category then that also is a duplicate in a sense. So you don't need to worry about those kinds of common words. Think about the less common words, especially the words people will use when they're searching for that type of book.
[00:31:29] And you have to be careful about things like you're not allowed to use competing titles and competing authors and things like that in your key words. But think about other words that people use when searching for their books, what kinds of unique keywords are going to help your book rise to the top, especially among those that are most popular for people to search for. And again, that's where that autocomplete comes in handy. Type in the word suspense and see what kind of other words people are using when they're searching for suspense books.
[00:31:55] Matty: If people are anxious to draw a parallel between themselves and someone else, my book is just like Clive Cussler, or whatever, is there a way that they can legitimately use metadata to hopefully show up on a Clive Cussler search?
[00:32:12] Joshua: The only way to legitimately do it and show up on a Clive Cussler search would be to use Amazon Marketing Services. AMS doesn't re doesn't have the same restriction on keywords. You can buy keywords for Clive Cussler and show up on those searches. And you'll be competing with all the other people who are trying to do the same thing. Your mileage may vary, but that's probably the most efficient way and the most direct way.
[00:32:32] My recommendation is to not try to compete directly with major authors, because that field is very busy. You're more likely to generate interest by being different, by having something that is unique, that actually gives you more of an oomph.
[00:32:46] If you can find a reviewer who's written about your book, that It's like a mix between Clive Cussler and such-and-such. That might be better. And you could use that in your book description or in your reviews section to say, this is what somebody said about the book. That's different than using it as a marketing gimmick or a marketing ploy. And it's definitely better for you to be unique in your own way, and to put your own spin on that genre or on that type of product than to try to match or be known as the indy author version of Clive Cussler.
[00:33:16] Matty: Right. There were a couple of examples of metadata you gave in your talk that I had never thought of before, and one of them was interior images. Can you talk a little bit about how authors on both the fiction and nonfiction side would use interior images as part of their metadata?
[00:33:33] Joshua: So they're not really helpful on fiction as much, unless in your print book, you've had an artist draw a map or something that's helpful for the reading of the book, or you have some sort of visual representation of the characters or something like that. That might be helpful as well.
[00:33:47] In nonfiction, it's extremely helpful. In children's books, it's extremely helpful for someone to be able to see the inside of the book and get a feel for how the book is designed, how it looks, what kind of imagery it has. Is it color or not color? All these things are variables that come into play when I'm choosing whether to buy a book or not.
[00:34:06] More data is better. If you're not able to use the Look Inside feature, then this is another way of, again, getting these interior images front and center, because they're right there in the same location, they show up as little thumbnails underneath the cover image. You can click on it and pull it up. I highly recommend it, especially for children's books, especially for nonfiction that's highly designed. Those are going to be where the most oomph comes in those interior images.
[00:34:31] Matty: I have never done anything specific to make use of Look Inside. It's just has shown up for my books, which are actually a combination of fiction and nonfiction now, but are there certain considerations that make a book eligible or not eligible for Look Inside on Amazon?
[00:34:47] Joshua: I imagine you probably have to have your print book in the KDP print on demand in order for them to have your PDF and therefore be able to show it. And for most of the authors, I think what people are going to see is that Kindle version in the search inside, even for the print book. So it's going to be really important to make sure that the Kindle version looks good and that it actually displays well in that display as well, because it's a web-based thing. It's not even on the Kindle itself. It's good to do some testing and make sure that your Look Inside for your book, whatever it ends up looking is actually what you want it to be and possibly go back and tweak that Kindle edition to make sure that it looks okay.
[00:35:20] Matty: There was one other thing I wanted to ask about and that was BISAC categories. You had mentioned BISAC categories. Can you just describe what those are and then how authors can take advantage of that data?
[00:35:31] Joshua: Sure. So BISAC is the industry standard categorization system for books in North America. It's maintained by the Book Industry Study Group, which is a nonprofit organization that helps publishers in the US maintain standards and learn about publishing and kind of interact with each other and help build connections in the supply chain. I'm actually on the board of directors of BISG. There's a whole committee that actually focuses on making sure that there are the correct subject categories available for books that are being published in the US right now. And if let's say an author or a publisher has a suggestion for a new category that doesn't currently show up in BISAC, you can reach out to the subject codes committee of the BISG and suggest that be added and that'll be discussed in the meetings and they can add that. And so every year in November, December, they come out with a new updated list of categories for the year.
[00:36:21] BISAC is really beneficial because it's made for the US market, it's actually intended to for US folks, so there's a lot of really detailed and good detail in there for US books. And it's also a good indicator of where people are publishing. It's an interesting view to see, some of the sections and BISAC don't drill down very deeply, but others drill down a lot, and so it's really interesting to see that. And you can start to get a feel for kind of what people are publishing.
[00:36:44] I highly recommend that you figure out what your BISAC categories are for your products. It's really helpful to have that knowledge, even if you don't need to give a BISAC category to a specific retailer, some retailers like Amazon don't use BISAC, they have their own kind of internal. system that they use for that, but it's loosely based on BISAC. So you have a close connection between the two.
[00:37:05] So my recommendation is as much as possible, find two or three BISAC categories your book fits into. There are some best practices about this. Don't use the categories that end in the word General. That General category is too general. Try to be as specific as you can be, especially for your first BISAC subject category. You might use the General category for a secondary one but be as specific as you possibly can for that first one. Don't duplicate. So if you go into the Paranormal romance category, don't do the General version of that as well. If you are drilling down deeply, don't come up a level or two and do General at that level, it doesn't really help you at all. And don't do more than three or four, some people say five. Typically three is a pretty common standard for subject categories in the US. Pick the three that really make the most sense and are actually the most beneficial.
[00:37:55] Matty: Great. I've taken a ton of action items out of this. Now I have to go pay some attention to my metadata. So Joshua, thank you so much for talking through this. Please let our listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and about Firebrand Technologies.
[00:38:10] Joshua: Yeah, you can find me on Twitter @jtallent. And you can follow Firebrand—our website is firebrandtech.com.
[00:38:19] Matty: Great. thank you so much. This has been so helpful.
[00:38:22] Joshua: My pleasure.
[00:02:18] Matty: So keeping in mind that most of the listeners of this podcast are going to be either individual indy author publishers or small houses -- we probably don't have a lot of listeners from the big five on this podcast -- can you just describe what you mean by metadata and how it gets out in the world and how people are using it?
[00:02:38] Joshua: Sure. Metadata is just data about data. It's the data about your book. So the title, the author, the keywords, the book description, the cover image is considered metadata. All of that is the information that whoever's selling your book needs to know in order to market it appropriately, or even just to display that information appropriately. And all of the metadata ideas and tips and all the details that I talk about apply to any book. It doesn't matter if it's published by an individual author or published by a big five publisher or anything in between, data is used by everyone in essentially the same way. As far as the retailers are concerned, they need the same types of data. And in some ways, good data practices are needed more by indy authors and smaller publishers because they're competing more directly with some of the much larger houses.
[00:03:28] As far as how data gets out there, it really depends on the size of the publisher or the author and the opportunities that are available to them. Some systems like Amazon KDP have a form that you fill out and that form is your metadata. If you're a publisher, a lot of times you're using an XML format called ONIX. That's a text-based format that's specifically designed for book publishing data that has specific fields for the title and the book description and everything else. That format is utilized by all the major publishers and most of the kind of midsize and smaller publishers to send their data out into retail and other trading partner sites.
[00:04:06] So that's how data gets moved around. Obviously, there's a lot of potential issues with how the data can be overwritten by other people sending data. There's a lot of kind of fun stuff that happens in the actual world, in the real world. But as far as how the data gets out there and how an author or a publisher can engage with it, it's typically going to be one of those two options, filling out a form on a website at the specific retailer or trading partner or sending an ONIX file, sometimes Excel or some other format as well.
[00:04:34] Matty: One of the things that I suppose I would have realized if I thought about it enough but didn't really think about it until I watched your presentation, is the differing ways the different online retailers use the data and what data they use. So for my own purposes, I have a spreadsheet where I keep my book description and the editorial reviews, and I have a folder for the cover images and so on. And I always figure that if I have one of those, then I'm going to use it everywhere. Is there ever a circumstance where an author publisher should consider providing different data for the same data field to different online retailers?
[00:05:12] Joshua: Yeah, definitely. It depends a lot on how far and how broadly you're sending that data. In general, if you're sending data for a book to US-based retailers or US trading partners, I would just say normally you're going to send the same data to all of them. It makes your job easier as a publisher and author. It also keeps the complexity of the data management down as well. I think there's some value though, when thinking especially externally, if you're looking internationally. Let's say you're selling your book in England, you're going to put it up for sale in some UK store, you might want to consider changing the spelling of certain words to match the UK spelling. You might want to consider changing the examples that you provide in the book description. If you're talking about some sort of US political thing, it may not apply in the UK as easily, or it may not make as much sense.
[00:05:58] A good example of this actually was one of the publishers that we've worked with in the past, they published a book both in Australia and in England and in the US, and it was written by a celebrity chef in Australia who was not well known at all in the West, in America. So they actually had to change the book description for the American audience to explain who he was just to make sure that people knew this is a celebrity chef and here's the name of his TV show. Those kinds of little changes can make a big difference when you're trying to market to a specific area. So that's one example of when you might change the book description.
[00:06:32] There's obviously also other examples for different formats of a book. Your ebook may have a little different description than your print book, especially if you're doing any new enhancements or you had to remove some content from the print book that you included in the ebook or vice versa, there are some things that you might want to consider in that regard as well. In general, though, the goal is to be as consistent as you can be just to keep your job from going crazy and having to manage all of that different data everywhere.
[00:06:58] Matty: I'm just thinking about the places I go to manage data, and I think I understand correctly that author bio needs to be maintained separately on each Amazon market. So, for example, if I'm entering my author bio in Author Central, there's an Author Central US and then there's a separate Author Central for UK, let's say. But most of the other data I'm thinking about, I can only picture one place on KDP where I'm entering it. If I wanted to enter a different book description for different Amazon markets, how would I go about doing that?
[00:07:31] Joshua: Yeah. Typically, it's not available for indy authors to be able to do that for Amazon specifically. But if you were selling the book through, say, Waterstones in the UK, then that would be an example of a UK market that would possibly require or desire a different book description. Yeah, the thing about Amazon KDP is it's kind of a one size fits all platform, which has its benefits, but also has its limitations as well.
[00:07:53] Matty: I think it's pretty obvious how online retailers use the metadata you enter, but talk a little bit about how that data gets to brick and mortar bookstores.
[00:08:04] Joshua: So the brick and mortar bookstores are going to receive the data. Many of them have online systems where they're receiving the data from you anyway. Barnes and Noble would get some of your data from the data use and them as well. Especially on the publishing side, they're going to get their data from your distributor, they're going to get it possibly from Bowker, there are a lot of different potential places that data can come to a brick and mortar store. Some brick and mortar stores, especially smaller stores, will subscribe to some sort of data feed from Bowker or from someone else, they get it from Ingram directly. There's a lot of ways for different data sets to come from different places.
[00:08:37] One of those struggles that a small independent bookstore has compared to say a Barnes and Noble chain, is that very issue. Where do we get the data? How do we make sure the data is up to date? In most cases it's not coming directly from the publishers, unless they're a bigger publisher that's able to send the data to them. So a lot of times the smaller stores don't have that same quality of data or have the same ability to get those same quality data.
[00:09:00] I think it really depends on who you're sending the book to and who's buying your books, right? So if you're an indy author and you're struggling to get your book into bookstores, your metadata is going to actually be less important than your sales efforts. It's going to be less important than finding a distributor potentially to help you sell your book, getting up into Edelweiss or into another platform where book buyers at bookstores go to look for content, go to look for books to sell.
[00:09:28] I think there's some value, obviously, in the quality of the data, there's value in having the data very broadly distributed, but in a lot of cases, actually your biggest issue is just being in the door in the first place.
[00:09:38] Matty: So would an individual author publisher have the option then of getting their books into a platform like Edelweiss? I'm not familiar with that. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
[00:09:49] Joshua: I would be surprised if they didn't have an option for getting your data into the system. But Edelweiss is basically like an online catalog, and it's utilized in a lot of cases by buyers at bookstores, especially like Barnes and Noble, they use that as the place where they can find new content. If you're a seller for a major publisher, you're going to be sending Edelweiss information to the Barnes and Noble rep for them to see that information about the book. I don't know for sure if there's an option for indy authors on that side, but the point really is that when it comes to the data, your goal as an indy authors is not to get into every individual mom and pop store, it's really to define your niche and be able to get into the stores where it makes the most sense for your content.
[00:10:29] If you're a nonfiction indy author writing in a specific area of the country, it makes more sense to go personally and talk to those bookstore owners at those indy stores and say, Hey, here's a book about our region. I would love for you to carry this book. That might actually be more beneficial to you than trying to get into some other kind of system that's online, just because there's a personal connection. Now, obviously corona virus makes it a little difficult, you can't walk into the store and talk to the owner directly, but that's the idea.
[00:10:57] And as far as data, though, then how that store gets your data is going to depend a lot on how they're making the sale and how they're working with you. If they're working with you directly, working through a distributor that you have, getting the data from Ingram, getting the data from somewhere else. There's a lot of options for them in using that data and getting that data.
[00:11:16] Matty: Most of the bookstores that I've spoken with about carrying my books, once you tell them that it's on Ingram, they're pretty happy and they're willing to go there for that information.
[00:11:27] If someone is distributing to platforms through an aggregator like Draft2Digital, are there any different considerations for metadata management?
[00:11:35] Joshua: The question with an aggregator mostly is going to be how much data and what kinds of data they're able to send, because they're going to, in some ways, come down to a lowest common denominator. They may not send all the data that you could potentially give to a specific retailer. It depends a lot on how the distributor or how the aggregator works. I would caution you about things like HTML in your book descriptions, trying to be sure that whatever you give to your distributor or give to your aggregator actually is what shows up on the websites, cause every website is different on how they handle that. You have to be really careful about not going crazy under your design. If you're trying to do bold and italic and things like that, that's usually okay in a book description, but sometimes it doesn't translate well, so pay attention to how that works within the system that you're putting the data into and also on the trading partner sites, the websites where it ends up showing up. Make sure that there's a good translation between those two.
[00:12:29] Matty: Do you have a recommendation for a site or a tool to use for non-programmers to be able to create the HTML that, for example, KDP looks for for book descriptions?
[00:12:41] Joshua: I would actually recommend that everyone who handles metadata get comfortable with some basic HTML. It's really not that hard. You're just wrapping the text in little tags that say, this is a paragraph, this is bold, this is italic. It's really not that difficult to learn. You don't have to know a lot of HTML, really. Whenever I do presentations on this, I usually tell people there's six tags that you need to learn, and if you can handle that and get comfortable in it, then it's really simple to do it. And you can do it in Notepad if you're on a Windows PC, or you can use it in Text Editor in the Mac, you don't have to have a special program or anything like that. You can do it in very basic systems.
[00:13:19] And make sure that whenever you're putting that HTML code up into whatever system it is, whether you're going to KDP directly, or you're going to Draft2Digital or you're using Ingram or whatever it is, make sure that if you're pasting in that code, that you're pasting it in in a way that's going to be understood as code and not going to be understood as text, cause that could be problematic. You'll have a whole bunch of code showing up on your book description instead of it being bold and italic and stuff. So just make sure you select that source code option or whatever it is on that site.
[00:13:47] Matty: That is good advice because I have seen people who obviously have not done that and it's off-putting. One of the very interesting things you talked about in your presentation was Amazon keywords and how those have changed over time. Can you talk about that and where that has landed, today, August 2020, and what authors should be doing to act on that status?
[00:14:09] Joshua: A lot of people don't understand how Amazon handles keywords in the first place. And I think that's the first thing you need to understand as an author or as a publisher. Anybody who sends out data about books has to understand how Amazon uses keywords in their search. Because Amazon search doesn't work the same way that say Google search does.
[00:14:26] So Google search, the way it works is it takes all of the text on a page and it analyzes that text and tries to pull out data from all of that text, and it'll pull out basically keywords, but it ingests all of that content, and then when you go and search on it Google, searching actually is searching against all of the text. Let's say we're looking at a book page on Amazon. The book description, the reviews, the excerpt, all of that information is used by Google when it's trying to give you good results.
[00:14:57] The search on Amazon really doesn't do the same thing. It doesn't really take into consideration any of those long form, descriptive copy fields, like the book description or the excerpts or the reviews. The search on Amazon is using the title, the author, the publisher, and the keywords as basically most of what its data is based off of, most of its search results are based off of. So when you're thinking about how do I make sure my book is going to show up on the first page of results for certain types of searches, you have to think about it from the context of my book description doesn't matter really that much at all, if at all. but my keywords will matter tremendously. This also leads some authors, some publishers, to say, Well, I'm just going to put a whole bunch of keywords in my subtitle fields, or things like that. And that's a bad practice. I don't recommend doing that either but take advantage of the keyboards fields that you have.
[00:15:48] And it's going to differ as to whether, you're on KDP versus if you're a publisher sending through ONIX, because if you send through ONIX, you actually have a much bigger set of data, of keywords, you can deliver. They accept up to 210 characters or 210 bytes of data in an ONIX file. That's what Amazon will ingest and use as part of their keyword searching algorithm. If you're on KDP, you just have the I think it's seven fields or whatever that you can fill out with keywords in the system. So take advantage of as much of that as you can.
[00:16:17] And take into consideration how do you want your book to be understood, and also how is it already understood. And this is where thinking about how your key words are created comes into play. For most authors, you think about your book in a certain way, but your audience is going to think about your book in the way that they're going to think about it, regardless of whether you think they should in that way.
[00:16:41] So a good example of this is we have a publisher that we help with a lot of different things, and they specialize in books about autism that are intended for teachers. So their books are really for the classroom and trying to help teachers understand how to deal with children who are on the spectrum. They found after doing an analysis of all of their reviews of their books that were on Amazon, they found that actually it was parents who were mostly writing the reviews, not teachers. It was parents who were reading the books, not teachers, not nearly as much as they thought. So they actually had to change their marketing and change their thought process about how they market their books for those types of situations to target parents. And so the key words that they came up with and the key words that they used were specialized toward parents in some ways, thinking about, How would a parent do this?
[00:17:28] You can do it this yourself as well. If you go to Amazon and you pull up an Amazon search page and you start typing, you'll notice that Amazon provides a bunch of auto-complete options. Let's say you're a romance author. You start typing in romance. You're going to see a lot of different options. Those options in the autocomplete are based on actual searches people do on Amazon for that term. So you can use that as a foundation for understanding a little bit more about how to market your book, how to write keywords for your book. If you see an option and that drop down that fits your title, then it would make sense to use that key word as one of your keywords that you're using on your title.
[00:18:02] There's other things as well you can do. You can use Amazon Marketing Services to find keywords. The higher priced the keyword is, the more valuable a keyword is, potentially the more likely it is to actually return results. So you can use that as a guidebook for coming up with those ideas.
[00:18:18] And think about how people search on Amazon. Most people don't go to Amazon and type in romance in the search bar. They're going to think a little bit more deeply than that. I was looking for a shaker bottle the other day for shakes and you don't go and just search for shaker bottle, you search for I want one that's a certain number of ounces. I want a certain type of material, BPA free or whatever it is. And the more data, the more information you put in that search string, the more valuable your search results are going to be, the more specific they're going to. And people know that kind of naturally when they go on Amazon, they're doing what we call it long tail searches. So as an author or as a publisher, you should be thinking about what kinds of long tail searches will help people find my book.
[00:19:00] What really is my book about and what are people saying about my book to help me understand what my book is about. And then use those as keywords. So you'll get a much more very specific set of keywords for historical romance in Florence than you would for just the word romance.
[00:19:16] It's a very specific example. I'm typing in a very specific thing in that search bar, and that's going to help me find a very specific set of books. So figure out whatever you're publishing, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, figure out what people are saying about your book. Go read your reviews, go read reviews of similar titles and see what they say about those books.
[00:19:34] Try to find some commonality in the language because the language, the audience language, is going to make a huge difference in how someone also searches for those topics as well, and then play around with it.
[00:19:45] Then the biggest problem I think a lot of publishers have is they don't change their data up enough. They don't pay attention to, Okay, so every six months, every three months, especially for a front list title, I should be going back in and tweaking some things. Can I find a different keyword or take a keyword that I didn't really know if it was going to work or not? So I kept it off the list, throw it on there, replace something else. See what happens.
[00:20:07] That does a couple of things for you. One is actually Amazon pays attention to changes to metadata and that will help cycle a book back up, to filter it back up to the top because they're seeing that you're paying attention to the data. They're more likely to actually show that book more frequently because they want to see if the data is going to help, because their goal is to sell products. They don't care. They just want to sell it. So they know as far as their algorithms are concerned, if data's changing, that's actually helpful to their system as well. So that's one benefit.
[00:20:35] And the other benefit obviously is that you will see the benefit or the detriment of those keywords over the course of time. So if you change out a bunch of keywords and you try some new ones and your book doesn't sell any better, well, go back a couple months later and do it again. It's always helpful to try new things and that focus on, Let me tweak a little bit here. Let me tweak a little bit there. That benefits you in so many different kinds of non-tangible ways behind the scenes that I think it's one of those key things that publishers should remember to do and authors especially should remember to do as they're trying to focus on better quality data and more visibility.
[00:21:07] Matty: When you were talking about the key words and you were talking about the fact that there's generally between, I think, 210 and 2000 bytes of information that in certain circumstances people use. Is that different if you're using KDP and the specific the thing I'm thinking about is the example you gave, where the idea of phrases isn't as important as it used to be, that perhaps if you were writing a Japanese cookbook, you would put Japanese ingredients and Japanese recipes, but the way that Amazon is treating that data, now just putting a Japanese ingredients recipes would achieve the same thing. Does that apply if you're putting the data into KDP as well?
[00:21:48] Joshua: So as far as I know it does. Now obviously KDP is a little different than sending an ONIX file, which is where most of my examples come, is from ONIX. But KDP has a couple of fields you can use to put in your keywords. Amazon's algorithms care less about the phrase itself than they do about the words, because the algorithm is taking the words you provide and remixing them in a variety of different ways to try to match more searches for those words, in whatever order you give them. So like the idea of Japanese recipes, Japanese cooking, you don't have to repeat Japanese every time because Japanese is understood. It's already there. And actually, it would even give the book as a result if you had recipes Japanese, regardless of what order it came in.
[00:22:34] Again, the goal for Amazon's algorithm is to match as many products as they can, which is why at least on the ONIX side they've removed that whole idea of separating out phrases with a semi-colon or having any kind of distinction there. At this point, that's not beneficial to their algorithms, so they just said, don't worry about it. I don't know for sure on the KDP side if it's the same, but I imagine it is because it's the same search algorithm that's used being used regardless of where the data's coming from. So focus more on the words themselves and less on the phrases and more on how you can get good words and valuable words into those fields.
[00:23:11] Matty: I believe that the KDP user interface still shows the seven blocks. I'm not positive that's true, but if it does, should indy authors be just entering the applicable words independent of the phrase consideration as you just described, to the extent that field allows them to enter it?
[00:23:30] Joshua: Yeah, I would say take the maximum you can take if you have that ability, I would also look at the documentation. It's been a while since I looked at the KDP documentation specifically to see what it says about those keyword fields, but I imagine you could put multiple words in there, and it won't cause any problems.
[00:23:45] Again, the search algorithms are the same, regardless of where the data's coming in. I can't imagine that they would do something different with the searches for KDP books compared to how they would do it for an ONIX file that was delivered. All of it's going into the same database, all of it's being used in the same searching. So provide as many words as you're allowed and follow the rules that they have, and you should be fine.
[00:24:04] Matty: So if you've put in as many keywords as you can, and you're being a good steward of the data and you're going in periodically to check it, is there a way you can tell which of those keywords are working and which aren't so that you can swap out in an informed way?
[00:24:20] Joshua: You can try searching yourself for those keywords to see if they're actually being utilized and see where your book shows up for those keywords. You can also try to find searches that you find are helpful or not helpful for your book. If you've used a certain phrase by putting in certain words, go search for the phrase and see if the phrase works. So I would go search for Japanese cooking and Japanese recipes and see if my book is showing up, hopefully on that first page of results. There's no tried and true way to do this because that positioning will change constantly.
[00:24:51] It's also your visibility on Amazon is not just based on your keywords. It's based on your sales rank as well. So you have to have good sales in order to make better sales. So there's a give and take, it's a chicken or the egg situation. So I would say the best way to look at it that I've seen is just put in the keywords, see what happens to your sales and visibility. And over the next couple of weeks, you should see a bump or you will not see a bump. And if you don't, then go try again and do something different. Again, the change itself can sometimes trigger more visibility, but also you're probably going to get more results and better results if you tied into marketing campaigns that you're running.
[00:25:28] So if you're running a marketing campaign for specific words, whether that's using Amazon Marketing Services or not, even if you're just putting up a Facebook campaign or a Twitter campaign, whatever words and nomenclature you're using in those campaigns, make sure those words are also keywords because when someone goes and searches for the text, they're going to be looking for your book and you want your book to show up highly.
[00:25:49] So if more people go searching for some very specific phrase that you gave or some word that you're using as your exciting phrase for your marketing, you want that to be your books. And so you have to make sure that you're actually utilizing that keyword as well.
[00:26:05] Matty: I know this is I'm going to make you cringe, but let's say someone has been optimizing away and they feel like they have the best set of keywords or metadata that they can, or they just don't have the time to do the research that you're describing--they're not making the time to do the research you're describing--if they just go in and make an arbitrary change, like swapping around words, does Amazon recognize that as a change? And do you get that same benefit of maintaining your data as you would if you were making a substantive change?
[00:26:35] Joshua: Yeah. If you're changing the words in any way, then it's going to be triggered as a change. Again, the bump is going to only be as beneficial as it can be. It's not going to suddenly change your sales rank. It might boost some visibility, especially for the new keywords that you're adding. Changing around the order of the keywords won't matter very much, but definitely changing a couple of words out would probably make a bigger difference.
[00:26:58] My biggest thing, like I would highly recommend that as authors, especially if you're trying to make a splash, you're trying to get the most bang for your buck, is to focus your efforts within a specific timeframe on the marketing of the book, because your marketing is more important than even your keywords are. Your keywords are an add on to your marketing. They're a cyclical thing that you can use to benefit everything else you're doing. You can't expect keywords to do the work for you. You have to actually put the marketing effort in.
[00:27:28] And that can be things like Amazon Marketing Services, or it can be other stuff. It doesn't have to be just that. If you're doing an author tour of some kind, you're doing a webinar of some kind, whatever it is that you're doing to generate interest in the book, make sure that you're doing that and your keywords, cause the keywords will help build that flywheel.
[00:27:45] And at some point, I think a lot of indy authors, and I've worked with a lot of indy authors when I was an ebook developer, I think a lot of indy authors focus too much on the one book. There's a point at which you just have to go on, move on to the next product and move on to the next project and go do something more. If you're finding after the course of a year that you still haven't sold the book, it might be time to go write a new one, find another topic or expand on the topic you've already written on and find something else that will generate interest. Cause there's a limit to how much you can get the market to pay attention to something that they're just not willing to pay attention to.
[00:28:15] But also there's more visibility and more capability that comes when you have more content. You can see this with the really successful indy authors typically are writing on a consistent basis. They're publishing a lot of content because that's what draws more people. I've got a series of titles that I'm writing on a specific topic or a specific genre I'm following, this one thing or whatever. And they have a lot of content that they're coming out with. That's a really beneficial way to approach an indy publishing business.
[00:28:43] You can't just have one book cause one and dones typically don't work. The vast majority of people who write a single book never go on to success. There's gotta be more consistency. And I think that's when you combine the idea of the marketing and the idea of focusing your content and writing more content, those are actually much more important than the keywords, because in the long run, you have to have the visibility to make people want to go search for your type of content or for your content specifically. And that takes more than just filling out some keywords and trying to tweak things here and there.
[00:29:15] Matty: You had guarded or warned against packing keywords into a subtitle. Is that just because it looks stupid or is there an actual database reason that people shouldn't do that?
[00:29:28] Joshua: Yeah, it's both actually. The keyword packing happens mostly on non-book products. If you look at book data, the standard in the book industry, and this is actually the Book Industry Communication Group in the UK, wrote a really solid article about this and said, Hey, this is a bad idea. Don't do this. The reason is because the supply chain needs to have consistency in those fields, specifically things like subtitle field. The subtitle field is intended to be where the subtitle of the book goes. It doesn't help to put in bestseller or whatever. It is just not helpful for the selling of the product. And essentially, you're trying to game the system instead of using keywords, do exactly the same thing, but are invisible and therefore don't give your book that look of, oh, this is someone who's just trying to game the system.
[00:30:14] And readers are actually pretty knowledgeable about that stuff. I think they figured it out pretty well that if your book looks a little odd or it looks a little different, they will treat it that way. They're less likely to treat it as, Oh, this could be published by any number of other publishers. You want your book to look as similar to the big five publishers books as you can, because you don't want them to think about who published this. You want them to think about, Is that a story I want to read? or Is that a topic that I'm interested in? So the more you can make it fit within the model of standard traditional publishing, the more likely you are to have people not care about the fact that it was published by an indy author.
[00:30:48] Matty: If you have a word in a subtitle, for example, one of my series is the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, so suspense is already in the subtitle. Should I put suspense in the keywords also, or should I use that space on a completely new word?
[00:31:02] Joshua: I would use it on a completely different word. You also want to think about, sometimes more unique words and keywords are better. Obviously, suspense is already in the title. That's great. Don't think about using the same words you have in your subject categories. So if you're in a suspense subject category then that also is a duplicate in a sense. So you don't need to worry about those kinds of common words. Think about the less common words, especially the words people will use when they're searching for that type of book.
[00:31:29] And you have to be careful about things like you're not allowed to use competing titles and competing authors and things like that in your key words. But think about other words that people use when searching for their books, what kinds of unique keywords are going to help your book rise to the top, especially among those that are most popular for people to search for. And again, that's where that autocomplete comes in handy. Type in the word suspense and see what kind of other words people are using when they're searching for suspense books.
[00:31:55] Matty: If people are anxious to draw a parallel between themselves and someone else, my book is just like Clive Cussler, or whatever, is there a way that they can legitimately use metadata to hopefully show up on a Clive Cussler search?
[00:32:12] Joshua: The only way to legitimately do it and show up on a Clive Cussler search would be to use Amazon Marketing Services. AMS doesn't re doesn't have the same restriction on keywords. You can buy keywords for Clive Cussler and show up on those searches. And you'll be competing with all the other people who are trying to do the same thing. Your mileage may vary, but that's probably the most efficient way and the most direct way.
[00:32:32] My recommendation is to not try to compete directly with major authors, because that field is very busy. You're more likely to generate interest by being different, by having something that is unique, that actually gives you more of an oomph.
[00:32:46] If you can find a reviewer who's written about your book, that It's like a mix between Clive Cussler and such-and-such. That might be better. And you could use that in your book description or in your reviews section to say, this is what somebody said about the book. That's different than using it as a marketing gimmick or a marketing ploy. And it's definitely better for you to be unique in your own way, and to put your own spin on that genre or on that type of product than to try to match or be known as the indy author version of Clive Cussler.
[00:33:16] Matty: Right. There were a couple of examples of metadata you gave in your talk that I had never thought of before, and one of them was interior images. Can you talk a little bit about how authors on both the fiction and nonfiction side would use interior images as part of their metadata?
[00:33:33] Joshua: So they're not really helpful on fiction as much, unless in your print book, you've had an artist draw a map or something that's helpful for the reading of the book, or you have some sort of visual representation of the characters or something like that. That might be helpful as well.
[00:33:47] In nonfiction, it's extremely helpful. In children's books, it's extremely helpful for someone to be able to see the inside of the book and get a feel for how the book is designed, how it looks, what kind of imagery it has. Is it color or not color? All these things are variables that come into play when I'm choosing whether to buy a book or not.
[00:34:06] More data is better. If you're not able to use the Look Inside feature, then this is another way of, again, getting these interior images front and center, because they're right there in the same location, they show up as little thumbnails underneath the cover image. You can click on it and pull it up. I highly recommend it, especially for children's books, especially for nonfiction that's highly designed. Those are going to be where the most oomph comes in those interior images.
[00:34:31] Matty: I have never done anything specific to make use of Look Inside. It's just has shown up for my books, which are actually a combination of fiction and nonfiction now, but are there certain considerations that make a book eligible or not eligible for Look Inside on Amazon?
[00:34:47] Joshua: I imagine you probably have to have your print book in the KDP print on demand in order for them to have your PDF and therefore be able to show it. And for most of the authors, I think what people are going to see is that Kindle version in the search inside, even for the print book. So it's going to be really important to make sure that the Kindle version looks good and that it actually displays well in that display as well, because it's a web-based thing. It's not even on the Kindle itself. It's good to do some testing and make sure that your Look Inside for your book, whatever it ends up looking is actually what you want it to be and possibly go back and tweak that Kindle edition to make sure that it looks okay.
[00:35:20] Matty: There was one other thing I wanted to ask about and that was BISAC categories. You had mentioned BISAC categories. Can you just describe what those are and then how authors can take advantage of that data?
[00:35:31] Joshua: Sure. So BISAC is the industry standard categorization system for books in North America. It's maintained by the Book Industry Study Group, which is a nonprofit organization that helps publishers in the US maintain standards and learn about publishing and kind of interact with each other and help build connections in the supply chain. I'm actually on the board of directors of BISG. There's a whole committee that actually focuses on making sure that there are the correct subject categories available for books that are being published in the US right now. And if let's say an author or a publisher has a suggestion for a new category that doesn't currently show up in BISAC, you can reach out to the subject codes committee of the BISG and suggest that be added and that'll be discussed in the meetings and they can add that. And so every year in November, December, they come out with a new updated list of categories for the year.
[00:36:21] BISAC is really beneficial because it's made for the US market, it's actually intended to for US folks, so there's a lot of really detailed and good detail in there for US books. And it's also a good indicator of where people are publishing. It's an interesting view to see, some of the sections and BISAC don't drill down very deeply, but others drill down a lot, and so it's really interesting to see that. And you can start to get a feel for kind of what people are publishing.
[00:36:44] I highly recommend that you figure out what your BISAC categories are for your products. It's really helpful to have that knowledge, even if you don't need to give a BISAC category to a specific retailer, some retailers like Amazon don't use BISAC, they have their own kind of internal. system that they use for that, but it's loosely based on BISAC. So you have a close connection between the two.
[00:37:05] So my recommendation is as much as possible, find two or three BISAC categories your book fits into. There are some best practices about this. Don't use the categories that end in the word General. That General category is too general. Try to be as specific as you can be, especially for your first BISAC subject category. You might use the General category for a secondary one but be as specific as you possibly can for that first one. Don't duplicate. So if you go into the Paranormal romance category, don't do the General version of that as well. If you are drilling down deeply, don't come up a level or two and do General at that level, it doesn't really help you at all. And don't do more than three or four, some people say five. Typically three is a pretty common standard for subject categories in the US. Pick the three that really make the most sense and are actually the most beneficial.
[00:37:55] Matty: Great. I've taken a ton of action items out of this. Now I have to go pay some attention to my metadata. So Joshua, thank you so much for talking through this. Please let our listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and about Firebrand Technologies.
[00:38:10] Joshua: Yeah, you can find me on Twitter @jtallent. And you can follow Firebrand—our website is firebrandtech.com.
[00:38:19] Matty: Great. thank you so much. This has been so helpful.
[00:38:22] Joshua: My pleasure.
I took a ton of to do’s from the discussion, including removing common words like “suspense” from my keywords and adding a calendar reminder to review and adjust them regularly. What actions are you going to take? Let me know if the Comments below!
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