Episode 119 - Metadata Is Your Brand with Kathy Meis
February 8, 2022
Kathy Meis of Bublish discusses METADATA IS YOUR BRAND. We discuss how the real marketing begins in the manuscript ... the role metadata, including a book’s cover, plays in a discovery process that increasingly takes place online ... the ways that different platforms, such as Amazon and Google, use metadata ... and how good metadata is a service not only to the author but also to the reader.
Kathy Meis is the founder and CEO of Bublish, a complete one-stop publishing solution for today’s independent author. With more than 30 years of experience in the media and publishing industries, Kathy has served in a wide variety of editorial and management positions at some of the industry’s leading companies. She has worked as a television reporter for CBS, was a founding editor of Forbes MediaCritic, and was a founding partner of PubSmart, an author-centric publishing conference held in Charleston, South Carolina. Kathy speaks and blogs regularly about book promotion, author branding, social marketing and discoverability. She lives in Charleston, South Carolina.
"Audiences are made of human beings, and so the more you know about what delights that audience or what that audience is craving and where they're going to fulfill that desire for that reading experience or information, the more you'll write something that is like a gift." —Kathy Meis
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[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Kathy Meis. Hey Kathy, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Kathy: I'm doing great. How are you today, Matty?
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Kathy Meis is the founder and CEO of Bublish, a complete one-stop publishing solution for today's independent author. With more than 30 years of experience in the media and publishing industries, Kathy has served in a wide variety of editorial and management positions at some of the industry's leading companies. She's worked as a television reporter for CBS, was a founding editor of Forbes Media Critic and was a founding partner PubSmart, an author-centric publishing conference held in Charleston, South Carolina. And Kathy speaks and blogs regularly about book promotion, author branding, social marketing and discoverability, and she lives in Charleston.
[00:00:46] And today we are going to be talking about metadata is your brand. Kathy, I think I heard you first talk about this at a panel event we did for Sisters in Crime New England, if I remember correctly.
[00:00:59] And so normally, I lead this in with some topic-specific thing, but when I saw you were in Charleston, I'm sorry, I just have to talk about Charleston for a minute because Charleston is one of my favorite places ever.
[00:01:12] Kathy: So happy to hear it.
[00:01:13] Matty: For many years, my husband and I used to always go at the beginning of December, and in addition to the gracious people and the beautiful architecture, it has probably three of my top five favorite restaurants in the world.
[00:01:28] Kathy: We got food, yeah. If you got all the time in the world and you can burn calories as fast as you speak, you could probably never get through all the great restaurants in this town. So yes, we are very blessed in that department.
[00:01:43] Matty: Well, and I just thought of something, this actually is kind of a lead in, I can find a transition between any two topics.
[00:01:48] Kathy: I love it.
[00:01:49] Matty: My favorite restaurant in Charleston is FIG, Food is Good. And the last couple of times my husband and I went there, we were gushing to our server about how great the food was. And he or she said, do you want to come back to the kitchen? And so we said, of course. So they went back, and they let people know we would be coming back, and then they took us in just like right inside the door. And they said, "Guests in the house," or something like that. So everybody knew and everybody stopped what they were doing for a millisecond and waved and said hello. And then we were able to kind of stand there and watch what was going on.
[00:02:25] And it's kind of a cool branding example, because how many restaurants invite the customer to come back to the kitchen? They were obviously so pleased, they were so proud of what they were doing, that they wanted to share it. And it was obviously something that they had prepped for. It was kind of like the metadata of FIG.
[00:02:47] Kathy: Yeah, exactly. And it is an interesting segue because, when I say, metadata is your brand, people's eyes get big and they blink and they go, what the heck does that mean? And the reality is that in the old days, you walked into a physical space, a physical bookstore, and those wonderful, magical places still exist. And either you heard from your neighbor about a book or maybe you saw an ad in a physical magazine or a newspaper, or you just browsed the bookstore and you walked out with something, right? So it was a very human process, it was a very kind of limited ways that you got there, and you left.
[00:03:30] And now, it's very different. You're building a brand in a very competitive book marketplace where people discover books all over the place. And more books are purchased online than they are in physical bookstores. And I'm thrilled with the latest numbers, that the bookstores had a great November, are coming back, but sadly, more books are purchased online.
[00:03:53] And so if you don't understand the metadata piece, which is what informs that discovery process, which is millions of avenues into finding a book. People are searching, maybe they ask Siri for a book, maybe they put in words, maybe they see it on TikTok, which is huge right now, and all of those experiences in that little network of discovery to product page to purchase, is driven by metadata. And so that's why I say metadata is your brand now. And you really need to take it seriously and try to understand what it means.
[00:04:34] Matty: Well, when I was first thinking through, as I was listening to your talk at the conference, we were participating in about metadata is your brand, one of my first questions was which comes first, the metadata or the brand? And I thought that might be a good entree to describing exactly what you mean by metadata and even branding.
[00:04:51] Kathy: Yeah. So brand, we could go on for a long time, as you know, what that means, but to me at its simplest level, brand is the promise you make to your readers. So by definition, the word brand, you can't build a brand without understanding an audience that you're building a brand for. And so I think people need to think about what that might mean. So that means your readers. That your book is for a particular type of person who likes a particular type of reading experience or if it's non-fiction, is looking for a particular type of information or journey, if it's inspirational. So, brands are built for audiences, so understanding your audience is really key.
[00:05:33] And when we started Bublish, we really thought a lot about the marketing piece, and what we discovered is, that the real marketing begins in the manuscript. And if the author is thinking about what they want to achieve, the reading experience, who they can delight and they start to think about their readership really early in their publishing journey, it makes all the difference. Because then that reader gets that book and they're delighted by it, and they know how to get that book in front of them because maybe they know the other titles that that type of reader is reading.
[00:06:09] And so, I kind of talk about it as a gift. If you and I just met, which we actually don't know each other that well, and I wanted to delight you with a holiday gift this year, then I would learn about you. I'd try to make that gift great for you and learn what you like, where you hang out, what restaurant, I might get you a gift card to FIG, now that I know, a trip to Charleston.
[00:06:32] So, it's not dissimilar as an author to think about marketing in a more human way like that. Audiences are made of human beings, and so the more you know about what delights that audience or what that audience is craving and where they're going to fulfill that desire for that reading experience or information, the more you'll write something that is like a gift.
[00:06:57] And so brand, that's what really brand is to me. And the irony is that you now have to translate this very human thing into robotville, quite honestly. And we are talking about algorithms and robots basically showing you things in an online world oftentimes, because some other thing that you viewed, either in a retail environment or through search or through an advertisement or through a social post. There are literally hundreds of ways that people find a book now.
[00:07:32] And different formats, so much to understand, and that is all driven by metadata. So translating that promise that you're making to readers and really understanding them and writing something that's going to delight them, translating that into then things like title, subtitle, description of the book, pricing, length of the book, reviews, editorial reviews, reader reviews, even the social posts have metadata, hashtags, blog post, search engine optimization.
[00:08:05] It's a bit daunting, but it has become ever more important. Because even if you're walking into the bookstore to buy it, and it's a physical bookstore in your town, you've still probably discovered or saw something about that book online.
[00:08:22] Matty: One of the things that I thought was really interesting about the talk you gave is the idea that even a book cover is metadata. I had never thought of a book cover as metadata before.
[00:08:33] Kathy: Yes. And it's actually one of the most important pieces of metadata, and it increases sales by hundreds of percentage points. And so, yeah, making sure that your cover's there, and one of the reasons is too that many of the retailers require you, for example, if you were writing a series and you have a title and you have a subtitle and you have a series title, even the word "a novel" is a subtitle that is highly used to indicate something with a vague name isn't non-fiction, it's a novel. So that tells us as consumers a lot in a nanosecond, and it also tells all the bots running these whole massive systems that this is a novel, okay, that goes here, that goes on this shelf.
[00:09:19] But the thing that is interesting about covers is, people just think, oh, well, they should look really attractive, and then if a more sophisticated author might say, they should look really attractive, but kind of like this, because I know the other books in my category look like this. But the title, the subtitle and the series title are supposed to be on that cover in order for you to put those into the metadata fields.
[00:09:44] And so a lot of independent authors at least, make the mistake of forgetting to label that first book in a series because they start that on book two or book three and that little piece of metadata, maybe it's not even in the field when you uploaded it, that links all those books. Now, when a consumer is looking for your book and maybe they heard, yeah, I can't remember the name of the book, but the series is blah, blah, blah, boom, they put that in and all the books come up. And so they know there's 3 books or 5 books or 12 books in that series, and they can purchase them all at once if they want.
[00:10:20] It's a huge difference in the discoverability of that series, because you may come into book 10 and you're like, oh, I can't find book 1, and people are extremely, they’re just, the focus issues are really hard online. You might have them for 3 to 5 seconds, and so if they can't find something, then they're gone. And if you just had a series title, they would have seen them all at once. And so that, that's the power of metadata.
[00:10:48] Matty: For both of my first in series books, I didn't realize when I was writing them that they were first in series. So a benefit of being an indy author is I was able to go back and add those, book 1. And it is a particular annoyance to me when I'm reading a series and it's very difficult to find the order in which the books were put out, so, that's one piece of metadata that's important to me as a reader.
[00:11:12] One of the reasons I thought this was such an intriguing topic is the branding, which seems so personal, and metadata, which seems so computerized, seemed kind of diametrically opposed. But one thing I'm realizing based on what you're saying is, there's an extent to which both of them are controllable, and then there's a point at which they're no longer controllable. So I'm specifically thinking of Also Boughts. The Also Boughts are not something that you can directly control as an author. You can influence it by not encouraging all your family and friends who read a lot of cookbooks to buy your thriller, because then I believe that the effect is that at the bottom of your thriller, it says Also Bought Julia Child's Greatest Hits or whatever.
[00:11:52] So, do you have any thoughts about the controllability of metadata, the things that aren't a field that you're filling out yourself in a publishing platform?
[00:12:02] Kathy: Yeah. Well, precisely to the scenario that you said, you can advertise to the specific comparable titles that you want to be in your Also Boughts and if you're savvy and they're a good fit and you can compel people to buy your book, and they're also buying this comparable title where you're paying, and I'm talking at this point in the Amazon environment, that you pay to get those first purchases and then you get the organic lift by that showing up, because the people who bought your book are buying that, and the people you show up in theirs, and you've paid for that initial influence, like you say. It's not complete control but there are ways to strongly influence that, but you have to be pretty laser-focused on understanding your comparable titles.
[00:12:53] And again, comparable titles in an advertising environment become very significant metadata that impacts your brand. So part of your brand is to say, well, if you like this reading experience, you might like this. That's a very popular way in a very short amount of time to say to a new reader who doesn't recognize your name, if you enjoy so-and-so, you might enjoy this series. And it's become increasingly popular because we are so attention-deficit shoppers right now.
[00:13:25] And so, if you can actually advertise to that person's and you pay for showing up on their product page as an alternative reading experience that the same reader might like, and you're really good at that, that metadata is what puts your book there, because you were bidding on that keyword, which is the author's name, maybe the title, also the categories they're in, and then after a while you get that organic lift. But it is more and more of a pay-to-play environment to try to not control but strongly influence what the bots show you.
[00:14:01] Matty: The way that I can imagine that scenario and branding coming together is that I've just recently started noticing on Amazon, sponsored books on my pages. So if I go to Amazon and I search for "Matty Dalrymple books," then I'm starting to get more frequently sponsored ads at the top of those pages. And so I don't know if that's because that author targeted me or because Amazon is guessing that it's a good match.
[00:14:28] When I first wrote the first Ann Kinnear suspense novels, it's a series about a woman who can sense spirits, so it's supernatural suspense, but it's not heavily supernatural the way, let's say Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse books are supernatural. So I was very hesitant to market to that audience because I was afraid that my books wouldn't pay back that promise. To me, the subtlety of the supernatural part was a plus, but I didn't want to market it to people who are looking for a lot of woo woo stuff.
[00:15:01] But I'm seeing more and more that the books that are showing up as sponsored on my pages are of that genre. And so I started feeling more comfortable about, well, maybe I can venture into that brand a little bit more, which is going to open up a whole other pool of readers for me. Is that smart? Or am I being misled by the fact that some arbitrary person put their ad on my page?
[00:15:26] Kathy: Well, no, I think it's always worth experimentation when it's a little more gray, the fit of your brand next to that brand, and I think that's the nice thing about advertising is, you can do that. I think what you're probably seeing, and it's a little bit of an informed guess, but when we run ads, we will run ads where we control the keywords, being author name, search terms, categories, comparable titles, and then run automated, where Amazon takes control and says, well we're going to try it on these keywords because we think they fit. And that's artificial intelligence also learning what's working and tracking it. And so, you may be seeing that, and so I would definitely experiment with that. I would try it, maybe you run one or two ads to that audience, so bigger than that author, but you try to that audience.
[00:16:23] And I think the big thing to be aware of is also watching your reviews, your reader reviews after that, and if you see a switch where they're not as happy, then you might pull away from that audience. But give it a timeframe that you're experimenting with, and then just watch the reviews and if the reviews stay strong and maybe even improve, you've got a new audience like you said, and you're expanding there. But if you see that the fit that they are saying, well, this is not the reading experience I expected because I'm a big fan of blah, blah, blah, and she does this and that's the key there.
[00:16:57] So not only do you get the conversion, so you're getting in front of a new audience, are they actually buying based on your description, your cover, your title, the experience they see on a product page, but then once they read it, are you getting the reviews that say, oh yeah, we like this too, this is kind of in our circle of experiences that we enjoy.
[00:17:18] Matty: And how long is a good period of time to let that kind of experiment run before you make a decision about whether to continue it or not?
[00:17:24] Kathy: I think you got to give it at least two to three months, unless you see something kind of shocking there, which can happen. But monitoring, about two to three months, yeah. And especially if you decide you're going to run the ads where you're running yours and then you're letting Amazon do its auto- placements, because that does take longer to get data. It's slower learning, the confidence doesn't come as quickly as it does in those, it's going to spend what you say, the Amazon auto keywords kind of learn and slowly take their time to give you the data you need to really decide if it's working or not.
[00:18:37] Matty: Another way I was thinking that there is a commonality between branding and metadata possibly is, obviously keywords is a key part of metadata, and I'm wondering if people could benefit from doing a comparison between the brand that they're putting out there and the keywords that they're using for their books. So, for my Ann Kinnear series, I have psychic, ghost, haunted, that kind of thing. And so when I'm doing, let's say, Facebook ads and I go to the photo sites for backgrounds for the ads I'm putting in, haunted and ghost and the same things in the hopes that that will result in consistency. Are there other ways that people should be coordinating between branding and metadata, like keywords?
[00:19:27] Kathy: Yeah, and so one thing to think about is that Amazon itself is one of the biggest search engines in the world, and they are different than say, a Google or a social platform like Facebook, which is driven more by audiences and interests, and it has a different way of parsing the metadata. And this is why I don't really recommend just spread yourself thin and try to do this across a thousand platforms. Learn the platforms that you work with, both for selling your book and promoting your book. Learn them well because they are all different. So the keywords that you might use in Amazon, where people have intentional search for products, could be different than the interests that show up, say, in Facebook advertising.
[00:20:15] And another thing, for example, in Amazon, one of the biggest metadata tools to use is categories, right? And to really get into the smallest category or subcategory that you can, in order to be the biggest fish in that pond. But it has to be of course, an honest category, or else you can also get readers who are like, ugh I don't like this book. But that's not the same on a place like Facebook or in a place like Google search. Google has a ton of interesting tools around keywords that are free, that you can do all types of comparisons of how people are looking for books, which also changes over time. And I think it's just called Google Keywords, if you put that in, you'll get quite a few of those free tools. Facebook again, a different animal, takes a fair amount of sophistication to really understand how to view those audience and interests.
[00:21:11] But again, all of them are metadata, but they're not always parsing the metadata the same, using it in the same fashion. But I recommend having a big Google sheet or a spreadsheet. I like Google Sheets because they're kind of living, breathing things that you can keep adding to, and just make sure you're keeping track of your metadata, not only on all of the retailers, where you put in the keywords, but also on social. What are the hashtags you're using? What are the advertising audiences and interests you're targeting? In Google search, what are the search terms? And as voice comes into search, people are searching in more conversational ways than the robots do, so Google is adapting to a world where someone might say, while they're cooking dinner, show me a book that will keep me up tonight.
[00:22:01] Well, that's an interesting search, you know what I mean? Show me a book that will relax me. Like what, where's that keyword? So search is changing and again, these platforms handle that differently because of the way they have evolved and the way that they're interacting with the changing environment of discoverability.
[00:22:23] But I did want to say, from a retailer perspective, just even where you have your book, a place like Ingram is so different, if you're working to get your book into bookstores and libraries, the metadata is so different there than it is on a place like Amazon. And even like iBooks versus Kobo versus Barnes and Noble's Nook, there's Google Play. They all have different restrictions and opportunities for you. So even just looking at best practices and the user guides there, that you're really tapping into the best discoverability tools that they have to offer on those platforms.
[00:23:01] Matty: In Episode 85, I talked with Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur about optimizing your keywords and then after that, I had an inbetweenisode called MATTY OVERHAULS HER KEYWORDS. And in that, I was talking through how I was putting the advice that Dave had given into practice. But I also talked with Dale Roberts of Self-Publishing with Dale and also Joshua Tallent who has a podcast that's specifically about metadata, and talked through it with them, and we talked some about that idea that for example, I think in Google Play, you can put the keywords right in the description. It's permitted and encouraged to do that, whereas that would be frowned upon on other platforms, so people can check that out.
[00:23:46] I'm also seeing the metadata and branding playing out in the choice of advertising platforms. So I've tried both Amazon ads and Facebook ads. I think I spent like 2 cents on Amazon ads because it never picked it up. But I've had better luck, probably because I enjoy it more, I don't know this is another chicken and egg thing, I don't know if I got better results because I was enjoying it or enjoyed it because I was getting better results. But what I liked about the Facebook ads is that first of all, you didn't have to come up with comp authors to the same level of granularity that people recommend you do with Amazon ads. So Stephen King, you can target Stephen King and you're never going to run out of people on Facebook who like Stephen King, and you can play with the more branded aspects, like the visuals for your ad. Whereas I feel like with Amazon ads, it's almost all metadata. There's not really a lot of opportunity to show anything other than your book, the way you can with Facebook ads. Does that lend itself more to people who are more comfortable with the branding versus more comfortable with the metadata?
[00:24:53] Kathy: Yeah, I mean, I'll say one thing with Amazon, I think they are getting more creative with their A-plus content and the things that you can do on your page to make it a little bit more personal. We actually saw this for the first time a couple of months ago in the ads we were running for one of our distributing authors, and we put copy in but they didn't show it with the copy. And so there's a lot of people saying that in the future, you won't even have, I think it's like the length of a tweet that you could put in copy about the book. You won't even have that anymore because their testing was that it really didn't influence purchasing. So we've started to run ads without copy as well to kind of really see if that holds true for us.
[00:25:39] I think that successful Facebook ads that are finely tuned are really challenging as well. But you can get started with Facebook ads, even through promoting your posts and they've made it really easy for you to get started there. For me, what would guide it, but this is my business to help other authors, like what's going to drive more success? And some books, they do great on Facebook and other books do not.
[00:26:07] And Facebook is also showing ads on Instagram too. So, you have to also look at putting all your eggs in one basket metaverse now, is Facebook, what does the future look like? And if that dried up and I've seen companies not in the book space, but in a building I worked in and it basically shut down a company that was very successful, multi-million-dollar company was shut down because of a Facebook ads policy change.
[00:26:33] And so I'm a big believer in not putting all your eggs in one basket. Again, don't spread yourself too thin, so I sound like I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth here, but it is that sweet spot. Hedge your bets a little bit and make sure you learn more than one platform, but don't go too wide because it's a lot to learn to actually be able to get a return on your ad spend and do it well.
[00:27:00] Matty: Yeah, I would say for my indy author business, the thing that I'm most nervous about is I do have a lot of my eggs in the Facebook basket. In terms of advertising, I'm only running Facebook ads generally, and I'm also primarily building my community there, which is great. But I totally hear what you're saying, it does make me uncomfortable to think that if I step wrong in the Facebook world, then things could go badly.
[00:27:23] Kathy: Yeah. I mean, it's kind of the great irony of the modern world. These platforms give you access to huge audiences, but you then do grow dependent on them continuing to do what they're doing now, and that is not the nature of their business.
[00:27:41] Even Amazon, you look at Amazon shift to pretty much everything we as consumers need to do, I think they're getting into financial services, they bought Whole Foods. But they started out as just books.
[00:27:55] Someone asked me at the beginning of my journey as an entrepreneur, they were like, do you serve the reader or do you serve the author? And at the time I said, hmm, but I definitely served the author. And if you ask that same question to someone at Amazon, they serve the consumer, which would be the reader and not the author. So, even understanding the business models of some of these places we all work with every day is important and tracking strategically where they're moving so you can protect your own business.
[00:28:26] Matty: Yeah. Another commonality between the metadata and the branding idea is, I know you recommend thinking about these and perhaps acting on them actively, even before an author's first book comes out. So I think thinking through branding kind of makes sense. You want to know how you're going to position your book, what kind of a cover you want, but the idea of thinking through your metadata also in advance of your first book, can you talk about that a little bit?
[00:28:53] Kathy: Well, we do something called a positioning study at Bublish and we're actually building some technology around it because we find it to be so transformative for a work. And in a positioning study, I don't know that it would be, we do comp title research at that level, but our whole goal is to have the author decide upon their goals, which is really important.
[00:29:19] You really wouldn't start a business without some clear goals, right? And so the act of writing a book is a creative one. The act of publishing a book is a professional act. And so if you're going to publish that book, you need to really think about your book from an early stage around the goals you want to achieve. I mean, it's a heck of a lot of work to write a book and it's a heck of a lot of work to learn how to publish your first book, there's a lot and then distribute it and market it, the whole business side.
[00:29:50] So is it more about your first novel, I'm going to write a lot of these, I want to build an audience. So maybe instead of margins, your goal is just getting the book into lots of people's hands. And so you start with the novella, and you price it at a low price. If you're running a business and your book's supposed to help you build influence in your industry or generate leads, that's a very different set of goals.
[00:30:16] So understanding your goals is part of what we talk to authors about. And then saying, who's the audience I need to reach to achieve these goals? Now, when you're writing something like literary fiction, you think that's not how it works, but if you were in a traditional publishing house, I can assure you they're talking about the audience to reach their goals. And that is massive book sales, so if you're an independent author, you have the choice of setting those goals as something that might be different than a traditional publisher's goals.
[00:30:47] And they will say, that is a fabulous manuscript, I loved it, I have no idea who the audience is for this book. I'm sorry, we can't work with you, right? So as an independent, you have the ability to do the research then. Okay, so I'm writing a story and I think this audience will be delighted. Go learn about those people, and that is, get on a place like Amazon, look at the books, look at the cover design, look at the descriptions, look at the categories, it's all there. And then look at what comparable titles they're going to show up. People also bought this book and go look at them and make a list. Again, open a Google doc, make a list of all the things that that audience, and you're going to find all these categories.
[00:31:30] That's part of what we do, and it's a fascinating journey. So we'll say, well, what are the top three comparable titles for your book? Even that question, some people are like, I'm not sure. So they need to go find out. And if they know them, then we can find hundreds if not thousands of other comparable titles. Now we've got a foundation for really understanding the marketplace into which this book is going to be published, what are the categories, descriptions, all those things. Now we're audience centric.
[00:32:02] And that's really for people who have a goal of commercial success, right? Which never happens overnight, it used to in the good old days, but now it's tactics and strategies to get there. And knowing a lot about your audience and then learning, reading those books, reading the reviews, what is going to delight that reader? And is that the kind of book I want to write? Well, maybe I'm wrong, maybe I need to look at a different audience because I don't want to write that.
[00:32:30] I had somebody say that to me yesterday, I can't write those happy books. And I was like, well, you shouldn't write happy books. If you want more complexity, there's plenty of audiences for that, but who are they? Where are they? What are they reading now? What do they like and don't like about those top books that are going to sit on a virtual shelf with you? And it's all there for the research.
[00:32:51] I have a webinar on how to do your own positioning study, and I completely believe that if you really know what you want to achieve and you think about the audience that you want to reach, and then you learn this branding, how do I delight, what's my promise to this readership, and you study the marketplace, you have set yourself up for much more success.
[00:33:12] Because great writers get lost. More than 70,000 books are published every month, and you get a couple of seconds in an online setting to make an impression on the right reader when they happen to land on your content, either on a product page or social media. So the more you can understand how to grab their attention and turn it into some type of action, join my email list or read the Look Inside feature or buy my book, then you can start to build an audience and a brand, right? Because it's about the audience, brands are about the audience.
[00:33:48] Matty: So if someone is just starting out, I think this is probably the situation that a lot of our listeners are going to be in, they are writing or have written one book, and I'm going to use an exaggerated version of my own example to ask you to illustrate this. So I put out my first book and it has a woman who can sense spirits, but I'm not going for that audience, so I don't mention ghosts or spirits or anything like that in the keywords. I have a completely ghost-free cover. And then I start seeing that the people who like Sookie Stackhouse in fact buy my book or maybe commenting that it's similar, commenting in what ways it's comparable. And maybe I went into this thinking, this was going to be it, I'm writing this one book, it was a hobby, now I'm done. Now, I'm realizing that I have this potential audience of people who love ghost stories and I'm thinking I want to do this in a more serious, ongoing way. What would your advice be on both the branding and the metadata side for someone who finds himself in that situation?
[00:34:49] Kathy: Well, again, back to the goals. Does that make you happy to start writing that type of book? For some people it's about the connection. I mean, that's a wonderful part, when you start to connect with an audience and they're writing to you, or I was at a signing last night here in Charleston. It was like eight authors, five of them were from Bublish, and two of the authors said, people came here just because I was here and they wanted to tell me how much they loved my books. And I mean, that's really a great feeling. So, if that community, if that's part of your goal, but you know, if you are like, well, I know there's more money in this type of writing and I'm really driven to make money because I got to pay my bills. I mean, there's nothing ignoble about that, then you might make a different choice, but it is not a bad thing to have a happy audience.
[00:35:41] One of the authors there last night had the thought his first book was a standalone. And he said, everybody wants me to write the second book. and he's so delighted because the first two books, which he didn't do with Bublish, didn’t go anywhere. He sold very few copies and he's just loving that, and he loves the whole experience of this book. And so it comes back to your goals, but if there's a fit and you have a happy audience and you want to write more for them, yeah, that's great. And then you learn from the feedback you get, you can start to engage with them and ask them questions like, well, who else do you read? And how can I find out about what you love? And you do that with 10, 20 people in a Facebook group or however, on social media you're chatting with them, and you can even do it publicly, and people want to join the conversation. People love to be part of that creation story, oh, I found her first.
[00:36:38] And I would say what's transitioning here is that authors are kind of in the power seat now. And this happened, I think really with music first and you look what happened on YouTube. And people who built extraordinary careers by just playing a guitar on YouTube and people finding it and liking it and sharing it, and they listened. And you think of someone like Taylor Swift or Adele. They know what their audience loves, and they love to please their audience. And that's not for everybody, but it does create an incredible commercial success. And then around the metadata of that, that again is well, where's this audience hanging out?
[00:37:20] And so interesting with Adele, I happened to see a quick snippet of her, and someone said, you're not on TikTok. And she's like, you know, not my scene, I write a different kind of music. Now, will that change? I don't know, because I think she'd have a lot of fans on TikTok, but she kind of knew where her people were.
[00:37:37] And I think really, highly successful authors, they really know, they know where their audience hangs out, they hang out there too. It's about creating a community.
[00:37:46] And that can be from your first book while you're writing. There are people who've been very successful doing that, like sharing samples. We have people who use our marketing technology, the Book Bubble, you can actually share from your manuscript with a rough-cut Book Bubble, and people have had hundreds of thousands of engagements before they ever published, which is an interesting way to try out scenes, and even that book reveal, that book cover reveal, title reveals, engaging people.
[00:38:15] But it does depend, to me it comes back to, every author's journey is personal. But if they publish it, it's very entrepreneurial. And entrepreneurial journeys are rollercoaster rides and they're hard work, and so you kind of want to know what you believe in and what you want to do and where you want to go. And if you keep your eye on that, you won't get lost.
[00:38:42] Matty: Excellent. Well, Kathy, thank you so much. This was so interesting, so much great food for thought. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all you do online.
[00:38:51] Kathy: Yeah. So, Bublish.Com is the site, and we have a blog, we do a lot of education, you can check out our services. And we also have BublishBooks.com, which is an online bookstore that is exclusively dedicated to showcasing high quality independent authors. And I believe it might be the only one in the world that's like that. And if you have a book that you'd like us to consider for inclusion there, you can submit your title there, and we're loving being able to showcase the indies without all the big budgets around them.
[00:39:39] Matty: Showcasing and without big budget is like the holy grail of independent publishing.
[00:39:44] Kathy: Exactly, yeah.
[00:39:46] Matty: Well, thank you very much Kathy, this has been great.
[00:39:48] Kathy: Great to talk with you. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:06] Kathy: I'm doing great. How are you today, Matty?
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Kathy Meis is the founder and CEO of Bublish, a complete one-stop publishing solution for today's independent author. With more than 30 years of experience in the media and publishing industries, Kathy has served in a wide variety of editorial and management positions at some of the industry's leading companies. She's worked as a television reporter for CBS, was a founding editor of Forbes Media Critic and was a founding partner PubSmart, an author-centric publishing conference held in Charleston, South Carolina. And Kathy speaks and blogs regularly about book promotion, author branding, social marketing and discoverability, and she lives in Charleston.
[00:00:46] And today we are going to be talking about metadata is your brand. Kathy, I think I heard you first talk about this at a panel event we did for Sisters in Crime New England, if I remember correctly.
[00:00:59] And so normally, I lead this in with some topic-specific thing, but when I saw you were in Charleston, I'm sorry, I just have to talk about Charleston for a minute because Charleston is one of my favorite places ever.
[00:01:12] Kathy: So happy to hear it.
[00:01:13] Matty: For many years, my husband and I used to always go at the beginning of December, and in addition to the gracious people and the beautiful architecture, it has probably three of my top five favorite restaurants in the world.
[00:01:28] Kathy: We got food, yeah. If you got all the time in the world and you can burn calories as fast as you speak, you could probably never get through all the great restaurants in this town. So yes, we are very blessed in that department.
[00:01:43] Matty: Well, and I just thought of something, this actually is kind of a lead in, I can find a transition between any two topics.
[00:01:48] Kathy: I love it.
[00:01:49] Matty: My favorite restaurant in Charleston is FIG, Food is Good. And the last couple of times my husband and I went there, we were gushing to our server about how great the food was. And he or she said, do you want to come back to the kitchen? And so we said, of course. So they went back, and they let people know we would be coming back, and then they took us in just like right inside the door. And they said, "Guests in the house," or something like that. So everybody knew and everybody stopped what they were doing for a millisecond and waved and said hello. And then we were able to kind of stand there and watch what was going on.
[00:02:25] And it's kind of a cool branding example, because how many restaurants invite the customer to come back to the kitchen? They were obviously so pleased, they were so proud of what they were doing, that they wanted to share it. And it was obviously something that they had prepped for. It was kind of like the metadata of FIG.
[00:02:47] Kathy: Yeah, exactly. And it is an interesting segue because, when I say, metadata is your brand, people's eyes get big and they blink and they go, what the heck does that mean? And the reality is that in the old days, you walked into a physical space, a physical bookstore, and those wonderful, magical places still exist. And either you heard from your neighbor about a book or maybe you saw an ad in a physical magazine or a newspaper, or you just browsed the bookstore and you walked out with something, right? So it was a very human process, it was a very kind of limited ways that you got there, and you left.
[00:03:30] And now, it's very different. You're building a brand in a very competitive book marketplace where people discover books all over the place. And more books are purchased online than they are in physical bookstores. And I'm thrilled with the latest numbers, that the bookstores had a great November, are coming back, but sadly, more books are purchased online.
[00:03:53] And so if you don't understand the metadata piece, which is what informs that discovery process, which is millions of avenues into finding a book. People are searching, maybe they ask Siri for a book, maybe they put in words, maybe they see it on TikTok, which is huge right now, and all of those experiences in that little network of discovery to product page to purchase, is driven by metadata. And so that's why I say metadata is your brand now. And you really need to take it seriously and try to understand what it means.
[00:04:34] Matty: Well, when I was first thinking through, as I was listening to your talk at the conference, we were participating in about metadata is your brand, one of my first questions was which comes first, the metadata or the brand? And I thought that might be a good entree to describing exactly what you mean by metadata and even branding.
[00:04:51] Kathy: Yeah. So brand, we could go on for a long time, as you know, what that means, but to me at its simplest level, brand is the promise you make to your readers. So by definition, the word brand, you can't build a brand without understanding an audience that you're building a brand for. And so I think people need to think about what that might mean. So that means your readers. That your book is for a particular type of person who likes a particular type of reading experience or if it's non-fiction, is looking for a particular type of information or journey, if it's inspirational. So, brands are built for audiences, so understanding your audience is really key.
[00:05:33] And when we started Bublish, we really thought a lot about the marketing piece, and what we discovered is, that the real marketing begins in the manuscript. And if the author is thinking about what they want to achieve, the reading experience, who they can delight and they start to think about their readership really early in their publishing journey, it makes all the difference. Because then that reader gets that book and they're delighted by it, and they know how to get that book in front of them because maybe they know the other titles that that type of reader is reading.
[00:06:09] And so, I kind of talk about it as a gift. If you and I just met, which we actually don't know each other that well, and I wanted to delight you with a holiday gift this year, then I would learn about you. I'd try to make that gift great for you and learn what you like, where you hang out, what restaurant, I might get you a gift card to FIG, now that I know, a trip to Charleston.
[00:06:32] So, it's not dissimilar as an author to think about marketing in a more human way like that. Audiences are made of human beings, and so the more you know about what delights that audience or what that audience is craving and where they're going to fulfill that desire for that reading experience or information, the more you'll write something that is like a gift.
[00:06:57] And so brand, that's what really brand is to me. And the irony is that you now have to translate this very human thing into robotville, quite honestly. And we are talking about algorithms and robots basically showing you things in an online world oftentimes, because some other thing that you viewed, either in a retail environment or through search or through an advertisement or through a social post. There are literally hundreds of ways that people find a book now.
[00:07:32] And different formats, so much to understand, and that is all driven by metadata. So translating that promise that you're making to readers and really understanding them and writing something that's going to delight them, translating that into then things like title, subtitle, description of the book, pricing, length of the book, reviews, editorial reviews, reader reviews, even the social posts have metadata, hashtags, blog post, search engine optimization.
[00:08:05] It's a bit daunting, but it has become ever more important. Because even if you're walking into the bookstore to buy it, and it's a physical bookstore in your town, you've still probably discovered or saw something about that book online.
[00:08:22] Matty: One of the things that I thought was really interesting about the talk you gave is the idea that even a book cover is metadata. I had never thought of a book cover as metadata before.
[00:08:33] Kathy: Yes. And it's actually one of the most important pieces of metadata, and it increases sales by hundreds of percentage points. And so, yeah, making sure that your cover's there, and one of the reasons is too that many of the retailers require you, for example, if you were writing a series and you have a title and you have a subtitle and you have a series title, even the word "a novel" is a subtitle that is highly used to indicate something with a vague name isn't non-fiction, it's a novel. So that tells us as consumers a lot in a nanosecond, and it also tells all the bots running these whole massive systems that this is a novel, okay, that goes here, that goes on this shelf.
[00:09:19] But the thing that is interesting about covers is, people just think, oh, well, they should look really attractive, and then if a more sophisticated author might say, they should look really attractive, but kind of like this, because I know the other books in my category look like this. But the title, the subtitle and the series title are supposed to be on that cover in order for you to put those into the metadata fields.
[00:09:44] And so a lot of independent authors at least, make the mistake of forgetting to label that first book in a series because they start that on book two or book three and that little piece of metadata, maybe it's not even in the field when you uploaded it, that links all those books. Now, when a consumer is looking for your book and maybe they heard, yeah, I can't remember the name of the book, but the series is blah, blah, blah, boom, they put that in and all the books come up. And so they know there's 3 books or 5 books or 12 books in that series, and they can purchase them all at once if they want.
[00:10:20] It's a huge difference in the discoverability of that series, because you may come into book 10 and you're like, oh, I can't find book 1, and people are extremely, they’re just, the focus issues are really hard online. You might have them for 3 to 5 seconds, and so if they can't find something, then they're gone. And if you just had a series title, they would have seen them all at once. And so that, that's the power of metadata.
[00:10:48] Matty: For both of my first in series books, I didn't realize when I was writing them that they were first in series. So a benefit of being an indy author is I was able to go back and add those, book 1. And it is a particular annoyance to me when I'm reading a series and it's very difficult to find the order in which the books were put out, so, that's one piece of metadata that's important to me as a reader.
[00:11:12] One of the reasons I thought this was such an intriguing topic is the branding, which seems so personal, and metadata, which seems so computerized, seemed kind of diametrically opposed. But one thing I'm realizing based on what you're saying is, there's an extent to which both of them are controllable, and then there's a point at which they're no longer controllable. So I'm specifically thinking of Also Boughts. The Also Boughts are not something that you can directly control as an author. You can influence it by not encouraging all your family and friends who read a lot of cookbooks to buy your thriller, because then I believe that the effect is that at the bottom of your thriller, it says Also Bought Julia Child's Greatest Hits or whatever.
[00:11:52] So, do you have any thoughts about the controllability of metadata, the things that aren't a field that you're filling out yourself in a publishing platform?
[00:12:02] Kathy: Yeah. Well, precisely to the scenario that you said, you can advertise to the specific comparable titles that you want to be in your Also Boughts and if you're savvy and they're a good fit and you can compel people to buy your book, and they're also buying this comparable title where you're paying, and I'm talking at this point in the Amazon environment, that you pay to get those first purchases and then you get the organic lift by that showing up, because the people who bought your book are buying that, and the people you show up in theirs, and you've paid for that initial influence, like you say. It's not complete control but there are ways to strongly influence that, but you have to be pretty laser-focused on understanding your comparable titles.
[00:12:53] And again, comparable titles in an advertising environment become very significant metadata that impacts your brand. So part of your brand is to say, well, if you like this reading experience, you might like this. That's a very popular way in a very short amount of time to say to a new reader who doesn't recognize your name, if you enjoy so-and-so, you might enjoy this series. And it's become increasingly popular because we are so attention-deficit shoppers right now.
[00:13:25] And so, if you can actually advertise to that person's and you pay for showing up on their product page as an alternative reading experience that the same reader might like, and you're really good at that, that metadata is what puts your book there, because you were bidding on that keyword, which is the author's name, maybe the title, also the categories they're in, and then after a while you get that organic lift. But it is more and more of a pay-to-play environment to try to not control but strongly influence what the bots show you.
[00:14:01] Matty: The way that I can imagine that scenario and branding coming together is that I've just recently started noticing on Amazon, sponsored books on my pages. So if I go to Amazon and I search for "Matty Dalrymple books," then I'm starting to get more frequently sponsored ads at the top of those pages. And so I don't know if that's because that author targeted me or because Amazon is guessing that it's a good match.
[00:14:28] When I first wrote the first Ann Kinnear suspense novels, it's a series about a woman who can sense spirits, so it's supernatural suspense, but it's not heavily supernatural the way, let's say Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse books are supernatural. So I was very hesitant to market to that audience because I was afraid that my books wouldn't pay back that promise. To me, the subtlety of the supernatural part was a plus, but I didn't want to market it to people who are looking for a lot of woo woo stuff.
[00:15:01] But I'm seeing more and more that the books that are showing up as sponsored on my pages are of that genre. And so I started feeling more comfortable about, well, maybe I can venture into that brand a little bit more, which is going to open up a whole other pool of readers for me. Is that smart? Or am I being misled by the fact that some arbitrary person put their ad on my page?
[00:15:26] Kathy: Well, no, I think it's always worth experimentation when it's a little more gray, the fit of your brand next to that brand, and I think that's the nice thing about advertising is, you can do that. I think what you're probably seeing, and it's a little bit of an informed guess, but when we run ads, we will run ads where we control the keywords, being author name, search terms, categories, comparable titles, and then run automated, where Amazon takes control and says, well we're going to try it on these keywords because we think they fit. And that's artificial intelligence also learning what's working and tracking it. And so, you may be seeing that, and so I would definitely experiment with that. I would try it, maybe you run one or two ads to that audience, so bigger than that author, but you try to that audience.
[00:16:23] And I think the big thing to be aware of is also watching your reviews, your reader reviews after that, and if you see a switch where they're not as happy, then you might pull away from that audience. But give it a timeframe that you're experimenting with, and then just watch the reviews and if the reviews stay strong and maybe even improve, you've got a new audience like you said, and you're expanding there. But if you see that the fit that they are saying, well, this is not the reading experience I expected because I'm a big fan of blah, blah, blah, and she does this and that's the key there.
[00:16:57] So not only do you get the conversion, so you're getting in front of a new audience, are they actually buying based on your description, your cover, your title, the experience they see on a product page, but then once they read it, are you getting the reviews that say, oh yeah, we like this too, this is kind of in our circle of experiences that we enjoy.
[00:17:18] Matty: And how long is a good period of time to let that kind of experiment run before you make a decision about whether to continue it or not?
[00:17:24] Kathy: I think you got to give it at least two to three months, unless you see something kind of shocking there, which can happen. But monitoring, about two to three months, yeah. And especially if you decide you're going to run the ads where you're running yours and then you're letting Amazon do its auto- placements, because that does take longer to get data. It's slower learning, the confidence doesn't come as quickly as it does in those, it's going to spend what you say, the Amazon auto keywords kind of learn and slowly take their time to give you the data you need to really decide if it's working or not.
[00:18:37] Matty: Another way I was thinking that there is a commonality between branding and metadata possibly is, obviously keywords is a key part of metadata, and I'm wondering if people could benefit from doing a comparison between the brand that they're putting out there and the keywords that they're using for their books. So, for my Ann Kinnear series, I have psychic, ghost, haunted, that kind of thing. And so when I'm doing, let's say, Facebook ads and I go to the photo sites for backgrounds for the ads I'm putting in, haunted and ghost and the same things in the hopes that that will result in consistency. Are there other ways that people should be coordinating between branding and metadata, like keywords?
[00:19:27] Kathy: Yeah, and so one thing to think about is that Amazon itself is one of the biggest search engines in the world, and they are different than say, a Google or a social platform like Facebook, which is driven more by audiences and interests, and it has a different way of parsing the metadata. And this is why I don't really recommend just spread yourself thin and try to do this across a thousand platforms. Learn the platforms that you work with, both for selling your book and promoting your book. Learn them well because they are all different. So the keywords that you might use in Amazon, where people have intentional search for products, could be different than the interests that show up, say, in Facebook advertising.
[00:20:15] And another thing, for example, in Amazon, one of the biggest metadata tools to use is categories, right? And to really get into the smallest category or subcategory that you can, in order to be the biggest fish in that pond. But it has to be of course, an honest category, or else you can also get readers who are like, ugh I don't like this book. But that's not the same on a place like Facebook or in a place like Google search. Google has a ton of interesting tools around keywords that are free, that you can do all types of comparisons of how people are looking for books, which also changes over time. And I think it's just called Google Keywords, if you put that in, you'll get quite a few of those free tools. Facebook again, a different animal, takes a fair amount of sophistication to really understand how to view those audience and interests.
[00:21:11] But again, all of them are metadata, but they're not always parsing the metadata the same, using it in the same fashion. But I recommend having a big Google sheet or a spreadsheet. I like Google Sheets because they're kind of living, breathing things that you can keep adding to, and just make sure you're keeping track of your metadata, not only on all of the retailers, where you put in the keywords, but also on social. What are the hashtags you're using? What are the advertising audiences and interests you're targeting? In Google search, what are the search terms? And as voice comes into search, people are searching in more conversational ways than the robots do, so Google is adapting to a world where someone might say, while they're cooking dinner, show me a book that will keep me up tonight.
[00:22:01] Well, that's an interesting search, you know what I mean? Show me a book that will relax me. Like what, where's that keyword? So search is changing and again, these platforms handle that differently because of the way they have evolved and the way that they're interacting with the changing environment of discoverability.
[00:22:23] But I did want to say, from a retailer perspective, just even where you have your book, a place like Ingram is so different, if you're working to get your book into bookstores and libraries, the metadata is so different there than it is on a place like Amazon. And even like iBooks versus Kobo versus Barnes and Noble's Nook, there's Google Play. They all have different restrictions and opportunities for you. So even just looking at best practices and the user guides there, that you're really tapping into the best discoverability tools that they have to offer on those platforms.
[00:23:01] Matty: In Episode 85, I talked with Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur about optimizing your keywords and then after that, I had an inbetweenisode called MATTY OVERHAULS HER KEYWORDS. And in that, I was talking through how I was putting the advice that Dave had given into practice. But I also talked with Dale Roberts of Self-Publishing with Dale and also Joshua Tallent who has a podcast that's specifically about metadata, and talked through it with them, and we talked some about that idea that for example, I think in Google Play, you can put the keywords right in the description. It's permitted and encouraged to do that, whereas that would be frowned upon on other platforms, so people can check that out.
[00:23:46] I'm also seeing the metadata and branding playing out in the choice of advertising platforms. So I've tried both Amazon ads and Facebook ads. I think I spent like 2 cents on Amazon ads because it never picked it up. But I've had better luck, probably because I enjoy it more, I don't know this is another chicken and egg thing, I don't know if I got better results because I was enjoying it or enjoyed it because I was getting better results. But what I liked about the Facebook ads is that first of all, you didn't have to come up with comp authors to the same level of granularity that people recommend you do with Amazon ads. So Stephen King, you can target Stephen King and you're never going to run out of people on Facebook who like Stephen King, and you can play with the more branded aspects, like the visuals for your ad. Whereas I feel like with Amazon ads, it's almost all metadata. There's not really a lot of opportunity to show anything other than your book, the way you can with Facebook ads. Does that lend itself more to people who are more comfortable with the branding versus more comfortable with the metadata?
[00:24:53] Kathy: Yeah, I mean, I'll say one thing with Amazon, I think they are getting more creative with their A-plus content and the things that you can do on your page to make it a little bit more personal. We actually saw this for the first time a couple of months ago in the ads we were running for one of our distributing authors, and we put copy in but they didn't show it with the copy. And so there's a lot of people saying that in the future, you won't even have, I think it's like the length of a tweet that you could put in copy about the book. You won't even have that anymore because their testing was that it really didn't influence purchasing. So we've started to run ads without copy as well to kind of really see if that holds true for us.
[00:25:39] I think that successful Facebook ads that are finely tuned are really challenging as well. But you can get started with Facebook ads, even through promoting your posts and they've made it really easy for you to get started there. For me, what would guide it, but this is my business to help other authors, like what's going to drive more success? And some books, they do great on Facebook and other books do not.
[00:26:07] And Facebook is also showing ads on Instagram too. So, you have to also look at putting all your eggs in one basket metaverse now, is Facebook, what does the future look like? And if that dried up and I've seen companies not in the book space, but in a building I worked in and it basically shut down a company that was very successful, multi-million-dollar company was shut down because of a Facebook ads policy change.
[00:26:33] And so I'm a big believer in not putting all your eggs in one basket. Again, don't spread yourself too thin, so I sound like I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth here, but it is that sweet spot. Hedge your bets a little bit and make sure you learn more than one platform, but don't go too wide because it's a lot to learn to actually be able to get a return on your ad spend and do it well.
[00:27:00] Matty: Yeah, I would say for my indy author business, the thing that I'm most nervous about is I do have a lot of my eggs in the Facebook basket. In terms of advertising, I'm only running Facebook ads generally, and I'm also primarily building my community there, which is great. But I totally hear what you're saying, it does make me uncomfortable to think that if I step wrong in the Facebook world, then things could go badly.
[00:27:23] Kathy: Yeah. I mean, it's kind of the great irony of the modern world. These platforms give you access to huge audiences, but you then do grow dependent on them continuing to do what they're doing now, and that is not the nature of their business.
[00:27:41] Even Amazon, you look at Amazon shift to pretty much everything we as consumers need to do, I think they're getting into financial services, they bought Whole Foods. But they started out as just books.
[00:27:55] Someone asked me at the beginning of my journey as an entrepreneur, they were like, do you serve the reader or do you serve the author? And at the time I said, hmm, but I definitely served the author. And if you ask that same question to someone at Amazon, they serve the consumer, which would be the reader and not the author. So, even understanding the business models of some of these places we all work with every day is important and tracking strategically where they're moving so you can protect your own business.
[00:28:26] Matty: Yeah. Another commonality between the metadata and the branding idea is, I know you recommend thinking about these and perhaps acting on them actively, even before an author's first book comes out. So I think thinking through branding kind of makes sense. You want to know how you're going to position your book, what kind of a cover you want, but the idea of thinking through your metadata also in advance of your first book, can you talk about that a little bit?
[00:28:53] Kathy: Well, we do something called a positioning study at Bublish and we're actually building some technology around it because we find it to be so transformative for a work. And in a positioning study, I don't know that it would be, we do comp title research at that level, but our whole goal is to have the author decide upon their goals, which is really important.
[00:29:19] You really wouldn't start a business without some clear goals, right? And so the act of writing a book is a creative one. The act of publishing a book is a professional act. And so if you're going to publish that book, you need to really think about your book from an early stage around the goals you want to achieve. I mean, it's a heck of a lot of work to write a book and it's a heck of a lot of work to learn how to publish your first book, there's a lot and then distribute it and market it, the whole business side.
[00:29:50] So is it more about your first novel, I'm going to write a lot of these, I want to build an audience. So maybe instead of margins, your goal is just getting the book into lots of people's hands. And so you start with the novella, and you price it at a low price. If you're running a business and your book's supposed to help you build influence in your industry or generate leads, that's a very different set of goals.
[00:30:16] So understanding your goals is part of what we talk to authors about. And then saying, who's the audience I need to reach to achieve these goals? Now, when you're writing something like literary fiction, you think that's not how it works, but if you were in a traditional publishing house, I can assure you they're talking about the audience to reach their goals. And that is massive book sales, so if you're an independent author, you have the choice of setting those goals as something that might be different than a traditional publisher's goals.
[00:30:47] And they will say, that is a fabulous manuscript, I loved it, I have no idea who the audience is for this book. I'm sorry, we can't work with you, right? So as an independent, you have the ability to do the research then. Okay, so I'm writing a story and I think this audience will be delighted. Go learn about those people, and that is, get on a place like Amazon, look at the books, look at the cover design, look at the descriptions, look at the categories, it's all there. And then look at what comparable titles they're going to show up. People also bought this book and go look at them and make a list. Again, open a Google doc, make a list of all the things that that audience, and you're going to find all these categories.
[00:31:30] That's part of what we do, and it's a fascinating journey. So we'll say, well, what are the top three comparable titles for your book? Even that question, some people are like, I'm not sure. So they need to go find out. And if they know them, then we can find hundreds if not thousands of other comparable titles. Now we've got a foundation for really understanding the marketplace into which this book is going to be published, what are the categories, descriptions, all those things. Now we're audience centric.
[00:32:02] And that's really for people who have a goal of commercial success, right? Which never happens overnight, it used to in the good old days, but now it's tactics and strategies to get there. And knowing a lot about your audience and then learning, reading those books, reading the reviews, what is going to delight that reader? And is that the kind of book I want to write? Well, maybe I'm wrong, maybe I need to look at a different audience because I don't want to write that.
[00:32:30] I had somebody say that to me yesterday, I can't write those happy books. And I was like, well, you shouldn't write happy books. If you want more complexity, there's plenty of audiences for that, but who are they? Where are they? What are they reading now? What do they like and don't like about those top books that are going to sit on a virtual shelf with you? And it's all there for the research.
[00:32:51] I have a webinar on how to do your own positioning study, and I completely believe that if you really know what you want to achieve and you think about the audience that you want to reach, and then you learn this branding, how do I delight, what's my promise to this readership, and you study the marketplace, you have set yourself up for much more success.
[00:33:12] Because great writers get lost. More than 70,000 books are published every month, and you get a couple of seconds in an online setting to make an impression on the right reader when they happen to land on your content, either on a product page or social media. So the more you can understand how to grab their attention and turn it into some type of action, join my email list or read the Look Inside feature or buy my book, then you can start to build an audience and a brand, right? Because it's about the audience, brands are about the audience.
[00:33:48] Matty: So if someone is just starting out, I think this is probably the situation that a lot of our listeners are going to be in, they are writing or have written one book, and I'm going to use an exaggerated version of my own example to ask you to illustrate this. So I put out my first book and it has a woman who can sense spirits, but I'm not going for that audience, so I don't mention ghosts or spirits or anything like that in the keywords. I have a completely ghost-free cover. And then I start seeing that the people who like Sookie Stackhouse in fact buy my book or maybe commenting that it's similar, commenting in what ways it's comparable. And maybe I went into this thinking, this was going to be it, I'm writing this one book, it was a hobby, now I'm done. Now, I'm realizing that I have this potential audience of people who love ghost stories and I'm thinking I want to do this in a more serious, ongoing way. What would your advice be on both the branding and the metadata side for someone who finds himself in that situation?
[00:34:49] Kathy: Well, again, back to the goals. Does that make you happy to start writing that type of book? For some people it's about the connection. I mean, that's a wonderful part, when you start to connect with an audience and they're writing to you, or I was at a signing last night here in Charleston. It was like eight authors, five of them were from Bublish, and two of the authors said, people came here just because I was here and they wanted to tell me how much they loved my books. And I mean, that's really a great feeling. So, if that community, if that's part of your goal, but you know, if you are like, well, I know there's more money in this type of writing and I'm really driven to make money because I got to pay my bills. I mean, there's nothing ignoble about that, then you might make a different choice, but it is not a bad thing to have a happy audience.
[00:35:41] One of the authors there last night had the thought his first book was a standalone. And he said, everybody wants me to write the second book. and he's so delighted because the first two books, which he didn't do with Bublish, didn’t go anywhere. He sold very few copies and he's just loving that, and he loves the whole experience of this book. And so it comes back to your goals, but if there's a fit and you have a happy audience and you want to write more for them, yeah, that's great. And then you learn from the feedback you get, you can start to engage with them and ask them questions like, well, who else do you read? And how can I find out about what you love? And you do that with 10, 20 people in a Facebook group or however, on social media you're chatting with them, and you can even do it publicly, and people want to join the conversation. People love to be part of that creation story, oh, I found her first.
[00:36:38] And I would say what's transitioning here is that authors are kind of in the power seat now. And this happened, I think really with music first and you look what happened on YouTube. And people who built extraordinary careers by just playing a guitar on YouTube and people finding it and liking it and sharing it, and they listened. And you think of someone like Taylor Swift or Adele. They know what their audience loves, and they love to please their audience. And that's not for everybody, but it does create an incredible commercial success. And then around the metadata of that, that again is well, where's this audience hanging out?
[00:37:20] And so interesting with Adele, I happened to see a quick snippet of her, and someone said, you're not on TikTok. And she's like, you know, not my scene, I write a different kind of music. Now, will that change? I don't know, because I think she'd have a lot of fans on TikTok, but she kind of knew where her people were.
[00:37:37] And I think really, highly successful authors, they really know, they know where their audience hangs out, they hang out there too. It's about creating a community.
[00:37:46] And that can be from your first book while you're writing. There are people who've been very successful doing that, like sharing samples. We have people who use our marketing technology, the Book Bubble, you can actually share from your manuscript with a rough-cut Book Bubble, and people have had hundreds of thousands of engagements before they ever published, which is an interesting way to try out scenes, and even that book reveal, that book cover reveal, title reveals, engaging people.
[00:38:15] But it does depend, to me it comes back to, every author's journey is personal. But if they publish it, it's very entrepreneurial. And entrepreneurial journeys are rollercoaster rides and they're hard work, and so you kind of want to know what you believe in and what you want to do and where you want to go. And if you keep your eye on that, you won't get lost.
[00:38:42] Matty: Excellent. Well, Kathy, thank you so much. This was so interesting, so much great food for thought. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all you do online.
[00:38:51] Kathy: Yeah. So, Bublish.Com is the site, and we have a blog, we do a lot of education, you can check out our services. And we also have BublishBooks.com, which is an online bookstore that is exclusively dedicated to showcasing high quality independent authors. And I believe it might be the only one in the world that's like that. And if you have a book that you'd like us to consider for inclusion there, you can submit your title there, and we're loving being able to showcase the indies without all the big budgets around them.
[00:39:39] Matty: Showcasing and without big budget is like the holy grail of independent publishing.
[00:39:44] Kathy: Exactly, yeah.
[00:39:46] Matty: Well, thank you very much Kathy, this has been great.
[00:39:48] Kathy: Great to talk with you. Thank you for having me.
Links
Kathy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathymeis/
Bublish on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bublishme/
Bublish on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BublishMe
Bublish on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bublishme/
https://selfpublishingadvice.org/authors-metadata-is-your-brand-get-yours-in-shape-kathy-meis/
https://podcastaddict.com/episode/29491747
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu0hmvqeygY
Bublish on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bublishme/
Bublish on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BublishMe
Bublish on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bublishme/
https://selfpublishingadvice.org/authors-metadata-is-your-brand-get-yours-in-shape-kathy-meis/
https://podcastaddict.com/episode/29491747
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu0hmvqeygY
For links to Matty's upcoming and recent events, click here.
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