Metadata is your best friend and marketing partner, so craft it carefully! When you’re ready to upload your book for publication you’ll need to provide a few types of metadata in your Bowker ISBN record and for the various print and eBook distributors.
- Book Description (short and long)
- Author Bio (short and long)
- Keywords and Phrases
- Categories
- Audience
I also have a vendor-specific summary for you and a cheat-sheet you can use as a master document for your book's metadata.
Get Crafty and Become a Metadata Master
Most authors don’t create metadata in advance, instead, making it up as they go along, uploading somewhat different data for Bowker and each distributor. This is a mistake. You want to carefully craft your metadata and use it across distributors for maximum searchability. In other words, Google and other search engines can find you better when you provide consistent data. (We also wrote about metadata previously here and here.)
Your mission is to create a single document with all the various metadata you’ll use, honing it to be as descriptive and attractive to readers as possible. This metadata is your best book marketing tool, so get help if you need it. Copywriting is not something most people—even writers!—are good at. You may want to enlist the aid of friends who are avid readers or hire a professional.
Here, I’ve provided specific metadata word and character counts for the usual book systems and distribution channels: Bowker, IngramSpark, Amazon CreateSpace and KDP, and Smashwords. Other vendors have similar requirements.
As an additional bonus, at the bottom of this post, I’ve included a cheat sheet doc you can download to work on your metadata.
Book Descriptions
Short Book Description
Create two short book descriptions… really attention-grabbing copy that sells your book.
- 350 characters maximum for Bowker and IngramSpark
- 400 characters maximum for Smashwords
Long Book Description
You can create one long book description of 4000 characters max for IngramSpark, Amazon CreateSpace and KDP, and Smashwords. However, a 1200 character description fits better in all
Author Bio
Create author bios in these sizes:
- 350 characters for your Bowker ISBN record
- 1200 characters is an optional, nice compact longer description
- 2500 characters is the max for Bowker, Smashwords, Amazon CreateSpace and KDP
- 4000 characters is the max for IngramSpark (about 760 words)
Keywords and Phrases
Use keywords and key phrases that readers are likely to enter in order to find your book, separated by commas. Before you decide, enter your keywords and phrases to find books like yours on Amazon or Smashwords. If those terms do not return books that are like yours, try again. Enter the most important keywords and phrases first. Different distributors allow different numbers of keywords and phrases. Make a list of 10, in descending importance. (Note: these same top keywords and phrases should appear in your book descriptions wherever possible.)
Be as specific as possible, because there's too much competition for the very popular keywords. Bestselling authors will dominate. You'll have a better chance to get noticed if you use keywords that really drill down into your subject.
BISAC Subject Heading Codes and Amazon Categories
A set of industry-approved BISAC codes helps resellers categorize your book correctly into topics and subtopics so they know what section of their store to place (or list) your book.
Create a list of the top three subject headings along with their secondary and tertiary topics. If you can, choose three different main (or secondary) subject headings, instead of one main subject heading three times, so your book will show up in three different sections of a virtual store. Sometimes BISAC Codes and Amazon Categories differ slightly, as you’ll see in the following example:
BISAC Codes
IngramSpark needs these. You get three.
- BIO026000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
- BUS109000 BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Women in Business
- OCC019000 BODY, MIND & SPIRIT / Inspiration & Personal Growth
Amazon CreateSpace Categories
Amazon CreateSpace allows you to specify only one BISAC code.
- BUSINESS & MONEY > Women in Business
Amazon KDP
Amazon KDP allows you to specify two categories for your Kindle book. These often do not match the BISAC codes.
- BUSINESS & MONEY > Women in Business
- BIOGRAPHIES & MEMOIRS > Women
There are a couple of good tools for finding competitive categories and keywords for your book on the Kindle store. One is KindleSpy, a browser plugin (Mac and Windows) and the other is KindleSamurai (for Windows only).
Smashwords
Smashwords allows you to specify two categories. These mostly match the BISAC codes.
- BIOGRAPHY > Autobiographies & Memoirs
- BUSINESS & ECONOMICS > Women in Business
Audience
Finally, you may be asked to determine your audience type and/or appropriate age range, such as “trade” (most books), or “young adult,” or “scholarly.” If your book is not age-specific (such as children’s or erotica), then do not specify a specific age range.
Vendor-Specific Summary
IngramSpark
- Short Book Description - 350characters max
- Full Book Description - 200- 4000 characters
- Keywords - not a limit but 7 max is a good rule
- About the Author - 4000 character max
- BISAC Codes - 3
- Table of Contents (optional) - 4000 character max
- Review Quotes - 4000 character max
- Audience - probably Trade/General Adult
Amazon CreateSpace
- Book Description: 4000 character max
- Category: Choose 1 main and 1 subcategory
- Author Bio: 2500 character (about 475 words)
- Search Keywords: 5 keywords or phrases, separated by commas
Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing
- Book Description: 4000 character max
- Kindle Categories: Choose 2
- Author Bio: 2500 characters (about 475 words)
- Search Keywords: up to 7 keywords or phrases, separated by commas
- Publisher: your publishing house/imprint name (not Amazon)
For details see their metadata guidelines
Smashwords
- Book Description: 4000 character max
- Short Description: 400 character max
- Primary Category: category and up to 2 levels of subcategories
- Secondary category: category and up to 2 levels of subcategories
- Author Bio: 2500 character (about 475 words)
- Search Keywords (tags): up to 10 keywords or phrases, separated by commas
- Publisher: your publishing house/imprint name (not Amazon)
The Cheat-Sheet
I use this cheat-sheet to develop good metadata with my author clients. (Sometimes we use a copywriting pro to help choose categories and use them in book titles and subtitles, descriptions, and author bios for better search results, but I'll bet you can do it yourself with some help with your friends!) Download it HERE and fill in the information for your book.
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4 thoughts on “Mastering Metadata: the Key to Marketing Your Books”
This is very insightful!
Would it be too much to ask you to ponder a concept for aiding the self-publishing indies, namely using LEGAL EBOOK SHARING communities as the springboard for launching a new idea, kick-around a concept or just motivate with excetps from an up-and-coming book.
I have recently joined:
http://shelfmybooks.com/
And as a budgeoning publisher, this is indeed a new field to discover, as the growing base readers already owsn MANY ebooks and is trying to find ways of further discovering NEW authors, much like WATTPAD.com is doing.
Anyway, I will appreaciate your comments or viewpoint on that subject.
Cheers!
I am new to Indie publishing and finding the learning curve to be at once inspiring and overwhelming! This is by far the BEST article on metadata that I have come across and I just want to express my appreciation for its thoughtfulness and thoroughness!
Thank you so much for taking the time to create this post, Carla!
Great tips and easy to understand! I’m making my first foray into self-pubbing and this was extremely useful!
Hi Nancy, Thank you for taking the time to share your comment. That is what we strive for and it is gratifying to know we’re succeeding. We are fortunate to have such great experts as Carla on the BW Team!