Walking Together Blog #3: Book Metadata: a Dash of Frustration and Resolution
Note: This issue was resolved on Oct 24/24: See addition at the bottom of the note.
One responsibility of a self-publishing author is the selection of metadata that describe your book. The metadata include: a) primary audience; b) genre; c) keywords that describe your book; and d) categories that allow the book to be classified. The metadata are important because they help readers find your book. If your book can’t be discovered, it won’t be found by potentially interested readers.
I asked the company guiding me through my self-publishing process for their opinion of the descriptive metadata options. I was gently reminded that as the expert on my book, the responsibility to identify these metadata descriptions falls on the shoulders of the author - me. This is a principle I agree with. But, I found that creating the metadata is harder than it sounds.
My primary audience is adults who are working with, or plan to work with, or people interested in, remote First Nations people.
The primary book genre I selected is “business, with a focus on leadership and Indigenous relations”.
Keywords are important because they are picked up by search engines. I learned that most book retailers, like Amazon, limit the number of keywords to seven or less and limit each keyword to 25 characters or less. Keywords I selected are: Indigenous engagement, First Nations engagement, Indigenous lessons, business practices, business leadership, business education, and social sciences.
Finally, I need to select three book categories that help classify my book and group it with similar published books. There is an industry-approved list of book categories called the BISAC Subject Heading list. The BISAC list is geared towards bookstores and it is mainly used by the Northern American book trade and online sellers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BISAC_Subject_Headings). As best I can determine, there are a few thousand BISAC categories. Now, here is the issue. I am not an expert on the BISAC categories. I cannot find a set of standards describing each category. When I requested help from the company guiding me, I was again reminded it is my responsibility. To help address my ignorance of BISAC, I compared my soon-to-be-published book with other similar published books. The BISAC categories I selected to describe my book are: a) 499: BUS071000; Business and Economics / Leadership; b) 466: BUS059000: Business and Economics / Skills; and c) 3527: SOC062000: Social Science / Indigenous Studies.
Done! Not exactly. The company I work with uses a very helpful template to help select the appropriate BISAC categories based on my selected keywords. Unfortunately, one of the BISAC categories I selected is not included in the curated list used by the company guiding me. So, for the past two weeks, I have been working with the company to add my third BISAC category to the company curated list, following a process described in their own author training video webinar. As of writing this note (Oct 23/24), the third category I selected has not been added to my list of three and I have not received an explanation why this is taking so long. This is very frustrating and movement of the book into distribution has ground to a halt because I will not mark the task as complete – because it is not.
I am learning that becoming a self-published author is much more complicated than writing of a manuscript.
Note: I just learned (Oct 24/24) from my book’s project manager that not all retailers use all the standard BISAC book codes. That means, a company that guides an indie author must make decisions about which BISAC codes they support. For example, Amazon may not use the same book categories as IngramSpark. That insight is important when an indie author compares their book with a published book to identify relevant BISAC book categories. Categories you select as an author may not be available in a curated list provided by the company guiding you. There are work arounds, but that process is likely unique to each company. Bottomline, if you are working with a company that assists authors to self-publish a book, ask questions about BISAC codes supported by the company and how that company addresses book categories for retailers that support a narrower list of categories.
