A major platform chief observes that smart use of metadata can boost sales and discovery, especially with series
The longstanding Book Industry Study Group, known as BISG, helps roughly 200 member-companies cope with industry evolution and changes in standards and practices, and its observation and analysis can be of use to authors, too. This was particularly the case last week at BISG’s annual meeting in New York.
Rakuten Kobo CEO Michael Tamblyn spoke to the organization about what he worries is “money left on the table” in publishing. Tamblyn supplied the text of his speech to The Hot Sheet so we can relay to you some of the insights he brought forward in how metadata is used—or not. (Metadata, broadly, is all of the information that identifies and describes a book for distribution and retail outlets. Some of it is visible to consumers and some of it is not; it encompasses everything from the book’s title and subtitle to territory pricing to keyword phrases associated with the book’s content.) Tamblyn identified six areas of opportunity.
1. Use local times for release. Tamblyn said, “It’s amazing how many publishers set their release times for midnight, New York time. No matter where the book is being sold. Even though pre-orders are huge everywhere, as in the US, UK, and Australia. So set your releases for sensible times in different time zones, so Australians can receive their UK- or US-rights-dependent pre-orders before they arrive at work. A hot title can lose a day of sales simply because it isn’t available for purchase when it should be.”
2. Different markets require different prices. “Ebooks go everywhere that their metadata allows,” Tamblyn told BISG, “but publishers so often neglect to look at the pricing in different markets and get a read on what good pricing looks like in different countries.” For example, nothing sells in India for anything like the price it might get in the States or Canada or the UK, although there are loads of English-language readers in India. Do your homework.
3. English is the big market. Tamblyn says that if “a book shows up in The Economist or on CNN International, you could have a robust run in Taiwan or Singapore or the United Arab Emirates, all of which are surprisingly strong English markets for us.” (Emphasis his.) In other words, even without translation, a book that starts its life in English has a significant world market. Tamblyn told BISG that Kobo sold 600,000 titles in English to readers in non-English-language countries in 2018.
4. Test your pricing. Tamblyn said, “Independent authors are eating big publishing’s lunch, tweaking their prices and testing price elasticity regularly.” A lower price is a reliable sales trigger for books, so indies lower pricing to float up bestseller lists and trending lists. Furthermore, Tamblyn said, “We [Kobo] automatically re-promote titles that have experienced price drops.” As an aside: self-published titles make up 25 percent of unit sales at Kobo and continue to grow annually.
5. Be consistent with series data. Ready for a great statistic? Tamblyn says that series represent 52 percent of sales at Kobo. “Our high-value readers around the world spend somewhere between $100 and $1,000 a month on books,” he said. “Half of their libraries are devoted to series. Forty-two percent of our top customers have at least two books by the same author.” And yet Kobo’s team sees huge misses in consistency in series data (e.g., using a different variation of the author’s name each time), making it more difficult for a reader to surface the right titles. “We often get customer complaints that they can find books 1, 2, 4, and 5 but not 3.” He also recommends offering a push to buy the next title at the end of the previous one.
6. Focus on book description excellence. Even more important than keywords, Tamblyn said, is your book’s description (which he terms a synopsis). “An SEO-approved or SEO smart synopsis can be as useful as any keyword composite. After all, if keywords are not worth including in your synopsis, how key are they? If you are going to invest your effort somewhere, it’s a good idea to write synopses that do the double duty of providing decision support to the customer who’s made it to your item page while also supplying differentiating language that can be used to help other customers along the same journey.”
Bottom line: Online bookselling (where Kobo lives) is deeply dependent on metadata; the fact that Tamblyn (who offers an email newsletter here) had to say this at a gathering of some of the leading publishers in the world means that there’s room for everybody to improve. Publishers, authors, agents, and editors should be engaged in creating and maintaining the right metadata to help with book discoverability.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
