Regularly updating metadata can increase the longevity of sales and lifetime value of a book
In 2020, there’s virtually no publisher or author who isn’t aware of the importance of metadata for book discoverability and sales. Just about every publishing industry event has a focused session on evolving best practices for improving metadata. In partnership with BookNet Canada, one of the experts in this area, Joshua Tallent, director of sales and education at Firebrand Technologies, recently offered a one-hour look at the latest challenges.
Because the percentage of online book purchases has increased from 20 to 50 percent in the last decade, online product listings are just as important, if not more so, than in-store placement. Tallent says metadata is not just about online sales, since brick-and-mortar stores position books with the same data. All types of book buyers consistently use search engines to find books, and Amazon and Google search results are greatly affected by the quality and quantity of book metadata. Moreover, Tallent pointed out, every new book is now competing against the everlasting backlist in an online environment. “Sending out your title without good metadata is like throwing it into a bin of books and just hoping that somebody will pull it out randomly.”
Tallent discussed the case of a publisher who has seen their Amazon revenue grow tenfold from 2012 to 2019, partly due to good metadata management. In 2019 alone, this publisher saw a 42 percent increase in sales, the direct result of the company taking a more active role in managing their book data. “They did that with only one person working on managing their data and advertising processes. And as a matter of fact, that same company saw a 63 percent year-over-year increase in sales on Amazon in April despite the coronavirus.” Tallent didn’t name the publisher but said their resilience is due not only to the nature of the books they sell but also to the fact they worked very hard to increase the quality of their data and to actively address issues and opportunities over the last few years.
Because Amazon accounts for roughly 70 percent of all online book sales, Tallent spent a good chunk of time discussing optimization for that site. “Keywords are a big deal at Amazon,” Tallent said, but unfortunately there’s a lot of confusion over what good keywords look like or how many you can include, due to changing standards at Amazon. Right now, Amazon will use the first 210 keyword characters provided, ignoring delimiters (such as commas) and spaces. Keywords that appear beyond that limit will be ignored. (Note that if you provide more than 2000 characters in your keyword field, everything will be ignored. For Amazon KDP users, it is impossible to enter this many characters into any of the keyword fields, even once combined.)
Because they’re removing the delimiters, Amazon doesn’t care about keyword phrases. “Their machine-learning algorithms will automatically combine words that are provided into phrases on its own, based on search effectiveness and how their search is using it,” Tallent said. That means there’s no need to repeat specific words in order to create your own phrases. For example, Japanese cooking and Japanese ingredients can be reduced down to Japanese cooking ingredients because the three separate words can be combined together by the machine-learning system in whatever ways are necessary.
Tallent also thoroughly addressed the intersection of metadata and third-party sellers. Third-party sellers (TPS) are the companies who sell new and used books through Amazon Marketplace and sometimes “win” the buy box from publishers. (Here’s our in-depth explanation from October 2019.) Tallent has been tracking these sellers for the last three years, using a pool of 40,000 titles from more than 50 publishers. He says that although TPS win the buy box on about 15 percent of titles on any given day, many are small players who don’t have a significant impact over time. But the top 30 TPS can have an effect: these companies win the buy box more frequently at lower prices—34 percent off list price, on average—whereas the average sale price offered by Amazon is 26 percent off list price. (Interestingly, Tallent pointed out that one of the top 30 TPS companies is Book Depository, an Amazon-owned company.)
“When a third-party seller has the buy box … the sales rank for the title at that moment is consistently worse,” Tallent said. This could be due to the decreased sales that happen through such sellers, or it may also be an interesting effect of how Amazon’s sales rank algorithms are working. The overall message we took away is that publishers can keep the buy box with better-quality metadata and better care of their product listings over time; abandoned titles lead to more third-party-seller activity, lowering of prices, and a cheapening of value.
Tallent said that publishers who want to preserve higher perceived value and thus higher prices need to have clear, recognizable, and well-known branding. “Publishing has a branding problem. The problem is consumers by and large don’t know or even care about your publishing company’s brand in essence. In our research over the last few months, we’ve found clear evidence that brand recognition is a key indicator of success on Amazon.”
He said that in the wake of COVID-19, his company has seen Amazon dramatically increasing the number of titles on which they’re making day-by-day adjustments to sale prices. However, “We’ve also seen that on books by well-known authors or on well-known imprints and brands, the sale price as a percentage of the list price stays higher. In many cases the sale price can be as high as 90 percent of the publisher’s list price.” In Tallent’s opinion, lower sale prices hurt your brand in the eyes of consumers. “Shoppers are tired, they want the decision to be easy,” he said. “Recognizable brands with good metadata and good reviews are going to make more sales just because they don’t require as much effort to research.”
However, recognizable branding is not all “sunshine and roses,” he said, due to the problems with product counterfeiting on Amazon. If publishers with recognizable brands don’t protect those brands, they can become easy pickings for counterfeiters. So how do you protect against that? He said, as a first step, publishers should consider using the Amazon Brand Registry, which offers access to what’s known as A+ Content. These are special “From the Publisher” sections on a product-listing page—more valuable metadata available only to publishers who are in the registry or who participate in other exclusivity programs. Brands can also create store pages for their books with a very simple address, like amazon.com/dummies. However, gaining access to the brand registry requires a brand to be on the US Trademark and Patent Office Principal Register or the Canadian Intellectual Property Office registry—and it can take years to get registered.
Finally, no matter the retailer, refresh your data often. One publisher told Tallent that every month they look at all the titles that were published in that month in the three previous years and they spend a little bit of time on each of those titles, updating the metadata, adding new and relevant information, and fixing issues that they find. “In this kind of yearly evergreen refresh, you might update the author bio, add new reviews, adjust the keywords, tweak the book description, add new comp titles. Think about what’s happening in the news or in the culture and in the specific genre or topic that the book is in and use that to help you create better data,” Tallent said. Also, Amazon’s search engine works similarly to Google in that it pays attention to titles that are being updated. Pushing out metadata updates can be an effective way to ensure that your titles stay relevant and visible.
Bottom line: Tallent said publishers are often missing opportunities to increase sales on their titles at all retailers because they don’t check and update their metadata regularly. Having at least one person at a publishing company devoted to metadata (preferably full time) is imperative—and not just because of third-party sellers. “Your metadata is arguably your company’s most valuable non-people resource,” Tallent said.
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.
