PUBLISHED OCTOBER 2015 by Otis Chandler, co-founder and CEO, Goodreads Ask authors and publishers about the biggest challenge they face, and chances are the top answer you’ll get is book discovery. Yes, it’s been the number-one challenge in the industry for years, but it’s getting even harder to deal with now that millions of books …

PUBLISHED APRIL 2015 by David Wogahn, digital publishing consultant In an increasingly online world, metadata best practices go beyond fields in an ONIX record and pertain to how we create, present, and maintain information about ourselves as authors and publishers. Accordingly, I believe we need to define metadata more broadly and develop new habits to ensure …

While we were celebrating John F. Blair, Publisher’s 60th anniversary during the past year, I noticed that half of our staff members have worked for Blair for more than 20 years, but a quarter of the staff members are under the age of 30. That gives us the unique advantage of having a historical perspective …

Metadata matters—it matters a lot. Defined as data about data, it is information about your books that is communicated to others, in part, through a set of descriptive keywords. It matters because skillfully chosen keywords in your metadata can make it easy for readers to find your books. In fact, if you are publishing e-books …

For centuries, printed books have included indexes to give readers easy access to particular aspects of their contents. But since the beginning of the digital age, many content providers have considered indexes extraneous, even though indexes offer users a higher degree of success than search functions in finding information; at least one study has shown …

Are you tired of reading more “new” tips about the same old social media tools? Me too. So here are some of my favorite underrated online tools that can drive traffic to your Web- site and improve book discoverability. QUORA.COM Quora is a crowd-sourced Q&A site that has recently gained a lot of popularity. The …

PUBLISHED JULY 2014 by Graham Bell, Executive Director, EDItEUR — It has become a cliché: Metadata is marketing. With online sales becoming yet more dominant, and sales through physical bookstores shrinking further, data about your product—as opposed to the product itself—becomes your primary con- tact with the customer and reader. All too often, metadata is …

PUBLISHED APRIL 2012 by Andre Breedt and David Walter, Nielsen BookScan — Perhaps more than any other industry the book trade is reliant on sharing product data in order to function efficiently. With the massive variety of products available the ISBN has been central to the industry for generations, and attaching accurate and appropriate information …