Episode 5.2: Book Metadata: Book Publishing Glossary

Welcome to another “book publishing glossary” micro-episode, author-entrepreneurs. Today we're talking about metadata, which is a term that you have maybe heard before, but maybe not. It's definitely a book publishing industry term. According to Merriam Webster, metadata is defined as a data that provides information about other data. Metadata is hugely, hugely important, because metadata is not only is it telling readers what your book is about — how to classify it — but maybe even more importantly than that, it's telling book buyers and librarians where your book goes in their bookstore or library, which, of course, is important to you, if you plan to sell your book in those places. 

So what do we mean by metadata? What kind of data about data are we talking about? We're talking about things that you know about and care about; we're just calling them by their technical name today. This is going to be a sampling of things that are included in metadata.

  1. Title & Subtitle

  2. Author’s Name

  3. Your Book Description

  4. Keywords

  5. Format

  6. Price of Your Book,

  7. ISBN

  8. Publish Date

  9. Book Category

This is an episode you don’t want to miss. So listen below or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Links Mentioned:

BISAC codes

AllieDanae WalkerComment