Publishing
Ebook metadata does a surprising amount of the heavy lifting, which is mildly rude given how little attention it gets compared with the blurb.
Title, subtitle, categories, keywords. Those are often the first things deciding whether a book reaches the right reader or wanders off into the wrong shelf and sits there looking misunderstood. The blurb gets the prose and the dignity. Metadata gets the job done.
It’s one of those unglamorous publishing details that can quietly make a book visible or nearly invisible. Annoying, really. Also rather important, which tends to be the pattern.
Title, subtitle, categories, keywords. Those are often the first things deciding whether a book reaches the right reader or wanders off into the wrong shelf and sits there looking misunderstood. The blurb gets the prose and the dignity. Metadata gets the job done.
It’s one of those unglamorous publishing details that can quietly make a book visible or nearly invisible. Annoying, really. Also rather important, which tends to be the pattern.
Metadata gets treated like a filing cabinet until it goes wrong, then everyone acts surprised. Categories and keywords matter, but only up to the point where people start stuffing books into absurd bins because the system rewards it. A historical novel can be perfectly labelled and still be sunk by a cover that says “romance in a frock” when it plainly isn’t. The shelf label is only half the battle.