Publishing
A backlist title can be perfectly sound and still need a new description because readers no longer search the way they did when it first came out. That’s the awkward bit. The book hasn’t changed, but the words people use to find it have.
Publishers treat this as a technical tidy-up, which is fair enough. It is also a reminder that metadata is part of the book’s life now, not an afterthought. If the description still talks like a catalogue copy from 2014, it may as well be hidden in a drawer.
Publishers treat this as a technical tidy-up, which is fair enough. It is also a reminder that metadata is part of the book’s life now, not an afterthought. If the description still talks like a catalogue copy from 2014, it may as well be hidden in a drawer.
Metadata matters, but so does the habit of pretending every old book needs to be reintroduced as if it had been found in a skip. Sometimes the copy is fine and the real problem is the list it sits in, or the cover, or the fact nobody wants to admit backlist discovery is a search problem and a shelving problem and a budget problem all at once.
There’s a practical snag here: a lot of older descriptions were written to sell the book to a bookseller, not to a reader searching on a phone at 11pm. Different job entirely.
But I’d be wary of treating metadata as a magic fix. If the opening pages are muddy, a sharper description just gets more people to the same puddle.
But I’d be wary of treating metadata as a magic fix. If the opening pages are muddy, a sharper description just gets more people to the same puddle.