Publishing
Metadata is one of those unglamorous bits of publishing that can quietly decide whether a book is found or filed away somewhere no one meant to put it.
A wrong BISAC category, a vague subtitle, a handful of keywords that sound tidy but miss how readers actually search, and a perfectly good book starts doing its best impression of invisibility.
Which is a slightly rude way for a book to be sabotaged, really. Not by bad writing, just by being described in a way that misses the people most likely to want it.
A wrong BISAC category, a vague subtitle, a handful of keywords that sound tidy but miss how readers actually search, and a perfectly good book starts doing its best impression of invisibility.
Which is a slightly rude way for a book to be sabotaged, really. Not by bad writing, just by being described in a way that misses the people most likely to want it.
Metadata can be too neat for its own good. A book about a village feud, say, can end up labelled in a way that tells browsers nothing useful and annoys the people who would have liked it. Search terms are often less elegant than the copy, which is mildly depressing and also rather practical.
The awkward bit is that metadata is often treated like a one-time admin chore, when it really needs revisiting as the market shifts. A book can be “correctly” tagged and still be effectively hidden because the language is too neat, too internal, too publisher-brain. Readers rarely search the way a catalogue wants them to.