Book discovery intelligence for publishers
Books succeed when readers can find them.
Kadaxis works with major trade publishing houses and distinctive independent presses on the keyword and metadata work that determines whether a book is found in retailer search. That foundation now extends into broader discovery strategy, grounded in reader demand and live market signals.
Approach
A single discipline, refined.
Readers search for books in language that is rarely the same as the language in publisher catalogs. We combine retailer search data, editorial judgment, and proprietary research methods developed across hundreds of thousands of titles. Each engagement is list-specific. Nothing we deliver is templated.
Read about our methodology →Notes from the Field
Occasional writing on metadata, discoverability, and the economics of publishing online. Sent a few times a year. Read on site, or have it sent to you.
RESEARCH Should Book Keywords Be Single Words or Search Phrases?
We conducted a study that found natural reader-search phrases made far better use of limited keyword space than tag-based single-word keywords. Search phrases produce substantially more visibility when searched directly or in expanded search forms.
RESEARCH Nearly half of publisher keywords are a single word
We analyzed 2.4 million keywords across 94,385 books. Single-word keywords make up 44.57% of the total, by far the largest share. A quarter of the books carry no keywords at all. When publishers use the field, they add a median of 26 keywords per book. Effort is not the problem. Shape is.
RESEARCH Your book description is a search surface
Descriptions are written for readers who already found the book. New Kadaxis research shows Amazon also indexes them: phrases appearing nowhere else on a listing surface the book in organic search about 1.6% of the time, roughly 260 times the matched-control rate. The effect is real, small, and strongest for distinctive language.
RESEARCH ONIX keywords work. Most keywords that publishers create don't.
Plenty of people in publishing suspect keywords do not work. Recent Kadaxis research shows why: only about eight percent of publisher-assigned keywords rank in Amazon search. Keywords built for 2,000 books from a recent Kadaxis client ranked forty-two percent of the time.
Kadaxis was named BookTech Company of the Year at the FutureBook Awards in 2016 and contributed to the Book Industry Study Group's 2018 keywords best-practices standard. We are taking on new publishing partners, with refined methodology and proprietary tooling developed across hundreds of thousands of titles.
If you are a publisher considering metadata work, we would like to hear from you.
Contact Kadaxis →