Posts tagged metadata
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Why a 500 keyword character limit is costing you book sales.
I bet that if you’re reading this, you’ve always accepted 500 characters as the gold standard for maximizing book visibility through search - work your way up to 500 characters and you’ve joined the metadata elite. You've surpassed the majority of publishers who add only two or three hundred keywords, or gasp, don’t add keywords at all. Well, dear reader, if your ONIX makes its way to Amazon, and Amazon is an importa...
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BISG 2017 Annual Meeting - Rights, Metadata and Marketing Panel
I participated in a panel on "Rights, Metadata and Marketing" at the recent BISG 2017 Annual Meeting , held at the Harvard Club in New York City. Here are my responses to the questions I was asked: What is currently working for Kadaxis? Our approach combines machine learning techniques with a deep knowledge of Amazon search. We take a digital marketing approach to keyword creation by understanding how readers se...
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Machine Learning and Bestseller Prediction: More Than Words Can Say
There’s been much recent conjecture on whether book sales can be predicted by text analysis alone. My company, Kadaxis, has dedicated the past few years to machine learning research and product development for the publishing industry. In our early days, we set out to build an algorithm to predict bestsellers, and tested it in the wild. In this post, I’ll share my perspectives on why the text alone isn’t enough. If Yo...
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How Do Keywords Impact Sales?
The question I receive most often from publishers is: “How do keywords impact sales?” While adding keywords to book metadata is considered best-practice, publishing businesses are naturally more interested in whether the practice will increase revenue. Keywords in this context are ‘off-page’ keywords , which are sent to retailers in an ONIX feed or added to a book via KDP, Amazon’s dashboard for Kindle books. Keyword...
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Who Uses the Keywords in Metadata?
We often hear that keywords are important to help readers find and discover books. But what does that mean, and do keywords actually make a difference? In this post, we look at how keywords are used to search book websites (in particular, online booksellers), and their adoption by publishers. For this investigation, I had help from Pat Payton (Bowker) and Catherine Toolan (Firebrand). We set out to answer the followi...
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What are off-page keywords?
In the world of publishing metadata, when we talk about keywords, we’re talking about structured off-page keywords, often sent in an ONIX file, from a publisher to a retailer like Amazon. The retailer indexes the keywords and matches them against customer search queries, in order to display relevant books to them. Keywords are made up of phrases used to describe a book and their purpose is to give a search engine clu...
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A Publisher's Advantage Over Indie Authors
View image | gettyimages.com When it comes to book discovery and retail search, traditional publishers have two advantages over indie publishers. More Keywords The first is the ability to add more keywords to a book. Most independent authors will be able to add 5-7 keywords to their book's metadata. Each keyword (or phrase) provides an opportunity for the book to be matched with more search queries. The more sea...
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Why Keywords Are So Important
View image | gettyimages.com Crafting effective keywords to add to a book's metadata, could be one of the highest return marketing activities to increase online sales potential. This post examines why keywords are so important, and how they affect discovery on Amazon. Let's break the logic down: • Amazon is the biggest bookseller in the world. • Around two thirds of online book sales are made through Amazon . • ...