Glossary
What is book metadata?
Updated
Metadata is everything about your book that is not the book itself: title, subtitle, author, description, categories, keywords, price and language. In a store with millions of titles, it is most of what decides whether yours is ever seen.
The fields that do the most work
- Subtitle. The single most under-used field in self-publishing. The title can be memorable; the subtitle should say what the book does, in the words somebody would search for.
- Categories. Two or three, chosen for how *narrow* they are. Ranking well in a small category puts a badge on the listing; ranking nowhere in a huge one does nothing.
- Keywords. Seven slots on Amazon. They are for phrases a reader would type, not single words, and not words already in your title — those are indexed anyway.
- Description. Your blurb, which is both sales copy and search copy.
It has to match everywhere
The title on the cover, the title on the title page and the title in the metadata must be identical, punctuation included. Distributors match records on these strings, and a mismatch is a common reason for a listing being rejected or, worse, split into two listings that each carry half your reviews.
Related terms
- Book blurbThe blurb is the description on the back cover and on the store page. It is not a summary — its only job is to make a browsing stranger want to read the first chapter, which is a different task from describing the book accurately.
- KDPKDP is Amazon’s free self-publishing platform. You upload a manuscript and a cover, set a price, and the book is on sale in the Kindle store — and, if you want, as a print-on-demand paperback — usually within 72 hours.
- ASINAn ASIN is the 10-character code Amazon assigns to every product in its catalogue, including books. It is Amazon’s own identifier — it works nowhere else, and Amazon creates it for you automatically.
- ISBNAn ISBN is a 13-digit number that identifies one specific edition of one specific book. Bookshops, libraries and distributors use it to order the right thing; it is a product code, not a copyright registration.
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