Words that Sell Books

Metadata can feel like traversing a dark cave, but you have friends along the way to help you navigate this aspect of book publishing. Don't be afraid to get some professional marketing gurus on your side.

Your book is out there, somewhere on the great world wide web (I just dated myself didn't I?) but the real question becomes, how does anyone find it? There's a magical word that makes a book show up on the internet for others. It's actually what they feed the internet monsters at night. It's called METADATA.

Metadata. Have you ever heard of that word before? It is a collection of information that identifies your book and makes it available to be found by the interwebs. Hopefully after reading this, you'll have a better understanding of how it works and why it's so important when listing your book on any place on the internet. Each of these following points is part of your book metadata.

Format. Your printed book size, paper choice, and cover style relies heavily on what the content of your book can be categorized as. Is it considered a fiction novel, spiritual or religious story, self-help book, business/history related non-fiction, a children's picture book, a biography, or a poetry book? Each of these is typically formatted very specifically to that audience and market, especially when it comes to printing costs. full length novels will need more paper and not have much for pictures; therefore are often printed on thinner, inexpensive paper types, at a size that's smaller than a picture-laden work such as a cook book, or historical book.

Children's picture books live in their own reality when it comes to printing and formatting, so it is important to choose the correct format for your children's book project.

Title. This is the attention grabbing moment that will get people's attention first. Short and sweet, but poignant and meaningful to helping people know what your book is about in as few words as humanly possible. It reflects the personality and writing style of your book. "The Secret" implies a loaded idea with emphasis on the ability to interpret, and participate in implied writing (perhaps a novel for 12-14 years, or even older), while "Carly's Secret Stone" can be used on a children's picture book title, showing that there is more simplistic imagery of what the story may be about, but still gives a sense of mystery and adventure in the fantasy realm. "Carly and the Stone Discovery" can imply a relatable, child-friendly story that may be less about some fantastical journey and be more of a practical and realistic narration. Words carry a lot of weight and meaning, even when we pretend they don’t.

Hook/Short Description. This is the super short summary that is often shown in preview windows, "at a glance" listings, and thumbnails on the internet. Many people don't realize that this essential marketing piece to your book is called a hook.

No matter what size/format you make your book, you HAVE to have a REALLY GREAT hook. Writing a hook for a picture book can be just as much work as writing one for a full length novel. It's the punch line. The book in a nutshell. The movie trailer compacted into 2-3 sentences to capture the magic of your story.

One of my all-time favorites is the hook they use to sell "The Duck Never Blinks." The book itself is a silly, charming challenge to make the duck blink, with the cliff-hanger written straight into the description like bait for a hungry fish. The book description says, "Can you make a duck blink?

Probably not.

But you can try, in this irreverent and hilarious staring contest between you and a duck that never, ever blinks."

Coming up with a short, concise description of the book style, the energy behind it, and the plot of the book all neatly packaged in a hook. It grabs your reader immediately, like a hook and bait when fishing. It's well worth the investment to make your hook capture the energy of your story, make it attention getting, and make it concise. For many retailers, and especially IngramSpark, this cannot be longer than 250 characters. Crazy right? Make is solid, concise, and powerful.

Keywords. Every time you go to Google to find something, or ask Alexa a question, you're using "keywords" to look up the information. What's trending on social media is often relative to the "hashtags" on that post; a fancier, modern way of talking about keywords. "Alexa, what's the weather today?" is a common example in those annoying commercials. So what are the keywords being used here? "Weather" is one. "Today" is another. So if you search in Google "weather today" you'll get similar results.

What's happening is these engines are looking through the giant database of websites that we call the internet, looking for these words to come up. Often they target websites that have multiple uses of the words. If you have the word "weather" on your website 50 times, you're likely to pop up in the search results. These keywords are the "key" to unlocking your book's reach.

There are people whose full time job is to research and refine keywords for people's products. Understanding the nuances of keywords will depend on your desire and time to dive into this subject. When you're creating a children's book, there are plenty of keywords you can come up with on your own, or with a marketing professional to narrow down the best words to include in your book descriptions and keywords list. These days, the "algorithms" for keyword searches changes so frequently on each platform it's nearly impossible to keep up with trends on your own. But I wouldn't let that stop you. Even if you just have some base keywords to assign your children's picture book, you'll be better off than not having any at all. And most of the time, you can go back into your picture book listing and change them any time you want. This is also why a lot of people start blogs on their author websites. The more words related to your book natter you decide to include on your website, the most chances you have of showing up in search results on the internet. (Did I just give away my little secret here? Nah, I actually love sharing this information with my book authors; I swear I'm not just writing to the internet keyword monsters!)

Part 2 coming soon...