Why metadata is the dental flossing of discoverability
Four million books were published in 2025. Five hundred thousand through traditional publishers. The rest, self-published.
Every single one of them is competing for visibility in an online marketplace that runs entirely on algorithms — and algorithms run on data.
Last week, I spent a day at Macmillan Publishers for the New York Book Forum's Marketing Bootcamp. Anna Jarzab, formerly Associate Publisher at Simon & Schuster Children's, gave an informative talk on a topic that is often the most tedious part of the publishing process. Metadata. She got our attention with her positioning:
You cannot buy something you don't know exists.
In some ways, an obvious statement but also a provocative one. How does the consumer know your book exists? In one word: metadata.
Metadata is what makes your book findable.
What is metadata?
Metadata is information about information (very meta!) In practice, it is a book’s title, subtitle, keywords, BISAC codes, Thema codes, price, format, and descriptive copy that tell retailers, search engines, and recommendation algorithms what your book is and who it's for.
Get it right and your book surfaces. Get it wrong, and your book is essentially invisible, no matter how good it is.
Metadata is boring and tedious, like flossing, but, like flossing, it is so important.
Without it, your book will decay in a sea of broken links and bad tagging.
A fake divorce memoir
To make the idea of metadata concrete, Jarzab built a fake book — a divorce memoir — and walked through how she'd approach the metadata from scratch.
Weak keywords: book. memoir. loss. divorce. grief. Too broad. You're competing with everything.
Stronger: a memoir about divorce. healing after divorce. memoir about dating after divorce. Now you're speaking the language of someone actually searching for your book.
Too narrow: a memoir about a woman from North Carolina who heals after her marriage ends. That's a plot summary. Not a keyword.
The sweet spot is specificity with search volume — real terms, real readers, real traffic.
She also made a distinction: keywords and BISAC codes are not the same thing. Keywords get your book found. BISAC codes get your book shelved. Different jobs and different structure.
Don’t forget the subtitle!
Subtitles are prime metadata real estate, and in fiction, most authors waste them. A Memoir tells algorithms nothing. A subtitle like “A memoir about dating after divorce” that incorporates the language your readers actually search for punches above its weight in terms of discoverability. This approach is non-traditional for fiction, but the payoff, in terms of visibility, can be a real advantage.
Why was I there?
As someone who has spent 30 years in publishing and works with authors every day on exactly these questions, I love the opportunity to keep my finger on the pulse and hear best practices from “insiders”. It's gratifying when what you hear from industry leaders confirms what you've been teaching your own clients.
In The Strategic Author, my group coaching program, we work on metadata as part of the publishing strategy process, not as a last-minute checkbox, but as something you build from the beginning alongside your positioning, your comp titles, and your audience definition. Because authors who understand this stuff don't just write good books. They write books that get found.
Metadata isn't glamorous. But invisibility is worse.
