Tag: metadata

Top Time Savers for Book Production

Business of Writing, Tools for Writers

Alarm clock in foreground demonstrates that time savers are important to writers.

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

This is the third post in my series on how writers can save time.  You can find the first post here (on social media), and the second post here (on saving time writing).

If you plan on having only a single book or just a couple of books, you probably can just skip the information I’m sharing today. This is more for those of us who have either multiple series or many books or both. It’s the nitty-gritty of book production–the tedious inputting of data into the retail and distributor sites.

By keeping track of the data we use over and over again, we can not only make our process go a lot quicker, we can also make sure it’s consistent. Although it does take some time to compile these lists, sometimes we have to spend time to save it.

Here are some examples:Continue reading

Metadata Tools

Business of Writing, Tools for Writers

 

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by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Those who’ve been reading my blog for a while know that I’ve had something of a bee in my bonnet lately over metadata.   When I first heard about metadata, it sounded like the most boring (and confusing) thing I’d ever heard of.  I became curious as I continued hearing more and more about it.  I attended a couple of talks on metadata at a couple of different conferences.  I read slideshows on it from conferences I hadn’t attended.

And then I decided that the topic of metadata was actually pretty interesting and useful after all.  To me, it’s a way of making my books visible to readers.  In that way, it’s useful in the way that a card catalog used to be useful at the public library.  Carla King wrote a great article for BookWorks called “Mastering Metadata: the Key to Marketing Your Books,” if you want a more detailed explanation of its helpfulness.

Then I realized at some point in the process that my own metadata, or the way I label the bits and pieces of my books, was wildly inconsistent.  I might be Elizabeth Craig, I might be Elizabeth Spann Craig, I might be Elizabeth S. Craig.  That doesn’t help my visibility on a search engine….surely I’d bring in better results if I listed myself one way all the time.Continue reading

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