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Title Management Desktop is back!

Editor’s Note: In case it was not clear, this was all an elaborate April Fool’s Joke.

Are you worried about security? Are you pining for the good old days when all of your work was done in desktop applications instead of on websites?

Well, we have the perfect solution for you! Title Management 5.1 for Desktops!

The Title Information page in Title Management 5.1

Title Management 5.1 does away with most of the complex configurations and special capabilities of Title Management 10.5, and returns users to the previous heightened state of efficiency that comes with fewer features and functions. For example, the Home screen is much more streamlined in version 5.1, just showing the Firebrand logo instead of those complex-looking dashboards

The Home screen in Title Management 5.1

In addition to these awesome feature reductions, we are excited to announce that Title Management Desktop will now be available on three CD-ROM disks! No more fumbling with twelve different floppy disks just to install the application.

Are you considering a change? Would you like to know more? Please see our complete overview video here!

New Years Resolutions for Publishers

Welcome to 2021! The time has come again for us to reflect on where we are and make goals for where we want to be when the end of this new year rolls around.

As you consider your publishing goals and plans for 2021, we’d like to offer a few suggestions to help you increase sales and build for a better future.

1. Diversify your lineup

When the COVID-19 shutdowns started last March we had no idea that those shutdowns would lead to the changes we saw in book sales over the course of the year. Publishers with a wide array of titles, and especially titles in specific categories, were much more likely to see success in the midst of those changing buying patterns. There is no telling what the future might hold, so diversification of your publishing programs is looking like a solid business decision for many publishers. If you have the ability to spread out your list into some of the better-selling categories this year, that might be a worthy goal.

2. Enhance your metadata to drive more online sales

The percentage of book sales that were transacted online last year compared to in-store could be as high as 85%, and numerous research reports over the last few years have proven that online sales are impacted directly by the quality of the metadata you send to partners. The recent shift to online sales channels has also lead to a shift in backlist title sales, as readers look for content that interests them and are not limited by the space available on bookstore shelves, typically taken by newer titles.

This year, we encourage you to take the time to engage the metadata on all of your titles, including your backlist, in targeted ways.

  • Create at least 200 characters of keywords for each title
  • Add book excerpts to your Eloquence feed (in the Comments section)
  • Add other data elements, such as Product Details and Prizes (new section for Prizes now available!)
  • Clean up your book descriptions, and add bolded Lead-Ins to the top
  • Get in the habit of linking related titles in the Title Relationships section

These and other cleanup and enhancement tasks really can make an impact on your sales.

3. Watch your titles, fix issues, and grab opportunities quickly

At the Community Conference in November we heard how Our Daily Bread Publishing increased their sales by actively watching their titles on retail sites and fixing issues that arose from bad data, missing cover images, third party sellers taking the Buy Box, and more.

You, too, can watch your titles daily, and gain all the benefits of a powerful tool that warns you when issues arise and opportunities emerge. Take a look at our Eloquence on Alert platform, the most powerful and flexible title performance monitoring system available.

We hope you have a wonderful 2021, and we look forward to hearing how these and other resolutions help you navigate the ever-changing waters we are in.

Update on Amazon Keywords, May 2020

If you have been following our ongoing saga (Part 1, Part 2) of Amazon’s keywords requirements, you’ll know that change is normal. Well, we have now heard that things are changing again. The newest information is:

“Amazon ingests up to 210 bytes globally (with the exception of CN and JP marketplaces, which ingest up to 800 bytes) for subject keywords. Everything beyond this limit and up to 2000 bytes is not used. If more than 2000 bytes are provided in subject keywords, the entire ONIX record will be disregarded.”

This is a significant change from the earlier statement that Amazon would ignore all of the keywords if more than 250 bytes were sent. Now, the accepted byte limit has been lowered to 210, but at least they will truncate the keywords for you automatically.

If you are using Eloquence on Demand, you don’t have to worry about this limit at all, as the Title Management Keywords field has a 1500 character limit, well below the 2000 byte maximum.

Update on Amazon Keywords, November 2019

If you have been following the saga of keywords on Amazon for any length of time, you know that the most accurate answer to the question, “What is Amazon actually doing?” is “It depends.” This whole thing started this time last year when Amazon updated their Vendor Central documentation to include a new maximum keyword limit of 250 bytes/characters.

Since that time, we have been watching the situation at Amazon carefully and talking to many of you about what you are seeing with your own titles. The results of that continued investigation have not been very fruitful, only serving to reinforce the idea that Amazon’s application of this new standard is inconsistent at best. It appears that the keyword limit of 250 bytes is being applied in some cases but not others.

We’ve seen a new wave of updates from Amazon on this issue recently, and we’re getting the sense that these requirements are finally being applied more broadly. However, Amazon has thrown some new recommendations into the mix that are likely to make things even more confusing:

1. The company now states that the 250-byte limit does not include spaces or punctuation, and that keywords should, ideally, not be separated by semicolons. This recommendation breaks from standard industry practice and the ONIX recommendation, based on Library of Congress preferred practices, of using semicolons as a separator.

2. In addition, the new recommendations say words should not be repeated in the keywords field.

We assume that Amazon wants to maximize the value of the words provided in the smaller keyword space allotted by removing duplicates. That makes sense when combined with their note that “Amazon determines the relevancy of search terms using a machine learning model.” We have known for a while, thanks to the intrepid work of Chris Sim at Kadaxis, that Amazon’s machine learning algorithms combine keywords into derived keywords. So, if you give them “cookbook recipes diet keto” (without any semicolons or duplication) their system should show your book in the search results for “keto cookbook,” “keto recipes,” or “keto diet.”

All that being said, the recommendation about not using semicolons is just that: a recommendation. We don’t recommend worrying about that limitation at the moment, as it just makes compliance with industry standards harder.

[Update 3/25/2020: Amazon has confirmed that “the use of semicolons and spaces are accepted for keywords, though optional, and do not count toward the total limit of 250 bytes. Publishers can continue to submit keywords with semicolons and spaces following EDItEUR best practices, or just semicolons if following the BISG best practices.”]

Changes for Eloquence on Demand

In an effort to help our clients become more compliant with the 250-byte limit, we are now offering a solution for publishers who send keywords to Amazon. The Eloquence on Demand service can automatically limit the number of bytes we send to Amazon on your behalf to keep you under the limit. If you choose to turn on this feature, our cloud will find the 250-byte point in your list of keywords, back up to the previous semicolon, and truncate the list at that point in your Amazon feed.

This new option allows publishers to meet the requirements for Amazon without affecting the number of keywords entered in Title Management or sent to other trading partners, like Apple; they are currently accepting up to 1000 characters’ worth of keywords.

To have this feature implemented, contact our support team. No action is needed if you do not wish to limit the number of keywords sent to Amazon. If you would like to discuss other options, or if you are concerned about how to best implement keywords within your team, our support team can help.

Keep an eye on this space for further news and thoughts about this change and others.

Announcing Elephants on Demand!

[Editor’s note: In case it was not clear, this was an April Fool’s joke. No elephants were harmed in the making of this video.]

Firebrand is constantly innovating and evolving — looking for the most effective strategies to help publishers succeed in the marketplace.

We are excited to announce the launch of our newest metadata delivery service, Elephants on Demand!

Elephants on Demand helps you get your heaviest and most important metadata where it needs to go. No longer do you have to worry about an intern dropping your fragile metadata on the way to the retailer, or one of the monkeys running the vacuum tubes getting their tubes crossed. No longer will your fully-fleshed-out metadata be left in the office because the designated carrying service can’t lift anything with a Table of Contents, an Excerpt, and 10 Review Quotes.

Elephants on Demand can handle any metadata load you give it, from the smallest to the largest. We have scoured the globe to find the fastest and hardiest elephants available, and we have already started to put them to work for you.

“This is a truly remarkable innovation in metadata delivery, which I know will make a huge impact on visibility,” said Catherine Toolan, Director of Elephant Services at Firebrand. “We have already been impressed with how quickly the service has been accepted by major retailers, and we are looking forward to expanding the reach of the service internationally with our upcoming Elephant Seal expansion.”

For more information on this new service, please watch our introductory video below.

Amazon 250 Byte Keywords Limit

We have been receiving reports for the last week or two that Amazon has set a limit on the number of keywords that will be indexed for books sold through Vendor Central. This limitation was previously only in place for Seller Central, but Amazon recently updated the documentation for Vendor Central to reflect the limitation, as well. The Vendor Central documentation specifically states:

Our system limits the length of the generic keyword/search terms attribute to less than 250 bytes. It is still possible to go over the limit, but if you do, our search engine will not index any of your entries.

Some clients have been in contact with Vendor Central Support and have received email and phone confirmation that the new limitation does apply to books, and to metadata delivered via ONIX, not just to metadata manually entered in Vendor Central.

We are taking this potential change seriously at Firebrand, and are looking for hard evidence that the limitation is actually being applied to titles. However, so far we have not seen that hard evidence. Also, in our experience Amazon’s support team is not always up-to-date on the technical requirements or application of rules when it comes to ONIX deliveries. These points make us cautious about jumping the gun on changing how keywords are handled in Title Management, Eloquence on Demand, or our Keywords service.

As we are running tests and looking for evidence of if and how this limitation is being applied, we encourage our clients to stay the course and not make changes to their current keywords programs. Again, we don’t have any hard evidence of keywords for titles not being indexed. There is a chance that changing the keywords currently applied to titles could negatively affect your sales rank for those titles unnecessarily. Even if Amazon is enforcing this new rule, they may not be (and from our current tests, are not) enforcing it on already-submitted metadata, choosing instead to only apply it when the keywords are refreshed.

If you have any hard evidence about this issue, especially evidence that the 250 byte limitation has been applied to your titles, making all keywords become un-indexed, please contact Joshua Tallent (joshua@firebrandtech.com) with that information.

We will update this blog post in the future as we learn more.

Community Conference 2018 Wrap-Up

We wanted to to give a big Thank You to everyone who attended the 2018 Community Conference in September! It was definitely one of our best conferences yet, and renewed our confidence that our clients benefit in tangible ways from this bi-annual meeting.

NetGalley posted a great article on their Insights blog last week, Lessons from the Firebrand Community Conference, and we highly recommend you check that out.

Also, Brian O’Leary, Executive Director of BISG, our keynote speaker, has put up the text of his talk, The Art of the Possible, on the BISG website. It is a great read, and worth your time.

The Community Conference comes every other year, but we don’t want to you to have to wait two years to learn with us again. Our Odd Year Conference, a one-day Master Class, is going to be on October 23, 2019, in New York City. We will also have open meeting slots available on the 24th for those who want to sit down with our team and talk shop. Save those dates!

Get a FREE BookExpo-Exclusive Metadata Health Assessment!

Let the power of our sophisticated toolset go to work for you
Firebrand has been helping publishers manage their metadata for 30 years. At BookExpo this year, we want to help you highlight and correct issues in your metadata.
So, we are offering a FREE, no obligation Metadata Health Assessment. You provide us with ten titles and we will run a comprehensive health check on each of them, including:

1. Actionable Market Intelligence:  Do you know if each of your titles is being presented accurately on retail sites?
 You will receive an Eloquence on Alert report for your submitted titles, showing trends and notable information from major retailers gathered during the Health Assessment period! This report gains more power the more time your books are being tracked, so don’t wait to sign up!
2. Minimum Required Metadata: Do you meet industry minimums, or are your trading partners missing the basic information they need?
 We will provide you with an Eloquence on Demand overview highlighting deficiencies or errors in your data.
3. Discoverability Factor: How good is your metadata? Does it meet industry best practices? Do you have enough of it?
 We will assess the quality of your data, including long-form bibliographic metadata (author bio, description, excerpt, etc.), looking for missing information and for potential formatting or content issues.
4. Evergreen Metadata: How often is your metadata being updated? Are you including the right information in those updates?
 We will tell you just how often. Our clients have proven again and again that refreshing product data leads to discoverability and sales.
5. Manual Retailer Assessment: Are the retailers handling your metadata correctly? How does it look on their websites?
 We will look at the metadata for each book as it exists on major retailers (Amazon, B&N, Google, Apple, and Kobo) and assess its quality and completeness in comparison to the metadata you are providing.
Want to participate?
You could win a MacBook Air!
Enter your books in the Metadata Health Assessment today, and you will be entered into a drawing to win a FREE MacBook Air.
Rules

Of course we have rules! Nothing crazy, though:

  1. Only publishers may enter. We want to help publishers create better metadata, so this is not open to just anyone. 
  2. Every entry must include exactly 10 ISBNs, no more, no less.
  3. The ISBNs must all come from different titles (not just different formats of the same titles). This number of titles gives us a good view of the metadata you send out and helps us see patterns.
  4. All submissions must be completed by 11:59pm EST on May 19th, 2017. That’s the deadline. Really. No extensions. Don’t wait to sign up!
  5. Applicants must schedule and attend an in-person meeting at the Firebrand booth at BookExpo 2017. We need to show you what we find, so you have to show up to your meeting at the conference to have your entry in the drawing confirmed. Don’t forget to put it on your calendar!
  6. Submissions are limited to the first 40 publishers. That’s 400 titles we have to check, so we have to set the limit somewhere!
  7. The MacBook Air drawing will take place after BookExpo. The winner will be contacted through email. 

Announcing Eloquence on Alert

Have you ever wondered what was really going on with your books on Amazon and other retailers? According to BISG’s report on The Development, Use, and Modification of Book Product Metadata, only 36% of publishers manually check their metadata once it is live on retailer websites. Meanwhile, 95% of publishers say their metadata is altered without their knowledge on retail websites by third parties like distributors and metadata aggregators.

The problem is that once you publish a book you are usually too busy working on the next one to keep an eye on your metadata. The more books you publish, the more daunting the task. Eventually you just leave backlist titles alone unless someone complains about something or you notice a problem when you happen to go look at the product page.

Our new Eloquence on Alert service is designed to give you detailed, actionable market intelligence about your books. It highlights notable trends such as fluctuating sale prices, product metadata issues, changes in customer rankings, and audience behavior. You’ll see information from all of the major retailers, both print and ebook, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Google, Kobo, and Goodreads.

Visit the Eloquence on Alert page here on our website for more information, including a short introductory video and informative screenshots of the service.

We will also be hosting a webinar on Wednesday, February 8th at 2:00pm ET, which will give you an overview of the Eloquence on Alert service, as well as information on our Case Study on Increasing Sales Through Effective use of Keywords. Register now!