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!

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

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!

[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.

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.

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!