Tech Forum & ebookcraft 2019

Metadata is an increasingly important tool for book marketing and discoverability, but sometimes systems and workflows can get in the way of optimizing data. It can be easy to fall back on old patterns, formulae, etc., and get lost in day-to-day minutiae rather than making sure your expansive catalogue has a minimum number of BISACs and keywords — let alone ones that are well-researched based on customer behaviour.
But making systemic changes at a large publisher takes a great deal of time and consensus-building, and time is often in short supply. So how does the individual book marketer or editorial assistant fight the Goliaths of inertia, scale, and the way things have always been done?
At Harlequin, we believe the answer is not doing it alone, but rather working to find ambassadors: like-minded people in various roles. Consensus, ambassadors, and eventually lots of excitement were the keys to our project. This led to the development of a new module for metadata that will revolutionize the way we can reach consumers, market our books, maximize data integrity, and optimize data at scale.
This talk will focus on the strategies we used to grow consensus, identify key opportunities for development, and eventually overhaul large systems and workflows to focus them around metadata best practices.