“Despite the widespread impression that e-book people are the jet-setters of the publishing business,” we wrote a while back, “the truth is that just about every step in the creation and publication of e-books is excruciatingly boring. In fact, e-book publishing may be described as long stretches of stupefying tedium punctuated by moments of numbing monotony.”

This observation found support in Andrew Wilkins’s coverage of what sounds like the quintessentially boring event of all time, the world’s first convention on metadata.  For those who are drawing a blank, metadata is all the stuff that goes into an e-book that is not the book itself.  It includes such tedium-inducing items as the ISBN, jacket copy, cover image, publisher information, territorial rights, country codes, suggested retail prices in US and foreign currencies, BISAC code, and a host of other data.

Before you click out of this essay there is one more thing you need to know about metadata: without it the e-book industry would vanish off the face of the earth.  For unless your publisher provides it to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo Apple and other retailers, they will not carry your e-book.

“Good data isn’t just nice to have,” writes Andrew Wilkins of Publishing Perspectives, “these days, there can be serious commercial consequences if your book information isn’t correct.” Wilkins cites a Nielsen executive who notes that “those titles in Nielsen’s top-selling 85,000 with complete data records sold 70% more copies on average than those with incomplete metadata.”

Enough publishing people felt the subject vitally interesting enough to convene a conference about it at last week’s Frankfurt Book Fair. One attendee went so far as to declare “Managing data needs to be a strategic priority.” Maybe it would become one if we called it something else.  Wilkins nailed it when he lamented “Can’t we just choose another more sexy term?”

Now that we have your rapt attention, you can follow up by reading All About BISAC Codes, Mastering the Mysteries of Metadata and Looking for Tedium? E-Books Are Your Medium.

Richard Curtis