Metadata Refresh: A Case Study
Updating Titles, Subtitles, Descriptions and Format to Improve Books and Improve Sales
In September, I ran a Kickstarter campaign to help launch a new book, PUBLISH A KID’S BOOK: FIND SURPRISING SUCCESS SELF-PUBLISHING.
If you’ve been following this blog and you supported the Kickstarter, you’ll immediately notice that the book title and subtitle have changed! Why? PUBLISH is a new title, but I was including four older books in the Kickstarter package, and I realized this was a great time to give everything a refresh.
The older titles have great information, but they also had some outdated information. After working with the content, I realized that each one had enough revisions that it should be labeled as a 2nd edition. There’s no hard and fast rule, but if you make “substantial” or “significant” changes, it should be a second edition. That means you need a new ISBN. .
Thinking time. I had to use new ISBNs on the revised books. That meant it was an opportunity to look at all the books as a series. Opportunity? Yes. But lots of work. Now, I revised with an eye toward where the book is placed in a series, and not just what it would need to stand alone.
Let’s look at those changes and talk about why it was time to make the changes. A metadata refresh like this shouldn’t be taken lightly; but it has the potential to bring older material back into relevance and earn more money. For paid readers, here’s my reasoning for the metadata changes.