Nobody browses a bookstore's database by hand. Readers type words into search boxes, and systems match those words against the metadata attached to each book. Your metadata is therefore the only part of your marketing that runs every hour of every day, for free, in every store at once.
The fields that do the work
Title and subtitle. The title is for people; the subtitle is for search. A novel's subtitle can be "A Novel". A non-fiction subtitle should say plainly what the book is about and who it is for, because that is what gets matched.
Description. The 150 to 300 words a retailer shows beneath the cover. Write the first sentence for someone who will read nothing else. Use the words a reader would search for, naturally, in the first paragraph. Avoid describing the book as a book ("this book is about…"); describe what the reader gets.
Contributor name. Consistency matters more than anything. Decide how your name appears, with or without a middle initial, and use that form everywhere. Two spellings become two authors in a catalogue, each with half your books.
Subject codes. BISAC codes in North America, Thema internationally. They decide which shelf, physical or virtual, a book sits on. Up to three is typical; the first is the main one. More in BISAC codes explained.
Format, page count, dimensions, price. Dull, but a missing page count or price is a reason for some systems to hide a title.
Publication date. Stores use it to decide what is "new" and whether to show pre-orders. Set it deliberately.
Cover image. Technically separate from the record, but it travels with it, and a missing or low-resolution cover is the most common reason a listing looks abandoned.
Where metadata goes
Your record moves through the trade in a format called ONIX, which is simply an agreed way of writing the fields above as a file that retailers and wholesalers can read. Whoever supplies your record, a distributor, a platform or you, is sending ONIX on your behalf. ONIX for authors explains the format.
Why the record drifts
The usual problem is not bad metadata but stale metadata. A description gets improved on one platform and never copied to the others. A price changes at the printer but not in the feed. The author's new website is on the cover of the second printing but the retailer page still links to the old one.
The fix is to keep one record as the source of truth and push changes outward from it, instead of editing each destination by hand. That is the model ScanSpine uses: edit a field once, and the hosted page, the ONIX feed and the API reflect it immediately.
A practical order of work
- Settle the title, subtitle and your name as it will appear everywhere.
- Write the description, then rewrite the first sentence three times.
- Choose up to three subject codes, most specific first.
- Fill in format, pages, price and date.
- Check the record on every retailer page a month after release, and fix drift at the source.