The first version of a book's description is rarely the best. Reviews arrive, you learn which sentence makes people buy, the price changes, you move stores. Each change then has to reach every place the book is listed, and the places multiply: retailers, your site, the wholesaler, a distributor, the back of the book itself.
Take an inventory
Before changing anything, list where the record lives. Typical entries:
- Your own website or author page
- Each retailer where you uploaded directly (KDP, IngramSpark, Kobo, Apple, Google)
- A distributor or aggregator that feeds other stores
- The ISBN agency's database, if you registered there
- Social profiles and link pages
- The printed book, including the cover and any QR code
Mark each entry as either editable by you, fed from somewhere else, or fixed in print.
Change the source, not the copies
Anything fed from somewhere else should be changed at the source, never at the destination, or the next feed overwrites your fix. If a distributor sends your record to twenty stores, change it at the distributor once.
For entries you edit directly, keep a short checklist and work through it every time. It is tedious. It is also the only way the record stays consistent.
What can change without a reprint
- Description, review quotes, author bio
- Price, in the feed and on store pages (the printed price add-on will be wrong until a reprint; many publishers print
90000for this reason) - Subject codes and keywords
- Retailer links on your own pages
- Where a dynamic QR code points
What cannot
- The ISBN. A new edition needs a new number.
- Anything printed: a static URL, the cover price text, the barcode.
The one-record approach
The method above works, but it scales badly: five changes a year across ten destinations is fifty edits and fifty chances to forget one. The alternative is to hold one record and have the destinations pull from it.
ScanSpine is built that way. The record you keep drives the hosted book page, the public ONIX feed that retailers and distributors can ingest, the API, and the destination behind every QR code. Edit the description once and each of those reflects it at once. Destinations that cannot pull from a feed still need their manual edit, but the list of them is shorter, and the feed is the version of record when they disagree.
A sensible rhythm
- At launch: set everything from one checklist.
- Monthly, for the first quarter: open every listing and compare it to the record.
- After that, quarterly, and whenever a review quote is worth adding.
- Before any reprint: reconcile the printed details with the record so the next edition starts clean.