Second Story Press is serious about keywords. Allie Chenoweth, Marketing & Promotions Coordinator, joins us to talk about their approach on this month's podcast.
(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)
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Transcript
Ainsley: Welcome to the BookNet Canada podcast. I'm Ainsley Sparkes, the marketing associate at BookNet Canada. And this month, we're talking about keywords. We've been covering this subject quite a bit lately on our blog from who should own them to their adoption in LGBT book metadata to our Canada 150 posts about the most Canadian keywords. And now we're taking into the podcast in a conversation with Allie Chenoweth from Second Story Press.
Allie: So, my name is Allie Chenoweth. I'm the marketing and promotions coordinator at Second Story Press. I've been there... I started interning there in May of 2014. And probably about six to seven months later was asked to stay on in a full-time position. So, I've been there ever since. So, three and a half years or so now. And it's been a wonderful place to work.
Ainsley: This week, we're talking about how Second Story approaches keywords, what prompted them to get serious about it, how they decide which words to use, and how they measure their success. Here's our conversation. When did Second Story start getting serious about keywords? And what was the push behind that?
Allie: Well, almost as if it was like kind of predestined. BISG published their document best practices for keywords and metadata in 2014, which was when I started working in publishing at Second Story. So, probably within maybe the first couple of months of my being there that document got floated across my way from my marketing manager. Emma being like, "Hey, keywords, what are these? What do we need to do about them?" And around the same time, this is probably just kismet, Thema started making a lot of noise as well. Thema subject codes 1.1 version were November 2014. And there certainly was a lot of push from the industry at that time to be like, "Hey, Thema, here's this new subject code system, you should all really get to work employing it." And so at the same time as I was reading through all these documents and really getting my hands on the metadata, I was like, "Well, if we're really concerned about implementing Thema, and that's a new thing we really wanna. I'm already updating all of the subject codes and the metadata anyway, I might as well look at what keywords we already have, improve the quality of them, employ those best practices." Because that's one of the things that I noticed is that keywords field wasn't really understood what it was there for before, what its real function was, and how you had to differentiate it from what you would call keywords in the main descriptive copy. And I'm just a huge data nerd and I like organization and at a lot of the independent game publishers, and I've talked to a few of the other wonderful women who work in marketing and deal a lot with the metadata. And it's certainly a certain kind of person who likes to get their hands on the metadata and improve it, and really understand what it is.
Ainsley: Do you find it's mostly marketing that's responsible for the keywords?
Allie: From some of the people that I've talked to in the smaller houses and the independent houses, it's often the marketing people. I'm not as familiar with how it works in the larger houses. I'd be really interested to know. So, anyone who's free to add me on Twitter @AllieMcAllison and tell me how you're creating your keywords at the multinationals. I'm super curious. And I remember there was that Tech Forum, there was a Tech Forum keynote about who owns the metadata, who owns the keywords, and someone was saying everyone should own the keywords. And it was all very utopian. I think in part, Second Story is quite a small staff. There's seven or eight of us now. Certainly are working to get very segmented. So, one person or two people are in charge of that. But that being said, though, I totally encourage the entire staff to know what that is and get behind that creation and be curious about it. I think sometimes there's an attitude of, "Oh, well, metadata and keywords, that's boring. That's not my job, that's somebody else's job." But I think really it should be something that actively interests everyone. It's a part of everyone's job. It's just invisible, and you don't really see it that much because it's not front-facing.
Ainsley: So, how do you decide which keywords you wanna use for each book?
Allie: It probably begins as we are starting to create the title records. So, let's just say we're starting a new book file from scratch. And usually, we're working on our print catalogue from anywhere six to nine months in advance of publication. And Emma Rogers is our marketing manager, so our marketing team is just her and I. She'll be working on the print catalogue. And we actually include a line in our frontlist, in our print catalogue for keywords, which functions in a different way in the print catalogue than it would in metadata. In part, because if we're trying to hook buyers who are quickly glancing through our catalogue, they wanna get the gist of what a book is about by looking at the cover and these keywords, and then they can sort of decide, "Do I wanna dive in and read the descriptive copy?" So, we're trying to hook them there. And the difference about that is in those keywords, you'll often find repeated phrases that are in the main description because they are keywords. And so, when I decide and I'm creating that metadata record, I'll usually eliminate most of the repetitions because they're not as needed unless it's super, super important, and you really feel it needs to be there. But otherwise, you can just eliminate them.
And then from there, I kind of think of it as reverse Googling. I put myself in the position of if I was a parent or an educator or a librarian or the book buyer in this case, and I know that this person really wants to read my book, what are they going to search so that they can find my book? I think of it a lot of getting in a librarian's head, how would they go about trying to search for this? And I think anyone who's an expert Googler knows that sometimes your first search is not always gonna provide you with the answers that you're looking for. And you have to be very considerate about the kinds of words that you use. And particularly because the educational market, we publish a lot of children's books and teen books that touch on themes of social justice. And we have a very successful series of children's books about the Holocaust. And so, I often put myself in the shoes of if I was someone who was looking for this, what are the keywords that I would search for so that this book can show up higher in the search rankings? So, that's kind of my approach. But then there are times just because of language where you can have lots of different ways of expressing keywords, and you want people which is the best one, you only have so many characters with keywords, you only have so much space. But you also wanna make sure that you're casting the net pretty wide. So, I remember it was just like a light bulb moment for me when I was listening to Erica Lehman's presentation on demystifying Amazon keywords at Tech Forum where she really dove down into if you're searching for the words, America, United States of America, USA, U.S., which ones show up when you search them? And or can they be conflated? Can they be absorbed into each other? Which ones work best?
Erica: But the variations on a theme of America was on my mind from the beginning is something that I wanted to set out. So, for this book, I originally applied just United States as a keyword and no other forms. And then I searched for the other forms in Amazon to see if this book would come up based on any other variant. What I found was that Amazon could find this book based on United States as a keyword if I searched the United States, of course, US or USA, but not if I searched for US with punctuation or for America. So then I updated the keywords and I changed United States to US because if that caught everything that United States caught, that's fewer characters and that would be ideal. And I also added America because for this book, it seemed like an important search term to capture. So, I saw that this one was functioning the same as United States that captured United States, US, and USA, and obviously, America now. So, it was only not capturing US with punctuation. So, when I put that on another book, I found that that caught USA and US, but not United States and still not America. So, at this point, it was clear that certain variations were being recognized as the same and certain of them weren't and the associations weren't always lining up exactly. But I could say at this point that United States and US would capture the same keyword searches, and US would not capture United States. And none of them would capture all of them and none of them would capture America. This is really frustrating. I think you're laughing because you realize that, very frustrating because if you wanna capture all the different ways somebody might search for this, you're gonna include a lot of characters that you really shouldn't have to do. It's just not efficient. So this was very frustrating. I did not like climbing this.
Allie: My eyes were opened because it happens a lot in our books where I think about teachers who are searching for books that are about the Holocaust or World War II. So, in some of my keywords I have World War II, T-W-O spelled out. Do I put World War II, two with the numeral? World War II, II in the Roman numerals. Second World War. There's so many different ways of expressing the same thing, and you do wanna make sure that it's found, but you also don't. That's also you only have so many keywords, you don't wanna miss out on putting in another keyword that might be really useful. So, there's a lot of thought process. And certainly, Google's Ngram tool is a really good one. If you aren't familiar with it, you should totally use it. It's super fascinating. For those who don't know it, basically, it's tracking the frequency of usage of a word or phrase over the course of as far as printed books they have in Google Books. And you'll see on a graph how frequently words or phrases are used over time. And you can see what's really being used now, what's on the rise, what's declining.
I had an interesting dilemma when I was picking out keywords for an adult fiction book that we published called Gone to Pot. And it's about an older lady who lives in Nelson BC who's sort of down on her luck and her job falls through and she sort of falls into growing pot in her basement. And so, I thought, well, there's a market for people who are looking for pot-growing fiction, but what are the words that they're gonna be looking for. So, I did like a Google Ngram search to be like marijuana growing versus pot-growing versus weed versus grow up. And I was just like this is gonna be, I really hope that this book gets picked up by the stoner community. And I'm sure many people are surprised to hear about this racy fiction coming from Second Story Press. But that was really useful just because even though I'm a fairly young person, I wanna make sure that I'm using the phrases that are hip with the kids, what's actually being used.
And it also applies in a lot of ways to the language that's getting used and preferred and especially with the books that we publish that deal with residential schools and the Indigenous peoples of Canada. Certainly, when I was updating keywords, one of the things that I've done is we have updated the language that we find is more preferred now. And it changes and it constantly changes. And there's lots of things that are like this. And I think that publishers should react and respond to this and think about how, especially when books are important like that, they need to be in the hands of the people who are actively looking for those materials. And you should be using the terms that they are now preferring and searching for more. It's a missed opportunity if you're not doing that.
Ainsley: Right. If they're outdated.
Allie: Exactly. And I think and also when it comes to timeliness, that's the other reason that you might choose to go back and update your keywords. I was thinking about this that really if you were a publisher right now and if you're publishing a book or you have published books about bias in the media, it would be a total shame if you are not using the keyword phrase "fake news" in your keywords. Just think about how many people are gonna be Googling books right now about how do I tell the difference between fake news and real news. Those books exist prior to this time, they should be using those keywords.
Ainsley: So, you talked a little bit about reviewing keywords for outdated terms. Other than that, do you ever go back and look at your keywords for the books? Or is it more just kind of set it and forget it until something comes up?
Allie: In practice, I am much better at consistently reconsidering and updating keywords for frontlist and recent titles because I'm probably updating those records anyway. Usually with like, oh, we have a new review, we have a new award or whatnot. And so, I'm often looking at those to see if there's something else. Even sometimes I'll read a review, a really thoughtful review of one of our children's books and they'll use a keyword and we'll be like, "Oh, that's a great keyword. I should put that in there." So, sometimes the reviewers they can help you out there. But that being said, I don't know if I will revisit keywords consistently in a systematic way. But that's really only because if I had the time, I totally would. If I had the resources, I definitely would. And I think it is something that is worth doing so... And I would say it's definitely your way backlist is not as much of your priority. But certainly, if you have key backlist titles that you know are selling pretty well or continue to sell well, they have a longer life. And that's often the case with children's books is you get a book that will sell for years and years and years, especially if the librarians and the educators love it. That's when you can start saying, "We should go back and revisit these keywords." As more and more books get published, you wanna make sure that those key backlist titles stay relevant too. Keywords is a great way to do that.
Ainsley: So, how do you measure the success of your keywords?
Allie: To be honest, I haven't done it in a systematic way to see if it has translated into sales. Part of that is a matter of taking the time to deep dive into that data. Having seen the work that Erica Lehman did at MIT was very affirming because she did do the work to prove that keywords can equal sales. And so I trust that. I definitely drank the Kool-Aid when it came to keywords equal sales. The other reason that it's harder to measure keyword success is because right now, the only retailer that we really know who is using them is Amazon. And without giving away too much of what our business model is, I mean, realistically, Amazon only makes up a considerable, enough of a percentage that we certainly don't want to neglect it. And we wanna help encourage it as much as possible. But it would be harder for me to explain the uptick in any recent or frontlist sales increasing on Amazon and say, "Yes, that's due to keywords." You could really right now I could only look at maybe there's a couple of backlist titles that I've seen, "Oh, hey, suddenly, we have some sales there that we didn't for, or it had sort of flatlined." It's harder to measure that way. But I have faith.
And I think the other reason that I personally really wanted to push to get keywords and all these other data updates done is because I do hope and believe that there will be more online retailers who will be implementing keywords. And it seems like there are rumblings going around that people are trying to figure out whether or not this is something that can be implemented in their systems. And I think it's a two-way street because we do know that it's really only gonna be a huge benefit if lots of publishers are providing good quality keywords. And that's always the trouble is what is a good quality keyword because you can have keywords in place, but they might not do anything. If you're putting best-seller in your keywords, don't do that. If you wanna show from the rooftops that your book is a best-seller, put it in your main description or how audiobook is one of the top used keywords. Format is not something that you use keywords for. So, I think when best practices are really applied, I think that's when we'll have the leverage to say to retailers keywords this is happening. It means sales, it means benefits for all of us.
Ainsley: Yeah. I mean, it seems like it'd be a good tool for discoverability, but only as good as the data provided.
Allie: Precisely. In terms of measuring keyword success, I do occasionally just make sure that the keywords are functional, that they are working in Amazon, that they are doing its job. Sometimes it's hard to do if you're using really general keywords and there's lots of books that are about that subject. I decided to do a little bit of an experiment just to make sure that keywords are working. And I chose a really specific keyword in one of our children's picture books that I had a feeling was not gonna be used by many people. So, we have this children's picture book. It's called Tilt Your Head, Rosie the Red and it's about a little girl named Rosie who has a friend, some Muslim girl. Her name is Fatty Mata, and she's being teased on the playground for wearing a headscarf. So, I typed into amazon.ca searching under children's books headscarf because that's one of the keywords that I chose to use. And sure enough, there's like three titles and ours is number two. So I was like, "Great. It's working. That's exactly what I wanted to do." But strangely, and this is where having data from so many different suppliers get in, it can get sticky.
I did the same search in Amazon's US site, which is gonna be receiving data likely from our US distributor. And we don't have the same way of getting our keywords out directly. So, I did the same search. And sure enough, my book didn't appear on the US site, but it did on the Canadian. And to make this mystery even weirder, the word headscarf appears in the main description in both cases. So, that opens up a weird can of worms where you say, "Oh, so is Amazon taking keywords and that's it's higher up in the hierarchy of search terms." I don't fully really wanna go there because that's another big question, is that a pandora's box I really wanna open? But at the same time, though, it is interesting to see that. And also on the US site just because there's so many more books that are available on the US site. Sure enough, there was like 20 titles that had headscarf as a keyword. There's only three in the Canadian site on Amazon. So, I think, hopefully, in the future, there will be some ways for us to smooth that out. It's a process.
Ainsley: Going back a bit to one of your earlier points about wide versus narrow keywords. It seems like it's such a hard balance to strike. You wanna get a big enough set of eyes on your title, but you also wanna reach the really...
Allie: Super-narrow specific...
Ainsley: Specific searches that people are doing. How do you balance that?
Allie: Try to do a mix of both. Maybe about 50-50 of keywords that are a little more broader, a little more general, and then some that are very specific. I think one of the things that certainly has affected the way that I create some keywords is in part a few years ago, Second Story did a project where they consulted with educators in Ontario about the specific things that are a part of their curriculum. Things like character education, which is a phrase you might not normally think of searching, and all of these sorts of keywords. They wanna teach kids empathy, they wanna teach kids courage and perseverance and things like that. So, there are a couple of things from that general list of things that we've been using for a few years. I do often choose from that list because someone is searching for those. But then there is also the specific nature of a book. I think sometimes I also often think about when I'm choosing the most specific BISAC code for a book. I frequently am thinking like, why isn't there a more specific BISAC code for this? I sometimes think about what piece of information is this subject code missing? What category of books would I put this in?
So, I think, for example, we have a new teen book that's, in many ways, it has a lot of broad themes. And I had to select which ones did I think people were really gonna be searching for. And I could put lots of things like empathy or bullying. I chose to go with confronting homophobia because I put myself in the shoes of someone who's like, "I'm looking for a book that deals with this." And I also included the phrase allyship because that's a buzzword that's really getting a lot of uptick in the community and in the sort of educator library world. It wouldn't really serve us well to use something like LGBT in the keywords there. That's already one of the bisects anyway. But also you're gonna search for books that are LGBT-friendly on Amazon, and you're probably gonna get pages and pages of gay romance. And that's not what this book is about.
So, in a lot of ways, it is almost like what do I wanna eliminate with my keywords? I mean, to some degree, it kind of helps that Second Story publishes a very specific kind of book that fits into our mandate, whether it's a children's book or a teen book or an adult book, and I do approach keywords a little bit differently for each age category. It's in part a primary buyer would be. I also try to not just think about who the primary buyer is on Amazon because I do wanna aim for one day, but having them not be the only one using keywords. You can always go on and on about like here the do's and don'ts of keywords, but BISG really covered that. And certainly, it's another one of the reasons that I come back to Tech Forum every year because there's always something new, there's always something changing that you need to learn and adjust and it's keywords.
Ainsley: Thanks to Ally from Second Story Press for joining me on this month's podcast. We hope you've come away with lots of keyword inspiration. We've added some links in the description of this episode. You can find the video of Erica Lehman's Tech Forum presentation "Demystifying the Inner Workings of Amazon Keywords" and a link to Google Ngram. And if you're interested in the BookNet Canada keyword audit that Ally mentioned or a biblio overview, send an email to biblioshare@booknetcanada.ca. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for this project. And of course, thanks to you for listening.
