This topic came up in conversation elsewhere, inspiring me to do an annotated post of how I use Schema.org information to partially control how my book's metadata is presented on the Internet.

Intelligence for search engines

In an ideal universe, search engines would understand the context of the data that they retrieve. They would just know that a recipe is a recipe, that a book is a book, that a business location is a business location, and so forth. To the degree that they have gotten as far as they have, it's because of metadata — data about the data that they retrieve — that allows them some intelligence about presenting the information that they find.

To do this requires a combination of descriptive metadata from the data owner, and collation and presentation work from the search engine presenter. As in most such things, Google seems to be leading the way.

Google's Information Cards

When you search on a restaurant using Google, you get not only ranked links scrolling down the screen — you also get a nicely formatted “information card” on the top right of the screen that collects the information you would find most useful in an intelligent way.

A version of this article was first published here.

There’s more to being an indie than the writing

We come to self-publishing out of a love of writing, but if we stop there, and go no further, then we risk never developing our writing into a full-fledged business. Writing itself can be such a challenge that it’s tempting to postpone dealing with some of the other challenges in becoming a fully-developed self-publisher.

Certainly, without the writing, you have no product. But without the rest of it, you have no business. Now, not everyone wants to build a business, and that’s fine, but for the rest of us…

I published my first book 5 years ago. As I look back, I can see all the places where I invested in things beside my writing. If I had done nothing but write, I’d have several more books – but then, I’d probably be selling fewer of them, in fewer places, in fewer formats, and I’d be less prepared to support my new books as they emerge. On the whole, I recommend balance between the writing and everything else.

It helps that I have a technical background and some experience with professional photography, so investing in things like learning how to format my own books and make my own covers (out of someone else’s background art) came relatively easily to me. So did building my first websites, one as a publisher (Perkunas Press) and one as a platform for other writing friends (HollowLands). That held me for the first couple of years as I tooled up and kept my costs down.

But I face learning curves, too, just like all of us, and my biggest are:

• Product availability (format & distribution)
• Marketing
• Learning the deep processes of the current (traditional) book trade