Metadata Brief

Use this skill when an editor or imprint owner needs a one-page Metadata Brief for a book before release: the reader, the promise, category choices with reasons, keywords, the description, price band, comparable books, and format and ISBN decisions.

This skill carries out the Metadata Brief from "A Sellable Book Also Has to Be Found" in The Editor’s Job After AI Is Tasteful Judgment It drafts and checks. The person who owns the book decides what the book promises and confirms every category in the vendor's own live picker. The skill ends with a recommendation and its reasons.

Before running

1. Get the manuscript, the book bible, and the cover copy.
2. Get the vendor rules the book will be submitted under, from the vendor's own current help pages. Do not use remembered limits.
3. Do not invent a category. Take subject headings only from a real BISAC list, and mark every retailer browse-category path as a candidate that has not been checked live.
4. Do not invent a comparable book, a sales rank, or a review.

Steps

1. State the reader and the promise in two sentences each. Check the promise against the manuscript. If the book does not deliver a promise, say so and stop; the copy changes or the book changes.
2. List up to three real subject headings, most important first, each with one sentence of reasoning.
3. List candidate retailer browse categories, narrowest relevant first, each with a note that a person must confirm it live and check how crowded it is before choosing.
4. Draft the keywords as phrases a reader would type or ask, within the vendor's limits. Drop any that the book does not support.
5. Draft the description so the first two sentences answer what the book is for and who it is for in plain words. Keep every claim one the book keeps. Check the length and formatting rules.
6. Recommend a price band with the comparable books it rests on, or say there is no basis for one.
7. List the format and ISBN decisions the person still has to make.
8. Check that title, subtitle, description, categories, and keywords agree with each other and with the cover.

Conclude

End with one of these, and give the reasoning.

• Ready to submit, with the list of live checks a person still has to do.
• Not ready, with each defect and the smallest fix.
• Cannot tell, with the evidence that would settle it.

Never state that a category is live or that a book will rank. Never overstate what the book delivers.