Create and connect the book's identity
Verify contributor roles and name spelling
Before metadata goes out, check every contributor's name spelling and role code against the canonical list, so nobody is misspelled or miscredited in the feed.
Why it matters
A misspelled name creates a second, orphaned author identity in retail and library systems, and it is genuinely hard to merge later. A wrong role can hide a contributor from the listing entirely. Both are avoidable with a five-minute comparison before the feed goes out.
Your part
- What you do
- Verify. Someone else may do it. Inspect the result yourself.
- Who normally owns it
- Publisher and Author. Publisher enters; author verifies before the feed and again at launch
- When
- Before metadata is distributed to retailers and libraries, usually six to nine months before publication, and again at launch (Create and connect the book's identity: twelve to six months before publication, and kept current after that)
Your part changes with your publishing route.
How to do it
The full walkthrough
Metadata feeds carry each contributor with a name and a role code (author, illustrator, translator, editor, narrator, foreword writer, and many more). Retailers and libraries use the role to decide how to display the person and whether to create an author page for them. This item is the verification step for the canonical names and credits you established earlier: it checks what actually went into the feed.
Get the contributor list as entered in the metadata, with roles, and compare it line by line with your Book Identity Sheet. Ask the publisher for it, or open the contributor section on each platform if you entered it yourself. Watch the diacritics, hyphens, suffixes, and initials, which are the usual casualties of data entry, and check that nobody has been added by mistake, which at a press sometimes means the press itself or a staff member.
Repeat the check at launch against live listings, since feeds are updated many times before publication.
Common mistakes
- Checking only the author and skipping the illustrator, translator, or narrator.
- Accepting a stripped diacritic because "the system cannot handle it", when most systems can.
- Entering a foreword writer as a co-author, which changes how the book is displayed.
- Assuming a name that is right on the cover is right in the feed.
Identifiers for Verify contributor roles and name spelling
Set a status on any record and it joins this step. All book identifiers.
| My status | Identifier | Why this matters | Yours |
|---|---|---|---|
| ONIX for Books ONline Information eXchange: the standard file that carries your book's details from your publisher or platform out to retailers and libraries. | If your subtitle is wrong at one retailer, that is one mistake; if it is wrong at a retailer, in a library catalog, and on Google Books, that is usually not three mistakes but one, in the feed, copied three times. It also explains why correcting it in one store often does not stick, because the next feed writes the old value back over your correction. Nobody acts on the feed directly: traditionally and hybrid published authors normally find out who owns it, which is the publisher's metadata or operations team and sometimes a separate distributor, and send corrections there, while a self-published book's feed is generated by the platform from the fields you filled in on its dashboard. Find the person or team that owns the book's feed so a correction goes to the source that can keep it fixed. | Nothing to record | |
| ISNI The International Standard Name Identifier: a sixteen-digit number that says which creator you are when several people share a name. | Without a shared number, databases across publishing and libraries have no agreed answer to which person wrote what, which is how one writer's books end up grouped with another's. It matters most if you have more than one book, share a name with another writer, or work with a publisher that already carries these numbers in its metadata; a first-time author with an uncommon name and one title can reasonably do nothing. You may have one already, because many are created from data that libraries and other contributors feed in, so on every route the first move is normally to search the database rather than to request anything, and a traditionally published author can also ask whether the publisher requests them as part of its metadata practice. Record the sixteen-digit number only after checking that the works under it are yours. | Add your ISNI |
What done looks like
- Every contributor present in the metadata with the correct role code and the canonical spelling.
- Diacritics, hyphens, suffixes, and initials matching the Book Identity Sheet exactly.
- No extra contributors and no missing ones.
- The check repeated against live retail and library listings at launch.
Ask your publisher
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Sources and last checked
- Official source
- No single official page for this step.
- Last checked
- Not checked against its source yet.
- How confident we are
- Verified