Find and control the metadata source
Audit the publisher's official book page
When the book's page appears on the publisher's website, check every fact and link on it, and check again whenever it changes.
Why it matters
The publisher's page is where your metadata is supposed to be right. If it is wrong there, every journalist, librarian, and bookseller who checks the source gets the wrong answer, and they will reasonably trust it over you. It is also the easiest listing to get fixed, because the publisher controls it directly.
Your part
- What you do
- Verify. Someone else may do it. Inspect the result yourself.
- Who normally owns it
- Author and Publisher. Publisher builds and maintains the page; author audits and reports
- When
- As soon as the page appears on the publisher's site, again at launch, and after every known change (Find and control the metadata source: twelve to six months before publication, then whenever a correction is needed)
Your part changes with your publishing route.
How to do it
The full walkthrough
Most publishers create a page for each book on their website: cover, description, author biography, formats with ISBNs and prices, publication date, retailer links, and sometimes reviews and an excerpt. It is often the page journalists, librarians, and booksellers treat as authoritative, and it is often maintained by someone who has never read the book.
Find the page as soon as it goes live, which at a publisher usually means when the season's catalog is published, months before the book. If you published the book yourself, the equivalent is your own book page plus any page a platform generates for you. Either way, compare every field against your Book Identity Sheet: the retailer links point to the right edition, the description is the approved one, the biography is current. Report discrepancies to whoever maintains the page, which is the publisher's web or marketing contact or you, and log them.
Re-audit whenever something changes: a new format, a price change, a new endorsement, a corrected biography. Set a reminder to look at it at launch and every few months afterward.
Common mistakes
- Never looking at the page because "the publisher handles it".
- Checking the description and skipping the ISBNs and prices, which are the fields most likely to be stale.
- Not testing the retailer links, which often point at a preorder page or a different format long after launch.
- Assuming a page that was right in the catalog season is still right at publication.
What done looks like
- The page found and bookmarked as soon as it is live.
- Every field compared with the Book Identity Sheet: title, subtitle, contributors, formats, ISBNs, prices, dates, description, biography, cover image.
- Every retailer link tested to confirm it lands on the right edition.
- Discrepancies reported to the right contact and added to the correction log.
- A re-audit at launch and after every known change.
Ask your publisher
Copy this into an email. Replace the bracketed parts with your details.
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