Describe and classify the book
Decide the book's primary audiences and use cases
Decide who is most likely to buy, recommend, assign, or use the book. That answer should drive the description, subject codes, review plan, and outreach list.
Why it matters
Metadata and marketing choices are downstream of this decision. A book positioned for everyone gets vague subject codes, a generic description, and outreach that reaches nobody in particular. Deciding the audiences early also makes it obvious which review outlets, awards, and library markets are worth your time and which are not.
Your part
- What you do
- Decide. Make a judgment about fit, cost, or strategy.
- Who normally owns it
- Author and Publisher. Author drafts; publisher's positioning should agree with it
- When
- Nine to twelve months before publication, before descriptions and subject codes are written (Describe and classify the book: twelve to six months before publication, and before any preorder opens)
How to do it
The full walkthrough
Before anyone writes a description or picks a subject category, someone has to say plainly who the book is for. Not "everyone", but the two or three groups of readers most likely to buy, borrow, teach, or recommend it, and what each group wants from it. A memoir might serve general readers, book clubs, and a particular community. A professional book might serve practitioners, students, and libraries at universities.
Do this work yourself whatever your route, because your answer drives your outreach. If a publisher has a view, it is usually written down in the title information sheet used for sales; ask to see it and compare it with your own list. Differences are worth a conversation, because the publisher's positioning drives the metadata. Where nobody else has done the work, and positioning is often the thinnest part of a hybrid package, your list is the foundation for the subject codes, keywords, description, and comparable titles that follow, so write it down before you touch any of those.
The output is a short list: each audience, why they would want the book, where they find books, and one or two comparable titles they already read.
Common mistakes
- Saying the book is for everyone, which leads to metadata that serves no one.
- Positioning for the audience the author wishes existed rather than the one that buys this kind of book.
- Never seeing the publisher's own positioning, so the author's outreach and the publisher's metadata pull in different directions.
- Choosing comparable titles that are decades old or wildly more famous.
What done looks like
- Two to four named audiences, each with a sentence on why they would want the book.
- The main use case for each audience (read for pleasure, teach a course, give as a gift, solve a problem).
- Where each audience discovers books (specific retailers, libraries, newsletters, communities).
- Comparable titles for each audience, ideally recent.
- Agreement with the publisher on the primary audience, recorded in the Book Identity Sheet.
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