Audit every retailer listing
Check every major book listing
At launch, compare the same nine fields on every major listing against your Book Identity Sheet, so the book is described the same way everywhere readers might find it.
Why it matters
By launch day the book's metadata has passed through several hands and several systems, and the launch pass is the last chance to catch errors before readers, reviewers, and award juries see them. A consistent description everywhere is also what makes search engines and retailers treat the book as one thing rather than several.
Your part
- What you do
- Do it. You normally do this yourself.
- Who normally owns it
- Author and Publisher. Author checks; publisher or platform corrects
- When
- At launch (Audit every retailer listing: three months before publication, in launch week, and at each later audit)
Your part changes with your publishing route.
How to do it
The full walkthrough
This is the launch-day pass that ties the individual retailer audits together. Take your Book Identity Sheet, which holds the correct version of every fact about the book, and check nine fields on every major listing: cover image, title, subtitle, contributors (author, illustrator, translator, narrator, foreword writer), description, publication date, price, format, and page count. Do it for each format on each site: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Google Books, Apple Books, Kobo, the audio retailers, Goodreads, and any retailer important in your territory.
The point of doing all of them in one sitting is consistency. Listings disagree with each other more often than they are outright wrong, and a subtitle that appears on three sites and not on two, or a contributor credited on one and not the rest, is the kind of thing that fragments search results and splits reviews. A single pass with the sheet beside you catches those disagreements in a way that separate audits do not.
Collect every discrepancy into one message rather than sending ten. Where the fields come from a publisher's or a press's feed, send the list to whoever they name for metadata corrections. Where they are yours to fix, make each correction at its source platform and allow time for it to propagate.
Record the date of the pass and what you found. It becomes the baseline for the quarterly checks.
Common mistakes
- Doing the pass from memory instead of from the Book Identity Sheet.
- Checking the main format and skipping the others.
- Sending corrections one at a time as you find them.
- Missing a contributor credit because the main author is correct.
- Not recording what was checked, so the next pass starts from nothing.
Identifiers for Check every major book listing
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 |
A template for this
Retailer listing correction requestA clear request to a retailer's support team to fix one error on a product page, with the exact field, current value, correct value, and who supplies the listing data.
When to use it: Use this when a retailer's product page shows something wrong that you cannot change yourself, and you have already told the party that controls the metadata feed. Paste it into the retailer's author or publisher support form where one exists. Do not use this when you control the listing through a self-publishing dashboard. Change it there first; support can only help with what the dashboard will not let you edit.
What done looks like
- All nine fields checked for every format on every major listing, against the Book Identity Sheet.
- Discrepancies between listings noted, not just outright errors.
- One consolidated correction request per controlling party, with links and the correct values.
- The pass dated and recorded as the baseline for later checks.
- Contributor credits (illustrator, translator, narrator) present wherever they belong.
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