There's a marketing trend sweeping the nation(s) and it can be described in one word: terrible. That word is "terrible."
Maybe you've seen it and it's also made your skin crawl? What I'm talking about is this:
An Act of Silence: A gripping psychological thriller with a shocking final twist = No.
Digital marketing is an evolving art form, one that typically rewards ingenuity and innovation. But there's a big difference between being creative and simply mishandling data.
Subtitles
Subtitle is a wonderful category that allows you to provide additional information about your book, whether it's fiction or non-fiction. The field is completely optional, but including one can often:
add additional context that positions your book;
boost discoverability (if properly tagged); and
allow your main title to be more artistically adventurous.
A subtitle should be concise, informative, and factual. Like this:
The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story
Fun fact: This is the first application of the word "gothic" to a literary piece. It tells the reader exactly what to expect without bias. If a reader were searching for a gothic read, this book, thanks to its correctly indexed subtitle, would be returned in a search — even though the term "gothic story" is not part of the main title.
A subtitle should not be this:
Another Woman's Husband: From the #1 bestselling author of The Secret Wife a sweeping story of love and betrayal behind the Crown. The category of the book, historical fiction, tells us it’s a novel, when it should be the subtitle that does that work.
When you look up "From the #1 bestselling author" Another Woman's Husband doesn't even come up as the top search! More importantly, the reader starts asking questions: Which crown? What country? What era? Is it fact or fiction? A subtitle should be answering questions, not creating more.
A good rule of thumb: The metadata in the subtitle field should always match what's printed (or digitally rendered — ebooks are books too) on the book cover and/or title page.
It seems that marketing staff are switching out subtitles with promotional headlines to take advantage of their prominent placement on many retailer platforms.
Promotional headline
A promotional headline is a hook, catchphrase, or brief sentence that's meant to stick in a reader's head and propel them towards your book. Properly laid out, subtitles and promotional headlines can work in harmony:
Alaskan Holiday: A Novel. Promotional headline: Debbie Macomber brings us to the Alaskan wilderness for a magical Christmas tale about finding love where it's least expected.
The subtitle primes your reader for the book; the promotional headline pulls them towards it. When mishandled, it becomes messy:
Springtime at Wildacre: the gorgeously uplifting, feel-good romance
Springtime at Wildacre may in fact be gorgeous, uplifting, and make the reader feel good, but that's a subjective statement. As far as subtitle offenders go, it's not the worst, but the real issue is what can happen when that promotional headline is attached to the title by putting it in the subtitle field:
That hashtag is more or less the entire tweet right there. Normally, you'd see something like this if the information supplied in the bibliographic data was misattributed, as in the case of a promotional headline being tagged as a subtitle. To avoid this, you want to make sure your subtitle and promotional headline are properly indicated in ONIX.
Subtitle
ONIX 3.0
<TitleDetail>
<TitleType>01</TitleType> ← List 15, 01 (Distinctive Title)
<TitleElement>
<TitleElementLevel>01</TitleElementLevel> ←List 154, 01 Distinct title of book (product)
<NoPrefix/>
<TitleWithoutPrefix>Springtime at Wildacre</TitleWithoutPrefix>
<Subtitle>A Novel</Subtitle>
</TitleElement>
</TitleDetail>
ONIX 2.1
<Title>
<TitleType>01</TitleType> ← List 15, 01 (Distinctive Title)
<TitleText textcase="02">Springtime at Wildacre</TitleText> ← Textcase, List 14, 02 (all subsequent significant words–eg. nouns, pronouns, etc.–will be capitalized)
<Subtitle>A Novel</Subtitle>
</Title>
One of the reasons publishers often switch out subtitle for promotional headline is because they're trying to call it out separate it from the description. But you can already do this! Instead of doing a lot of formatting to make this sentence the bolded first sentence of your book description (which takes a lot of HTML-ing), you can simply give it its own spot and let it stand on its own two legs. You never know where it will end up (but in a good way, not a "do you know where your marketing headline is?"). One thing's for sure, it will display on your CataList title page:
<TextContent>
<TextType>10</TextType>← promotional headline, list 153
<ContentAudience>00</ContentAudience> ←unrestricted audience, list 154
<Text>
Love is in the air in the little village of Welford...
</Text>
</TextContent>
ONIX 2.1
<OtherText>
<TextTypeCode>09</TextTypeCode> ← promotional 'headline', list 33
<Text>
Love is in the air in the little village of Welford...
</Text>
</OtherText>
Voila!
Bonus round: Keywords!
While we're discussing ONIX, here's something else that should always, always, always be supplied: keywords. Keywords are freeform text separated by semi-colons, and are intended to make your books appear in searches. It's strongly recommended that you DO NOT simply divide your title (e.g., springtime; at; wildacre) as titles are normally already searchable on nearly every platform and listing the words again as keywords just wastes prime real estate. Instead, think of common words that relate to the content of your book. For example:
<Subject>
<SubjectSchemeIdentifier>20</SubjectSchemeIdentifier> ← List 27, 20 (Keywords)
<SubjectHeadingText>Romance; Novel; dogs; village; cottage; Hope Meadows; gorgeous; feel-good; danger; friendship; animal; yorkshire; johnson; debbie; debbie johnson; veterinary</subjectHeadingText> ← list the most important keywords first as many retailers only take the first 3-5!
</Subject>
Keywords aren't meant to be displayed; they're the linguistic links that draw your content to the surface. You can read more about how online retailers are using keywords on our blog.
Subtitles are not keywords, but they're usually indexed, which boosts the discoverability of your book simply because they specify the subject matter. Which is why using the subtitle's designated section to drop in a tagline is not ideal. If anything, general statements tend to push your rankings down. Do you know how many books come back if you type "new, gripping" into a retailer's search engine? It's like The Birds, but with thrillers.
Everything has its place
ONIX is a beautiful language. There's a place for everything and everything has a place (more or less, but that's what updates are for!). Retailers, wholesalers, library systems — they all map their systems to pull specific information from where it ought to be, not where it was snuck in. Playing fast and loose with your bibliographic information is not expressing a creative solution. It's muddying up your display area. And while some of these examples are hilarious, they can also create more work for your marketing team in the long run.
Here's a book that was published in 2016:
The Teacher: A shocking and compelling new crime thriller - NOT for the faint-hearted!
As of this post, this book is two years old and counting, and the subtitle should definitely be updated by the publisher. But, as anyone in the industry knows, keeping your metadata fresh enough to pass validation is hard enough without having to write new content.
So, please, don't sacrifice subtitles and replace them with short descriptions. Subtitles are delightful, useful, and methodical pieces of bibliographic information that allow us to understand what a book is about, even when it has a pun in the title. And isn't that the greatest reason of all to save them?
Moby-Duck: The true story of 28,800 bath toys lost at sea and of the beachcombers, oceanographers, environmentalists, and fools, including the author, who went in search of them
(Okay, this one might be a bit too long.)
