Whether you call them categories, subjects or genres, how you label your book is vitally important, perhaps especially so in these times of the digital marketplace. Being placed correctly in ebook stores and libraries can help in both regular searches and with discovery techniques such as “Similar Titles”.
The EPUB format has been developed to allow your work to be properly tagged with as many subjects as is necessary to describe the title correctly, allowing any ebook reading system to categorise your books appropriately.
If you’re creating your EPUB files manually then you’ll need to open the .OPF in your favourite text editor. Then inside the metadata tags you can add your subject tags.
Here are some example entries;
<dc:subject>Fiction</dc:subject>
<dc:subject>Comedy</dc:subject>
<dc:subject>Satire</dc:subject>
You can add as many subjects as you like, though it’s probably best to keep things focused–adding 50 tags will be just as bad as adding none.
The arbitrary keyword or phrase used inside the subject tag hasn’t been standardised by the IDPF, but I’d recommend using the BISAC, LoC (Library of Congress) or other standardised system.
At this point you probably think there’s nothing more to be said on the topic, however… Continue reading “EPUB Creation: When Subject Matters”