Excited by the possible storytelling functions and forms that digital technology enables, I set out to foster meaningful encounters between author and audience in a digital narrative project titled We See Each Other. I had never considered the possibility of an invisible third party shaping these encounters, but they were there, ever-present and impossible to escape.

Pictured: We See Each Other home page

For many storytellers working online, large companies providing web services, like hosting or searching, play a constant mediating role which can shape stories in subtle but significant ways. This ‘mediation’ byweb services often requires users to participate in the reduction and over-simplification of people and concepts in order to easily present or index content. I refer to this as ‘totalising’, which can be challenging for practitioners concerned with fostering more democratic narrative experiences or challenging narrow and stereotypical representations of people, places or issues .

Many scholars (Morozov 2011; Jenkins, Ford and Green 2013; Noble 2018) highlight how structural inequalities and totalisation manifests on the web. For instance, Jenkins Ford and Green (2013) point out that meaningful participation online is ‘linked to educational and economic opportunities’ and Noble (2018) outlines the insidious ways in which search algorithms promote racist and misogynistic representations of people . But I want to provide a creative practitioner’s insight into how these power relations play out in digital narrative practice and examine some of the ways we can negotiate these issues.

The first encounter many creative practitioners will have with the underlying political structures of the web will happen early in the lifespan of a storytelling project. To create artwork online, creators must engage with some sort of intermediary service. In my case, during the construction of We See Each Other I set up the project domain and hosting through a leading web host provider. It seemed fairly innocuous at the time, but powerful intermediaries such as search engines and hosting providers shape how the Internet is used and who uses it. Morozov (2011, 209), for example, explains how people from countries such as ‘Belarus, Cuba, North Korea, Syria, Zimbabwe and certain areas of Sudan’ can face various unfair sanctions on the Internet simply because a large proportion of intermediary companies reside in the USA. For instance, the US government has a targeted policy to sanction particular former government officials and organisations in Zimbabwe (Morozov 2011, 209). This means American Internet companies should vet all their Zimbabwean customers, but because this ‘is so expensive and time consuming’ many companies end up banning all ‘Zimbabwean nationals’ (Morozov 2011, 209).

One company caught unfairly excluding a Zimbabwean organisation is BlueHost (Morozov 2011, 210): the very same hosting company I used to set up my digital narrative project. Because of the privilege I have of living and working in Australia I was able to use this competitively priced hosting service without interruption, but this may not be the case for all digital narrative practitioners.

The next encounter many creative practitioners may have with the underlying political structures of the web is when attempting to distribute their work. Making a work accessible to audiences means engaging with search engines, and in particular engaging with the most ubiquitous search engine, Google. Navigating this process can be difficult to negotiate for creative practitioners. Noble (2018, 100) explains, ‘what shows up on the first page of search is typically highly optimised advertising-related content, because Google is an advertising company and its clients are paying Google for placement on the first page either through direct engagement with Google’s AdWords program or through a grey market of search engine optimisation products that help sites secure a place on the first page of results’. This search engine optimisation (SEO) process can not only be expensive, but can also shape the work itself, as I discovered whilst constructing We See Each Other.

Currently, Google (2018) describes their algorithm as analysing ‘hundreds of different factors to try to surface the best information the web can offer, from the freshness of the content, to the number of times your search terms appear and whether the page has a good user experience.’ While Google’s algorithm uses hundreds of factors to determine page ranking, and it is not clear what the weight of each factor is, Google does highlight a few key factors; website speed, backlinks, keyword relevancy, submitting an xml sitemap, and editing page metadata. Backlinks and keyword relevancy are two SEO tasks I will explore in more depth because they are particularly hard to negotiate as a creative practitioner.

Google (2018) explains backlinks by stating that ‘if other prominent websites on the subject link to the page, that’s a good sign the information is high quality.’ This part of Google’s algorithm means the more that high ranking popular websites share links to creative practitioners’ work, the better the work will rank in Google, and the more traffic it will have. This can be problematic because it relies upon creative practitioners having connections to other influential and experienced  webmasters with high ranking websites, thus entrenching the same power structures present in the analogue world. Apart from the exciting storytelling possibilities, part of the reason I had (naively) turned to online platforms as a means for the creation and distribution of my work was because creators appeared to be able to make works that were directly accessible to huge audiences. But, the notion that online distribution is a democratic utopia obscures the wealthy companies shaping the Internet. In my case, because of the lack of connection myself and my co-creative team had to influential and wealthy domains, We See Each Other remains a low-ranking website resulting in a digital narrative that is less accessible to audiences.

Pictured: ‘We See Each Other’ search dominated by viral video from Real Housewives series

The second potentially challenging SEO task for creative practitioners worth discussing is identifying and using keywords. Identifying keywords that are most relevant to the content of the project is important to ensure that the website ranks highly when people search these terms. However, using these keywords is a highly rigid task. It involves using the keyword phrase in the title of the work. The title of the work must employ a header html font tag to be recognised by the algorithm, and the keyword phrase must appear frequently enough in the body text of the page or post (but not too many times as Google may penalise the site’s ranking for keyword spam) (Patel 2018). For artists trying to dismantle dominantrepresentations which define people, places and issues in totalising and stereotypical ways, moving away from definitive phrases is key. Therefore, researching popular keywords and optimising the content to match these phrases can undo some of the work towards less stereotypical and narrow representations. I have faced this struggle with keywords in my own work. The overall aim of We See Each Other was to move away from limiting and totalising representations of people from refugee backgrounds and towards more ethical encounters between people from refugee backgrounds and audience members. I asked myself what keywords might apply to the stories on the website. ‘Australian stories’, ‘refugee stories’, ‘stories about family’, ‘stories about war’ and ‘stories about choices’ all seemed somewhat relevant. But no matter how many phrases I came up with, none of them truly seemed to capture the project or the stories. Privileging a few words seemed absurd given the diversity of the stories and the storytellers, and using popular keywords  would have forced me to resort to privileging words and labels I was actively attempting to resist.

Even for creative practitioners whose work was not created with the specific goal of dismantling dominant or stereotypical representations, their engagement with SEO contributes to the way stories and people are found and framed. Noble (2018, 13) points out that:

the near-ubiquitous use of search engines in the U.S. and perhaps worldwide, demands a closer inspection of what values are assigned to race and gender in classification and web indexing systems, and warrants exploration into the source of these kinds of representations and how they came to be so fundamental to the classification of human beings.

In this statement, Noble highlights that classifying and labelling human beings and creative works, is a fundamental part of the way the web operates presently. Noble (2018, 1) contends that this is harmful because it can ‘reinforce oppressive social relationships’. Noble (2018, 14) goes on to describe her experience of searching the key terms ‘black girls’ on Google and discovering that ‘hotblackpussy.com’ was the first hit. Noble is clear that Google has a role and responsibility in this algorithmic oppression, but content creators like me looking to distribute through Google also have a role to play in constructing the way humans are classified and the ways content is framed. As creative practitioners we must examine the ways in which we choose to classify our authors, characters and subjects in order to rank highly in Google. It not only frames the way audiences interpret our creative work, it also has an effect on the way certain groups of people are represented and found in search engines.

Not all SEO tasks are so restrictive though. For example, editing the metadata or descriptions displayed on Google, Facebook and Twitter can provide opportunities to extend the way audience members might experience their encounters with the authors or narrative and make the experience more meaningful. Without editing the metadata, words from the titles and body text of a URL are selected by a bot to create a short description of the page. These descriptions appear on Google search lists and underneath Facebook or Twitter hyperlinks. Taking control over this element of SEO allows creative practitioners to rewrite and reshape how their work is framed. In my case, writing a few sentences of description allowed the authors and I to frame the work in a way that challenged narrow representations of people from refugee backgrounds.

Pictured: The metadata for We See Each Other as it appears on Google

Editing metadata is also an opportunity for creative practitioners to extend the interactive functions of their work beyond the domain of the site. During the construction of We See Each Other, manipulating the metadata allowed me to frame the encounter between author and audience from the moment someone found the site via social media or search engine. It also allowed me to construct further meaning  and metaphor for the audience to interpret when they shared the work over social media. So, when sharing a particular link to We See Each Other via Twitter or Facebook, the user’s friends or followers will see a link which reads, ‘I chose to see the authors of We See Each Other.’ The description underneath this link is then targeted toward their friends or followers, asking them directly if they will choose to see the authors too.

Pictured: ‘Screenshot of backend of seeeachother.com whilst editing metadata’

Editing metadata is not only an opportunity to continue to shape the creative work, it is an opportunity to shape how people (authors and characters) are represented and classified, rather than ceding agency to bots created by a powerful company, like Google.

Through my own experience, I have observed some of the challenges creative practitioners face when working in digital spaces to foster more democratic narrative experiences or challenge dominant stereotypical representations in their work.This is by no means a comprehensive list of these challenges, but it is my hope that by outlining these challenges, this part of the digital narrative construction process will become more visible. Other creative practitioners will have much to contribute to this conversation, particularly as the challenges we face will grow as algorithms and digital tools continue to evolve at a rapid pace. By observing and critiquing the political context of the digital tools and services we use, together we can make more informed choices about how we engage with them and gain more control over the effect they have on both our work and society more broadly. In particular, I believe that negotiating our engagement with these tools and services more critically can assist us to foster more democratic narrative experiences and challenge dominant stereotypical representations more comprehensively.

References:

Google. 2018. ‘How search algorithms work.’ Accessed February 1, 2018. https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/algorithms/.

Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable media: Creating value and meaning in a networked culture. New York: New York University Press.

Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. The net delusion: The dark side of Internet freedom. 1st ed. New York: PublicAffairs.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York: New York University Press.

Patel, Neil. 2018. ‘SEO copywriting: How to write content for people and optimize for google.’ Accessed February 1, 2018. https://neilpatel.com/blog/seo-copywriting-how-to-write-content-for-people-and-optimize-for-google-2/.

‘Anyway, those tickets, the old ones, they didn’t tell you where you were going, much less where you came from. He couldn’t remember seeing any dates on them either, and there was certainly no mention of time. It was all different now, of course. All this information. Archie wondered why this was’. — White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000) 

In spite of the above quote, 2000 may well now appear to have been a golden age in terms of information. In those long gone halcyon days, none of us had to worry about terms like big data, discoverability, feeds, and, quite possibly the scariest of them all, metadata.

All of us are awash with information now, drowning in an ever expanding sea of data. But it’s worth remembering that one school of thought, Clay Shirky’s, holds that there’s no such thing as information overload, only filter failure.

Let’s focus on metadata: What is it? Why are people always talking about it? And what’s it got to do with me anyway?

Definitions are never easy. But actually, in this case, it is. Metadata is simply information that describes your book, things like the ISBN, the price, the title, the author, the publication date, the description, the format, etc.

These things can be about identification (ISBN), they can be bibliographic (author, title, format) or transactional (price). What they have in common is that they’re all pieces of information that describe your book. And that’s it.

A key thing to remember is that metadata isn’t new. We’ve always needed this sort of information (think Advance Information sheets, the humble forerunner of the data feed) and we’ve always had people who care about it (the even humbler Information Manager).

But why do I hear so much about it now?  

To help answer this, let’s pause for a moment to think about iTunes. Here’s an iTunes library below. (It isn’t mine by the way, before you silently condemn my taste in music).

We’ve all seen this before and it’s familiar. But what are we actually seeing? Well, we can see information about artist, song title, album, genre, length of song, etc. You can probably see where I’m going with this: we’re looking at information that describes this collection of music. We’re looking at metadata.

And as we know from using iTunes, it’s incredibly useful. It allows you to group together genres, find favourite songs, create playlists, sort, filter, remove. The list goes on. So imagine your iTunes library without any metadata. You wouldn’t be able to do any of those things. In fact, your library would be pretty much unusable.

Let’s carry that analogy over to books. Imagine walking into a large bookshop and finding that all the book covers on all the shelves were blank and none of the shelves were marked.

If you had a book that was among all this, how would you possibly find it? The simple answer is, you wouldn’t. And neither would anyone else.

Now take that bookshop, and imagine it to be 1000 times bigger with 1000 times more books. And imagine it to be open to practically anybody in any country in the world at any time.

That’s the internet. And the miniscule needle in this gargantuan haystack is your book.

Without good metadata, you’re effectively putting your book with a blank cover up against hundreds if not thousands of competing titles in the biggest bookshop you can imagine. In 2000, when high streets bookshops were plentiful and ebooks a distant glimmer, metadata was important. Now, in the online environment, it’s life or death.

This is a good time to bring in another one of those scary words. Discoverability. Many publishers spend huge amounts of money and commit vast resources on complex methods of boosting discoverability for their titles.

This isn’t necessarily misguided, but having good metadata is the first step towards discoverability, which is ensuring that your book can be easily found online. It’s a step a surprising number of people skip. Making sure your metadata is in order is quick, easy and incredibly effective in terms of helping your book reach its intended audience.

So how do you do that? What is ‘good’ metadata?

A really good place to start is Book Industry Commission, the book industry’s supply chain organisation. They have developed a standard called BIC Basic which outlines the minimum metadata requirements for a title.

The information you need to supply to Nielsen, ideally four months ahead of publication, is shown in the example below. If you are self publishing you will also need to supply the information to your distributor and if you are publishing directly with platforms such as Amazon KDP or Kobo Writing Life, you will need to enter it onto their systems too (they provide step by step guides).

Title: Azar’s Brilliant First Novel

ISBN: 9780000000000

Product Form: Hardback

BIC Code: FA (Modern Fiction)

Publisher: Azar Classics

Imprint: Debut Dazzlers

Publication Date: 26th March 2015 (This might slip)

Supplier: Wonderful Warehousing

Availability Status: Not Yet Published

Price: £9.99

Territorial Rights: World

Description Copy: A day in the life of a beleaguered information manager, the digital Ulysses for the 21st century.

There are other things you can do, but the above is the bare minimum. If it’s the one thing you remember from this article, you won’t have wasted your time. Supplying the book jacket in good time is also highly advisable. We do all judge books by their covers and a blank placeholder will impress no one.

Many people think metadata ends there. You send it out  pre-publication and the job’s done. But metadata should be thought of as evolving and it often needs revision. For example:

Have you sold US rights? Don’t forget to change your Territorial Rights statement so retailers in the US know they should stop selling your edition. Forget to do it, and you could have a lawsuit on your hands.

Has publication date slipped? Make sure you update your metadata. Unless you want to confuse your would-be readers by making them wonder why they can’t have your book when you said they could.

Have you won a prize? Been shortlisted? Add it to your description copy. It all helps.

Want to experiment with pricing? Have you got a promotion on? Make sure the right price is visible at the right time (and in the right place).

The above examples all lead to a final point which is equally important:

There’s only one thing worse than having no metadata, and that’s having incorrect metadata.

Sending out the wrong price is the equivalent of having your reader pick up a book for £7.99 in a shop only to be told at the till it’s actually £12.99. Or telling your reader that their book will be in tomorrow only for them to return and you to say it actually won’t be in for another two weeks.

If you’re in any doubt about any of your metadata, you’re actually better off making no statement. Because as a number of celebrities, politicians and users of social media have discovered, once you’ve released information online, you can’t claw it back.

Metadata is the lifeblood of your title. And all you have to do is make sure you cover the elements of BIC Basic as above and maintain them as necessary. I hope the above has convinced you that metadata is vital to the success of your book, but if you ever need a reminder, just look at this:

Some useful links:

An Introduction to ONIX – The industry standard for communicating metadata

BIC Basic – The minimum requirement for your metadata

BIC Codes – Find the right BIC subject code for your title

Book Industry Communication – The book industry’s supply chain organisation

Book Industry Study Group – BIC’s US counterpart

Serendipity is the great unsung hero of publishing. We can never be sure of the precise value arising from chance encounters in bookshops, the flash of a good jacket catching the reader’s eye, igniting the purchase instinct so that before they know it they’ve bought another book. We’ve all been there; we’ve casually browsed, and probably found many of our favourite books this way – by chance, in bookshops, passing time, scanning idly. We’ll never know what this is worth, but it is likely to be very large indeed.

How about in digital environments? Well, there has been a great attempt at not just replicating the mechanisms of the physical world but surpassing them, and a good deal of web innovation has centred around recommendation engines, affiliate networks, filtering systems, automatic suggestions and the prediction of taste.

To some this is a world where abundant culture becomes easily discoverable, where we can find what we like and structure our experience in a totally customised way; to others it is what Eli Pariser has called the “filter bubble”, an egotistical echo chamber where we are never challenged by newness or difference aside from our pre-existing predilections.

Regardless of the rights or the wrongs, one thing is clear: where chance is lost, where algorithms replace luck and the keyword search term is king, metadata is the fulcrum of discovery. Metadata, in short, decides whether your book is found, and by extension whether your book is bought.

So what is metadata and why is it important? The word is part of the problem. It sounds fairly technical and abstract, the kind of thing requiring specialist knowledge. In fact metadata is easy. Metadata is just all the information around a book that isn’t the content. That’s it. People have been using metadata for centuries; they just called it something different.

The name of the book is metadata, the cover is metadata, the word count and page count are metadata, as are the formats. The blurb, the tagline, the keywords attached to those (e.g. which words summarise the book best?) are all metadata. Price, publication date, review quotes, sales points, promotional opportunities, territorial rights, ISBNs and the author name are all metadata to.

Then there are the subject categories, known in the US as BISAC codes and in the UK as BIC codes. If you Google for your subject you will quickly find the correct codes for your books. Metadata can become quite ‘granular’ as the parlance would have it, looking at details like different author roles and different identifiers, but for the most part it sticks to the information readers would find relevant about a book.

Metadata influences search, it influences territoriality and categorisation – metadata is the advert, the sales pitch, the sell in and the advance promotion; metadata is the random book left on the table, the fervent recommendation of a friend, the arresting blurb, the good review, serving the random browser and the determined buyer alike.

Bad metadata means your book is invisible and un-purchasable. Yet compared to many industries either totally or increasingly focused on digital commerce, publishing lags in its understanding of SEO practices, metadata standards implementation, data collection and analysis and systems investment.

A few brief principles for metadata, whether self-published or working with a book publisher, will enormously help your book’s chances.

1 Accurate metadata – it all has to be correct. Wrong metadata confuses the system. This means you need to be meticulous when inputting your metadata and check everything through. One of the difficulties of metadata is that different retailers have different metadata requirements, so you or your publisher need to make sure the right metadata is going to the right retailer. This can be a painstaking and time consuming process but it’s worth it.

2 More is more – if you don’t put the metadata in, it won’t be discovered. Many people only put the bare minimum in. Metadata is boring and tricksy. However by not putting absolutely everything in you will increase the visibility on offer. So if you are uploading work yourself fill out every field on offer. If you are working with a publisher supply them with as much information as they need and monitor what the output looks like.

3 BUT go for quality not quantity. Making sure your metadata is complete is one thing, overloading is another. Book blurbs, tag lines, review quotes, puffs, different regional pricing are all great; but don’t go overboard. A well drafted piece of copy is a much better piece of metadata than a lengthy, search engine friendly piece of text that no one will want to read.

4 Lastly, familiarise yourself with the basic tenets of SEO. Yes, this is a chore and a distraction from writing. We all have to recognise the world we live in, and in that world a bit of simple knowledge can go a long way. All of the above applies. You don’t need any technical knowledge, just an awareness of what kind of thing might help. Have a look at something like this introductory guide from a well-known SEO website: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo.

We still haven’t fully figured out how to replace the experience of shopping in a bricks and mortar store, that sense of surprise, fun, the unexpected – and we haven’t worked out how we can create and capture those impulse buys. We are going to need to, and the answer will be found in a revolution of what metadata we supply, and how we supply it.