TitlePage is expanding its offering in New Zealand, welcoming New Zealand publishers while enhancing the service to booksellers by providing a broader range of books with improved metadata across both Australia and Aotearoa.

Already used by more than 150 booksellers in New Zealand, this expansion is a perfect opportunity to strengthen the data available in TitlePage and increase the impact publishers can have in the New Zealand market. Update the metadata you provide to TitlePage to include New Zealand availability and pricing to ensure your titles are seen across the Strait.

What does this mean for Australian publishers?

Now is the ideal time to check in with your metadata or ONIX team to ensure that all your New Zealand metadata is up to date. Ensuring that title information includes basic New Zealand-specific data and any relevant rich data—and that titles are correctly included or excluded from relevant markets—will allow booksellers to access all titles and make more informed and efficient decisions.

Specific things to review should be:

  • Rights: Where you have exclusive rights (and capability) to supply titles in both Australia and New Zealand, ensure both country codes are included in your SalesRights composite (01 or 08). If you do not have the rights for either Australia or New Zealand for a particular ISBN, include that exclusion as well (03, 05, or  06) to avoid any confusion.  

  • Supplier details: Ensure your supplier information is correctly provided for both the Australian and New Zealand markets. You can provide dual product supply blocks—one for each market (preferred)—or a single set of supply data with both country codes.

  • Pricing: Ensure you provide a price for the NZ market, ideally in NZD. If an AUD price applies for NZ customers, make sure this is explicitly provided for the NZ country code. This offers New Zealand booksellers certainty about the price available to them.

  • Availability: Make sure the availability status and stock information are listed correctly for both the Australian and New Zealand territories.

  • New Zealand authors: If you have published New Zealand authors or illustrators, provide this information via the Contributor Place Composite.

These details should all be reviewed within your (ONIX 3.0) or (ONIX 2.1) composites for each title. Refer to the table below for the specific composites you might need to review based on your ONIX version and supply chain:

Situation

ONIX 2.1

ONIX 3.0

Title available in AU only

No change – check that your compulsory <SupplyDetail> composites are up to date.

No change – check that your compulsory <ProductSupply> composites are up to date.

Title available in both AU & NZ, both supplied from the same warehouse.

Ensure there are two <Price> composites, one for AU, one for NZ.
Ensure <SupplyToMarket> is both AU and NZ.

Ensure there are two <Price> composites, including a nested <Territory> composite - one for AU, one for NZ.

Title available in both AU & NZ, but supplied from different warehouses.

Include two separate <SupplyDetail> composites for each title, one each for AU & NZ. 

Include two separate <ProductSupply> composites for each title, one each for AU & NZ. 

 

For ONIX examples of each of these scenarios, please refer to the Titlepage Supply Detail Coding examples. 

If you would like to delve further into the specifics of ONIX 3.0 for products in multiple regions, please see the video resource with examples and details, or the two written application notes:

These reviews of your metadata are an important step towards growing in the New Zealand market, as more visibility and ease of access through Titlepage will increase the chances of bookseller & library orders.

Want more metadata advice?

If you need assistance getting to grips with metadata check out our collection of training resources, and for further resources in reviewing these supply aspects of your data please contact TitlePage for support.

Metadata misuse – what not to do

The Book Industry Study Group in the US released a statement on the misuse of the title and subtitle fields, and provided a reminder on best practices in supplying marketing copy. A number of supply chain partners have voiced their support, and this echoes what we regularly hear from booksellers and supply chain partners here in Australia too. 

Keep marketing copy out of titles

The key point is not to put marketing copy in the title and subtitle fields of your metadata. Keep the copy in the description field for its primary purpose – describing the book – and use the relevant ONIX fields for sharing endorsements, reviews and prizes. 

This impacts booksellers in their day to day activities, slowing down their searches for specific books or authors – particularly when content such as ‘A thrilling suspense novel for fans of X’ is in a subtitle field. A search for popular authors – particularly thriller authors – might leave a user with pages of results of books with subtitles containing optimistic comps, rather than the book they actually want. 

The description misuse also has a flow-on effect when this data feeds into other retailer systems, such as websites, which often have character limits meaning key information might be cut off. This might leave a hyperbolic TikTok endorsement quote instead of any information about what the book is about. 

Some retailers are removing the display of subtitles from their websites in response to subtitles full of marketing material. If you’re interested, ‘Gripping’ books are still clearly the flavour based on a quick TitlePage search – more than ten times more likely to feature in subtitle misuse than other likely phrases such as ‘TikTok’ or ‘Prize winning’. 

Recipients of your metadata are also much more likely to display the reviews and endorsements that you provide if they know that they won’t inadvertently be repeating text that is also in your description. 

Greater use of the correct ONIX fields for marketing content will encourage those in the supply chain to display this content, which benefits everyone – from booksellers to readers.

Learn more about metadata best practices in EDItEUR's guides, while there are a wealth of resources on the BNC Tech Forum website.