This guide will walk you through the various ways a Catalog Administrator can update their marketing content — or title descriptions — in Edelweiss. This can be done manually, via a simple Excel file import, through ONIX, or with a Product_Descriptions ancillary feed sent via FTP.

Below is a quick translation of the description abbreviations you may see in Edelweiss:

Sum = Summary/Overview Description; this is the long description for the title

Bio = Contributor Biography

Quo = Quotes and are treated the same as Reviews

Exc = Excerpts

Mkg = Marketing Plans

KSP = Key Selling Points

Key = Keynote:  this is typically a quick sales pitch. It will appear bolded, at the top of the Summary field when viewing a title outside of Title Administration

Fea = Feature Points:  these will appear when a given title is Featured — either by the Catalog Admin or the Rep — in the Featured Title Banner above a title listing

UPE = Unpublished Endorsements, including comments that haven’t been officially published anywhere. These might include bookseller reviews and endorsements from the author’s mother.

TOC = Table of Contents

Methods of Updating Title Descriptions

Manually, title-by-title:

1) While in Administrative mode, open the Title Administration window, either via the Manage Titles screen, or through a catalog’s list view by drilling into an individual title’s tools icon, to find the Marketing Content screen. There, you can access all title descriptions for a given title. Yellow stars appear next to attributes when content has been saved for them.

If you aren’t sending marketing content/title descriptions to Edelweiss via ONIX or Excel, then it’s safe for you to edit/update them here (if you do send this data via ONIX or other feeds, manual edits and additions may be overwritten!). As you can see, you have access to various formatting options, along with the ability to insert a hyperlink or image. Be sure to click the Save icon to the upper left of the text editor box before moving on to another description type or attribute.

Shown below is the Manage Titles window where you can access and edit individual titles’ summaries, bios, quotes, excerpts, marketing plan, key selling points, features, keynotes, unpublished endorsements, and tables of contents.

Clicking on a particular box or checkmark will take you directly to that title’s attribute. This is also where you access the Import Descriptions tool.

• Clicking on a green checkmark will show you existing content, which you may edit/update.
• If see a yellow alert sign, the text box will be blank, as the existing content is coming from another market. If you add content here, it will replace the currently displayed default/fallback content, for the market you’re currently viewing. If you hover over the yellow sign, you’ll be shown which market the content is coming from.

Importing Descriptions Via Excel File Upload:

Using a very simple two-column spreadsheet is the quickest and most immediate way to update many title descriptions at once.

1) From the Manage Titles window, clicking on the Import Descriptions icon will populate the screen shown below.

2) Click on the Example Excel File Format (here) to obtain a simple template to use, or create your own. It should only contain two columns:

• #1: ISBN – this can be the ISBN-10 or ISBN-13 of a title, preferably without hyphens
• #2: Description – Each file should only contain one specific type of description (e.g. just title Summaries or Key Selling Points). Be sure to include all HTML and style coding to indicate bullet points, line breaks, any special formatting, and paragraph openers/closers. Broken HTML, especially when there is no paragraph closer included, is the leading cause of Print/PDF issues where a description abruptly cuts off or the next title fails to appear.

3) Choose your file and click Import

You will receive a confirmation if the upload was successful. You’ll notice an Advanced option here that allows you to convert end-of-line characters to HTML <br/> tags, thereby ensuring new line breaks will appear. Try it out!