Nielsen PubWeb Quick Guide - Nielsen BookData

Nielsen PubWeb Quick Guide Nielsen PubWeb is our free online title editing service for publishers allowing you to input your title information quickly and efficiently ensuring that vital information about your books reaches booksellers and libraries around the world at the earliest opportunity. We appreciate users find it useful to refer to guidance notes when using our services and this guide is designed to help you conduct some of Nielsen PubWeb’s key functions. Nielsen PubWeb also has integrated online help which covers all its features. Our Publisher Help Desk, based in the UK, is available if you require further technical assistance: email: [email protected] tel: +44 (0)1483 712 450 The Help Desk is open between 09.00 and 17.00 (GMT) Monday to Friday.

Contents • Login • Problems with Login • Searching for and Editing Existing Records: o The Search Screen o The Jacket and Summary Screen o Editing a record o Submitting an edited record for approval o If the Edit this record? Button is not present

• Registering a Publication o ISBN verification o The Edit Screen o Submitting your new title • Uploading a Jacket/Cover Image • Submission and Edit History

Login Go to: www.nielsenbookdata.com/pubweb/PubLogon Login Screen: To login enter your UserName and Password in the boxes at the top of the page and click on the Login button immediately below.

Problems with Login Forgotten your UserName and Password: If you have forgotten your username or password, click on the Forgotten login details? link. This will open an email to [email protected] with the subject Forgotten Nielsen PubWeb login*. In order for us to provide you with your login information you must include in your email the name of your publishing company and an example of one of your ISBNs. Ideally, you should use the email address we have on file for your company or one that is connected to your web domain if you have one. * If your computer is not set up to open emails in this way, you can email: [email protected] Please ensure you include the information mentioned above.

Nielsen PubWeb Quick Guide

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You receive the message Error - login is incorrect. Please try again. You have entered an incorrect username and/or password. Please check your details and try again. NB: if your browser is set to remember passwords for you, it may automatically fill in your Password. This sometimes goes unnoticed and may mean that you enter the Password twice (for example: as ‘passwordpassword’ instead of ‘password’). If you continue to have problems, contact us using the Forgotten login details? link as described at the beginning of this section. We suggest keeping a record of your Nielsen PubWeb UserName and Password, along with any other logins you require for our other Publisher services, in the Notes section on page 10. We have a number of services for publishers and you may encounter login problems if you try to login to Nielsen PubWeb via one of our other services. The list of error messages below will help you identify whether this is the case: You receive the message Incorrect Username. Please try to login again. If you are still having problems then follow the 'Contact Us' link to find your nearest helpdesk. You are attempting to login to Nielsen BookData Online, not Nielsen PubWeb. Go to: www.nielsenbookdata.com/pubweb/PubLogon and be sure to use the login at the top of the page. There is a link to Nielsen BookData Online further down the page that you should ignore. You receive the message The provided credentials are invalid. Please type your credentials for authentication. You are attempting to login to Nielsen BookScan Online, not Nielsen PubWeb. Go to: www.nielsenbookdata.com/pubweb/PubLogon and try again. The login screen requires a Distributor Code as well as a UserName and Password You are attempting to login to either our Nielsen BookNet Online Order Collection or Nielsen BookNet Publisher Services, not Nielsen PubWeb. Go to: www.nielsenbookdata.com/pubweb/PubLogon and try again.

Searching for and editing existing records The Search screen

The main page of Nielsen PubWeb is the Search screen. If you click on the Search button without entering any terms into the search boxes Nielsen PubWeb will return a list of all your registered titles. If you only have a few books in-print this may be the most convenient way to find your titles, but if you have several hundred it may overload the search. You can use as many search terms as you like when performing a search. Remember that because ISBNs are unique, if you search by ISBN there is no need to use any other terms. ISBNs must be entered without dashes or spaces in the 13-digit format. If you are still using 10-digit ISBNs please contact the ISBN Agency:


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[email protected] for assistance in converting your numbers. The Title, Author, Publisher and BIC fields all use keyword and wildcard searches, where an asterisk can stand for any number of letters. For example Gobl* will find all results containing words beginning Gobl- (Goblin, Goblet etc.) while G*bl* will find these and also words such as Grumble, Giblet and Gambling. If the search is successful there will be one or more ISBNs listed at the top of the page. Click on the ISBN you wish to view and you will be taken to the Jacket and Summary screen for that book. If your search is not successful If you do not find the ISBN you are looking for this may be for a number of reasons. Firstly check that your search terms are correct. Nielsen PubWeb automatically excludes some ISBNs: • Any titles that are not linked to your publishing company or its imprints • If you have recently registered a new imprint with the ISBN Agency or have recently acquired another publisher it may not be included in your Nielsen PubWeb access yet. Please contact the Publisher Help Desk to confirm the details: [email protected] • If you have submitted a title within the last few days it may not have fed back from the Nielsen database into Nielsen PubWeb yet.

The jacket and summary screen

The Jacket and Summary screen displays a summary of the bibliographic data we hold for your ISBN, along with an image of the book if one has been provided. The information displayed is mainly self-explanatory, but there are a couple of sections which require further explanation: Author names All contributors, regardless of their actual role, are listed in the section labelled Author. The names are presented in ‘surname, first name’ order, separated by spaces, which can give the appearance that the names are incorrectly listed when they are not. For example if the authors were Tom Jones, Dick Francis and Harry Carpenter, their names would appear as ‘Jones, Tom Francis, Dick Carpenter, Harry’. This will be correctly displayed in our services and does not need to be corrected. Publisher The Publisher box actually lists the imprint under which the book was published, and not the main publisher. Distributor If you have only recently registered your title this box may be empty as it is usually the last piece of information to be completed as part of the registration process.


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Editing a record

At the top of the Jacket and Summary screen there are several blue buttons, the second of which should be Edit this record? If Edit this record? is not visible (between Back to Search and Core Data Notes) please refer to the If the Edit this record? Button is not present section on page 5 for more information. Click on Edit this record? will take you to the Edit screen. This is described in more detail in The Edit Screen section. You will be able to amend almost all of the data for your book, with two exceptions: ISBN You cannot alter the ISBN because you are editing the data associated with that ISBN. There should never be any reason to alter an ISBN, unless you have accidentally used the wrong number. In this case you should contact the Publisher Help Desk for assistance: [email protected] Publication Date The publication date is uneditable because it is a common error for users to amend this date when they should be amending the availability date instead. For example: in the event of a reprint or reissue. If you genuinely need to change the publication date (i.e. the book has been delayed or brought forward) please email the Trade Data department: [email protected].

Submitting an edited record for approval

Once you have made your amendments, click on Send record to Nielsen BookData to send the revised record to us for processing. You will either receive confirmation that the record has been sent or be returned to the top of the page with the message Please correct the errors below. Any invalid entries or missing mandatory data will be indicated in red. Once you have amended the record, resubmit it. If you continue to receive this message and cannot identify the source of the problem, contact the Publisher Help Desk: [email protected] The effects of your changes will not be immediately visible in Nielsen PubWeb. If you return to the Edit screen for a book you have just edited it will seem that all your changes have been lost. This is not the case. Any amendments you make have to be approved by our Editorial staff, after which the record we hold on the Nielsen database will be updated. This updated record is then fed back to Nielsen PubWeb. You should allow 7-10 days for


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this to happen. If you require confirmation that your update has been sent, you can view a list of recent activity for your Nielsen PubWeb account by clicking on the View History button found on the main Nielsen PubWeb screen and at the top of the Jacket and Summary screen. See the section on View History for more information. If the Edit this record? button is not present

The Edit this record? button may not be present for the following reasons: If you have recently registered the publication While a new record is being processed by our Editorial team you will be blocked from editing it. This lockout period usually lasts 2 weeks. If you have amendments to make you can contact the Publisher Help Desk either using the I Want To Edit This Record button further down the page or email: [email protected] If the title is not recently registered Nielsen PubWeb requires a record to meet a certain level of completeness for titles to be editable. Therefore, if some or all of the following essential data is missing you will be unable to access the record. Essential data includes: • • • • •

Title UK price Publication date BIC classification Publisher and distributor

If you can see that some of this information is missing, contact the Publisher Help Desk either using the I Want To Edit This Record button or email: [email protected], quoting the ISBN and the missing information, along with any other amendments. We will update the record, which will then become editable in 5-7 days. If more than one record cannot be edited, or cannot be found by searching but appears when you attempt to register it: There is probably an error in your Nielsen PubWeb configuration. This sometimes occurs when a publisher changes distributor and the Nielsen PubWeb system has not been updated to reflect this. To notify the Publisher Help Desk there is a problem either click on the I Want To Edit This Record button (if visible) or email: [email protected] Your email must include your Nielsen PubWeb UserName so we can ensure we are looking at the correct login details. The current version of Nielsen PubWeb does not always correctly grant editing rights for e-books. This only affects blocks of ISBNs that are used exclusively for e-books. If you need to update an e-book record you cannot access, please email the details to: [email protected]. The next version of Nielsen PubWeb will address this issue.


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Registering a Publication You can use Nielsen PubWeb to register the ISBN of any of your publications. We recommend that publishers register new titles 20 weeks in advance of publication to ensure that the information is distributed to retailers by the time the book is published and ready for sale. You can also register previously published titles if they are missing from our database. Do not register titles that are out-of-print – although Nielsen PubWeb will accept the data it will be rejected automatically when the record is uploaded to the Nielsen database. ISBN verification

To add a book (or other item), click on the Add Book button near the bottom of the Search screen. You will be asked to enter the ISBN; this is so that Nielsen PubWeb can check that the ISBN is valid and previously unregistered. You should enter the ISBN as a continuous string of digits with no spaces, dashes or other separators. For example: 9781234567890. There is only space for 13 characters in the box so you will not be able to enter a whole ISBN if you include separators. Take particular care when copying and pasting the ISBN from another document as it will be trimmed if it is more than 13 characters in length and become invalid. If your ISBNs were issued before 2007 they may only be 10-digits in length. Contact the UK ISBN Agency for advice on converting your numbers to the new standard, email: [email protected]. Assuming your ISBN is valid and previously unused, you will receive the message Your book has not been found… Add this book? Click on Add this book? to go to the edit screen.

The Edit screen

Most of the boxes on the edit page are self explanatory, and there are links to the Help page for further explanation. Simply click on the heading of each section. This guide will focus on areas of this page that users often experience difficulties with. If you have a problem that is not covered by this guide or Nielsen PubWeb’s integrated online help, contact the Publisher Help Desk: [email protected]


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Non-English characters Our database uses the ASCII standard character set, so as to be compatible with a wide range of different computer systems. When entering accented names or words you should therefore use the unaccented equivalent. For example: café should be entered as cafe, Müller as Muller, etc. Submitting data with accented characters will almost always produce corrupted text on output. Similarly, text written in other alphabets should be written using standard characters. For example: Правда as Pravda. Importing text from other applications Care should be taken when copying and pasting text from other programs and websites. The copied text may contain special formatting that will not be translated correctly when the data is uploaded. In particular, single and double quotation marks and apostrophes will often be misinterpreted. We recommend pasting the text into a plain text editor, such as Notepad, which will strip out the extra code. The plain text can then be copied from Notepad into Nielsen PubWeb. UK Retail Price and Tax Rate Nielsen PubWeb will only accept prices in UK £ Sterling. If you have prices for your books in other currencies these should be submitted by email to: [email protected] If you do not price your books in Sterling you will not be able to register them through Nielsen PubWeb. Prices should be entered as a numerical value with no ‘£’ symbol. You should enter the full retail price, including VAT if VAT applies. Printed books are exempt from normal VAT and have a VAT rate of ‘Zero’. All other media (CD, cassette, DVD, e-book, mp3) have a VAT rate of ‘Standard’ (20%). Products that contain both zero and standard rate items (for example: a book with CD-ROM) have a VAT rate of ‘Mixed’. Imprint Name If the imprint you wish to use is missing from the drop down menu, then contact us using the Let us know link next to the box. Alternatively you can email: [email protected] with New Imprint Request in the subject line. Please quote your Nielsen PubWeb login or the name of your organisation when contacting us, as an email does not automatically contain this information. If the imprint is already registered with us it can usually be added to your Nielsen PubWeb access the same day, but if the imprint is previously unknown it will take several days to set up. If no imprints are available at all, and it is more than a week since you first registered for Nielsen PubWeb, please contact us. You can still register books and your default imprint (the publishing name under which you purchased your ISBNs) will automatically be applied. Format (e-books) When registering e-books with Nielsen PubWeb, select Ebook from the Format drop down list, and then type the name of the e-book format the book is in using the Additional Format Information box. For example: PDF or ePub. If your e-book is available in more than one format each version will require its own ISBN, just as with printed books. Toy Safety Warnings If your product bears one or more toy safety warnings or symbols then you must choose the appropriate message(s) in this section. Since 20 July 2011 online retailers have been legally required to display this information on their websites. Providing this information to us will enable our customers to meet this obligation. Contributors If one of the contributors does not match any of the types listed (for example: you want to list someone as ‘Foreword by’, ‘Music by’, etc) then add the name in one of the available boxes and email us at: [email protected] to let us know what the contributor’s role should be. BIC Subject Codes and Qualifiers BIC is the industry standard system for classifying books. You can only enter one subject code in each of the Subject Code boxes, but you can enter multiple qualifiers (separated by spaces) in the Subject Qualifier box. Make sure you are not attempting to enter codes as qualifiers or vice versa. All subject codes begin with a letter, and all qualifiers


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begin with a number. There is a link on the Nielsen PubWeb page at the beginning of this section to the BIC Category Selection Tool. This enables you to search by keywords for the category you need. In the event that the link does not work you can find the tool, as well as a PDF of the complete category list, on the BIC website at www.bic.org.uk Audience (Readership) If you are uncertain which category your book is and it is not specifically a textbook, technical book or children’s book then it is most likely to be ‘General Interest’, also called ‘Trade’, so select the first option from the menu. The rest of this section, the Children’s Book Marketing Code (CMBC), should only be completed if your book is a children’s book. The first three sections are self-explanatory. Character is used to indicate popular, established children’s characters (for example: Noddy or Thomas the Tank Engine) so in most cases this should be set to Noncharacter. Tie-in indicates whether the book is related to a television programme or film. Territorial Rights This section refers to the publishing rights you own for the book. The most likely rights situation is that you hold worldwide exclusive rights to the book, even if you are only planning to sell it in 1 or 2 countries. If you have sold the rights to the book to other publishers overseas then indicate which territories you retain exclusive rights and in which territories your edition of the book cannot be sold. Free of charge items still have publishing rights – do not select Not for sale unless the publication is unavailable. Descriptive Information: Free Listing Service (Non-Subscribers) If you are registering your books under our free listing service, you will see only one box in this section. The description you enter will NOT be supplied to our data customers and will NOT appear in any of our services. It will however be seen by one of our classifiers, who will use it to determine if your chosen BIC Classification (see above) is appropriate. If you have access to more than one text box in this section and you are not paying an annual subscription, contact the Publisher Help Desk so that we can check that your Nielsen PubWeb account is set up correctly. Do not enter any data into the additional boxes as this information will not be distributed and may well be deleted when you submit the record to us. Descriptive Information: Enhanced Service (Subscribers) If you are a subscriber to our Enhanced Service, you will have access to 5 text boxes: Short Description, Long Description, Table of Contents, Author Biography and Reviews. You will have been provided with guidelines for using these boxes when you subscribed; for further assistance contact your assigned Nielsen Editor. If you are a subscriber and these boxes are not visible, contact the Publisher Help Desk so we can update your account: [email protected] Prizes This field can be completed by all publishers if applicable. If your book has won or was shortlisted for any national or international book prizes, enter the details here. You should enter the name of the prize, the year it was awarded and indicate whether it was a winner, runner-up, shortlist title, etc. Inclusion in a recommended reading list or an appearance as a ‘book of the week’ does not constitute a prize. However, subscribers can include this information in their enhanced data. Prizes awarded to the author that are not specific to this book (for example: lifetime achievement awards such as the Nobel Prize) should not be listed. If the book is an anthology or other collection of works, then prizes awarded to one of the contained works should not be added. Subscribers can add information about these non-book related prizes in their enhanced data.


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Submitting your new title

Once you have entered the data for your publication, click on Send record to Nielsen BookData. You will either receive confirmation that the record has been sent or be returned to the top of the page with the message Please correct the errors below. Any invalid entries or missing mandatory data will be indicated in red. Once you have amended the record, resubmit it. If you continue to receive this message and can’t identify the source of the problem, contact the Publisher Help Desk.

Uploading a Jacket/Cover Image To add an image of the jacket/cover of your book, click on the Add Jacket button and follow the instructions. Information on our required image specifications is given on the image upload page. You can upload images at any time before or after you register your book, but the image will only be distributed to our data customers if there is a book record to attach it to. If you wish to replace a previously uploaded image, just upload the new one. If you wish to remove an image and do not have a replacement, contact our image team: [email protected] for assistance.

Submission and Edit History The View History screen provides a summary of all the registrations, jacket/cover images and amendments you have submitted in the last 14 days. Despite the message at the top of the page this is not a list of updates waiting to be processed; it only indicates when new data was supplied to us.

Nielsen Publisher Help Desk Monday to Friday 09.00-17.00 (GMT) tel: +44 (0)1483 712 450 email: [email protected]


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Nielsen PubWeb: User Name: Password: BookScan Online: User Name: Password: BookNet Online Order Collection/BookNet Publisher Services: User Name: Password: Distribution Code: BookData Online: User Name: Password: Notes:


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