The first post in this series described the genesis of Thema and its basic structure of category codes, qualifiers and extensions. This second post explores the relevance of Thema to exports and international sales.

Many US based publishers make their titles available in multiple markets, and international sales can be a significant revenue stream. Yet how do you make sure that the title for which you spent time and effort choosing just the right BISAC codes will also be put in the categories you feel are the most appropriate in the UK, Mexico, India, Australia, Japan, Germany or Brazil? This is where a global standard is vital. Using an international subject category scheme – in this case Thema – alongside the domestic one – in this case BISAC – greatly increases consistency and control, helps increase discoverability and, in turn should boost your sales.

Thema, from its inception, always aimed to be multi-lingual, multi-cultural, commercially focused and internationally relevant subject code scheme for the global book trade. It has been created by a diverse group of organisations from around the world and is based on their experience with their own national schemes and their work in the global market.

Thema is increasingly being adopted and used in many countries around the world. To illustrate the reach of Thema across languages and national borders, at the last count there have been contributions to Thema from organisations in over 50 different countries and there are 21 publicly available translations which you can see on the Thema browser – https://ns.editeur.org/thema/.

There is increasing use of Thema in, for example, much of the Latin American market, with proactive support from the ISBN agencies in many countries in the region and a newly formed interest group for the book trade in Brazil. In Europe there are countries where the book trade uses only Thema, while other countries are going through a more-or-less managed transition from older national schemes (for example in the UK, Germany, Spain and Italy) and a couple, like France, which are using their national subject scheme for domestic consumption and Thema for international trade. In Japan there is a project mapping existing schemes to and from Thema, The new Japanese translation of Thema illustrates the expected way forward. In India there is a growing awareness of Thema across the big online retail platforms, especially for imported titles and Indian-published titles made available for sale outside India.

International vendors are keenly interested in using Thema. As an example, Amazon EU (that is UK, Germany, Spain, France and Italy) has publicly stated that Thema is its preferred subject scheme and is mapped directly to its own internal browse tree. BISAC codes still remain the main option for Amazon’s US and Canadian store fronts.

In the US market, BISAC codes remain vitally important for the domestic book trade. The scheme was conceived for the US book market and reflects what is needed to sell books in the United States. However, BISAC is not designed for international trade, even if many of the concepts are indeed international. Any US publisher, distributor or aggregator that trades internationally, or any US-based retailer who sells internationally or imports titles from other countries should be looking at Thema as well, rather than relying on BISAC exclusively.

Ideally whenever somebody chooses BISAC codes to assign, they should also choose Thema codes as well. There are mappings in both directions between BISAC and Thema, which can be a good, perhaps even automatic, way to get initial codes added to your backlist titles. But as the schemes are different in structure, there is always going to be a loss of precision when mapping, so this should not be a permanent solution.

Once initial mapping of the backlist is done, then key titles and bestsellers should get their mapped Thema codes gradually revised and updated ‘by hand’ as appropriate to optimise their effect on discoverability and sales (and it might also be a good opportunity to review the BISAC codes too). New titles should have codes from both BISAC and Thema added by those who know the content of the publication.