Media and entertainment
Publishing
Commissioning and distributing written work.
Books, news, trade titles and journals hold archives engines mine and rarely credit. The people who matter, the submitting author, the head of audience watching referrals fall, the professional checking a benchmark, the librarian at renewal, now ask a model first. The opening is narrow but real: publishing owns the reference material, and little of it sits in a form a machine can lift and attribute.
Where the answer is being lost
Engines answer from your archive without naming you.
A trade publisher spends decades compiling the only reliable price series in its sector. Ask an engine "Where do professionals get reliable industry benchmark data" and it recommends a consultancy report and two aggregators. The publisher's own series sits in a PDF behind a lead form, unreadable. The same thing happens across publishing. The editor who commissioned the work, the publisher who paid for it and the librarian who licenses it are absent from the answer their own material produced. What that costs is not readership. It is the advertiser, the subscriber and the submitting author who never arrive.
How we win this
The programme for publishing
The archive is the asset
Every publisher here already holds the answer to somebody's question. Back issues, buyers' guides, submission guidelines, abstracts, explainers written for a print reader. Almost none of it stands alone as an answer, so a model cannot lift it cleanly and attribute it. The work is to rewrite what exists into reference pages: one question, one page, and the conditions that change the answer.
You already file this metadata
Publishing is the rare sector that agreed its own data standards decades ago and still keeps to them. ONIX feeds go to the retailers, records go to the ISBN agency, DOI deposits go to Crossref, issue and byline fields sit in the CMS. Every trading partner gets a clean record. The public page gets a cover image, a price and a paragraph of blurb. Our job is to put those fields back onto the page you own and link them together, so who published this, who wrote it and on what licence is answerable from your domain and not only from a feed your buyer never sees.
Decide what the crawlers get
Publishing is the one sector where blocking the crawler is a serious option. Some titles should. Most want the paid archive protected and the free, reputation-carrying material read and cited. That is a decision about robots rules, render and paywall markup, not a philosophy. We map what is currently exposed, what is blocked by accident, and what should stay shut.
Scope built for thin margins
Margins in publishing are thin and everyone here knows it. So the programme starts small: a diagnostic that queries live models with your own buyers' questions, then one surface fixed properly rather than six half done. For a trade title that is usually the benchmark data. For a journal it is the submission decision page. The order comes from the diagnostic, not from a template.
The mix that carries it
Content
Answer and comparison pages
Cost, process, eligibility and comparison pages built for direct extraction, not for a reader who scrolls.
Foundation
Entity and schema engineering
Structured data and entity definition so engines know exactly what you are, where you operate, and what you are credible in.
Authority
Original data and benchmarks
Proprietary numbers, surveys and benchmarks — the most-cited asset class there is, because nobody else has them.
Foundation
Technical fixes
Crawlability, render, speed and the machine-readability faults that keep an engine from reading you at all.
Content
GEO blogs and authority content
The definitive written answer to the questions your buyers put to an engine, structured so it can be lifted and attributed.
The constraint we work inside
We do not write your journalism, your books or your peer review, and we will not dress editorial as marketing. The material we work on is everything around it: the explainers, the metadata, the submission and pricing pages. Paid archives stay paid. That boundary is also what keeps the citations worth having.
Specialisations
4 total
The pitch is different for each one, because the buyer, the trigger and the rules on what may be published are different for each one. Open the one that is yours.
An author with a finished manuscript asks a model how to get published, gets a list of vanity presses and self-publishing platforms, and never sees your submissions page.
The question deciding this today
“How do you get a book published in India”
- Who they sell to
- Readers, retailers and rights buyers
- Who signs
- Acquisitions editor, or the reader
- What starts it
- New title acquisition, seasonal list, rights market, author submission
- Cost of staying invisible
- Titles that reach nobody who would have wanted them
Type "How do you get a book published in India" into any engine. The answer names self-publishing services, a couple of literary agencies and an old blog post about submissions. Established houses with open submission windows are not in it. The same applies to your list: an engine asked who publishes translated fiction, or who holds Indian rights to a title, works from retail listings and Wikipedia, where your imprint is a line of text rather than a publisher it can name.
What we would run
- 01Answer and comparison pages
A submissions and process set: what your list takes, what a first-time author should expect from advance to publication, how rights and translation deals are handled, what happens after a manuscript is accepted.
Retail platforms own the moment a reader buys. They do not own the moment an author or an agent chooses a house, which is where the engine is now consulted.
- 02Entity and schema engineering
Your catalogue marked up as entities: title, author, ISBN, imprint, format, translator, rights held, linked to the house that published it, so a machine reads a list rather than a grid of covers.
An engine asked who published a title, or which house does this kind of book, needs a machine-readable answer. Retail pages give it the retailer's name, not yours.
- 03GEO blogs and authority content
Category authority pieces written by your editors: what makes a debut work in this genre, how a translation is commissioned, why a backlist title still sells. A short set, not a content calendar.
Editors are the credible voice for anyone deciding where to submit, and this is the material an engine draws on when asked which houses publish a given kind of book.
- 04Directories and profile consistency
Consistent house and imprint records across trade directories, ISBN agency records, festival and rights-market listings, and the library and distributor databases that engines treat as reference.
Rights buyers and foreign agents start from registries, not from your website. Inconsistent imprint names there are the reason an engine cannot connect your titles to you.
What we would not recommend
- Reviews and testimonials. Reader reviews live on retail platforms and Goodreads, which we do not control and will not seed. Buying or soliciting them would damage the list, not help it.
- Reddit. Writing communities read publisher accounts as touting and remove them. An editor posting in a personal capacity is fine, that is not something an agency should run.
- Instagram. The frontlist campaign lives on Bookstagram and it works, publication week by publication week. Neither a backlist title nor the question of where to submit survives a caption, and those two are what this budget has to move.
What a lead looks like
The covering letters change before the volume does. One names the imprint the manuscript belongs on and gets it right, cites your editor's piece on how translations are commissioned, and states the word count and the comparable titles because your submissions page asked for them. Agents send a different kind of note: two titles, a question about English-language territories, both pulled from your catalogue rather than from a fair guide that is eighteen months old.
What we measure
- Inclusion for submission and rights prompts
- Imprint named as publisher, not retailer
- Catalogue entities resolving to the house
- Qualified submissions, not slush volume
What changes
The enquiries arrive further along. An author whose manuscript actually fits the list, because they read your submissions page rather than a forum thread. A supplier asking to be in next year's buyers' guide after finding your benchmark series. A researcher who has already checked your scope, fee and decision times and is ready to submit. A media agency that found your masthead named in an answer. The volume of cold approaches drops. The people who do write already know what you publish.
Start here
See who gets named in publishing today
We put your buyers' real questions to the live models and come back with the businesses they name, the sources behind those answers, and the gap between that list and yours.