A fictional business. The figures are a modelled scenario, not a client result.
A case study in
Fallowmere Press
Independent literary publisher · Edinburgh
+178%
direct book sales, over 12 months
Get Ranked On Top · Edinburgh · UK & Ireland
“A book that cannot be found has, in every way that matters to its reader, not yet been published.”— from the brief
Chapter I
Searches for Fallowmere's authors and titles led straight to retailers; the press's site had no author pages, reading guides or book structured data.
Fallowmere publishes around twenty titles a year from a converted printworks in Leith: literary fiction, poetry and translated crime. Its readers were loyal, but they rarely arrived at its door. Someone hearing an author on the radio searched the name, and the first five results belonged to retailers that paid the press a fraction of the cover price and kept the reader’s email address.
The aim was not to beat the large bookstores at selling books. It was to make the press the authoritative source for its own authors and titles, so that search engines and AI assistants would point to it first, and to make buying direct the easy, obvious choice once a reader arrived.
Chapter II
A four-week audit covered crawl logs, structured data, the catalogue and 120 reader-style prompts in AI assistants. Six findings shaped the plan.
§1 Entity
No author pages at all — 31 living authors existed only as a name in a book's blurb.
Search engines had nothing on fallowmerepress.co.uk to reconcile an author entity against, so panels were built from retailer and encyclopaedia data.
§2 Structured data
Zero Book, Person or Organization markup across 214 title pages.
No ISBN, format, author or offer properties: retailers' pages were the only machine-readable record of each edition.
§3 Content
Title pages carried 60–90 words of jacket copy and a buy button pointing off-site.
Pages answered no reader question — who is this for, what to read next, discussion points for book clubs.
§4 Technical
Backlist hidden behind a JavaScript-only filter; 138 of 214 titles not indexed.
Crawl logs showed bots reaching the catalogue root and stopping.
§5 Commerce
Direct checkout existed but was linked from only 9% of title pages.
Every 'Buy' route defaulted to a large retailer, giving away margin and the reader relationship.
§6 AI search
AI answers for 'books like…' queries cited retailers and review aggregators, never the press.
No quotable, well-structured passages existed for an assistant to cite.
The strategy runs to four chapters, one per tactic, built on our Content Engine plan (content & ai search).
Chapter III
A permanent home for every author: biography, full bibliography, interviews and events, with consistent naming and sameAs links to the authority records search engines already trust.1
Plate 1 — the same search, a year apart
big-online-bookstore.example
The Salt Orchard: Paperback — free delivery
chain-bookshop.example
The Salt Orchard by Isla Marrick | Buy online
reader-reviews.example
The Salt Orchard — reviews and ratings
secondhand-books.example
Salt Orchard Marrick — used from £2.10
No knowledge panel. The author’s details exist only on retailer listings.
Chapter IV
Every title page rebuilt as the definitive record of the work: each edition with ISBN, format, page count, publication date and a direct offer, marked up as Book with workExample editions.2
Chapter V
Reading guides grouped into clusters around what readers actually search — Scottish landscape fiction, translated Nordic crime, debut poetry — each linking guides, titles and authors.3
Chapter VI
Passages written to be cited: short, factual answers to 'books like…', 'what to read after…' and book-club questions, placed high on guide pages with clear attribution.4
Chapter VII
Bars: reading guides published to date.
Chapter VIII
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
Cream: panels at the start · Rose: gained during the engagement · Dark: not yet
| Query | Intent | Before | After |
|---|---|---|---|
| isla marrick | Author | 9 | 1 |
| the salt orchard novel | Title | 6 | 1 |
| the salt orchard reading guide | Book club | — | 1 |
| scottish landscape fiction | Topic | — | 3 |
| books like the salt orchard | AI answer | — | 2 |
| independent publisher edinburgh | Brand | 4 | 1 |
| translated nordic crime novels | Topic | — | 5 |
| callum dunmore poetry | Author | 12 | 1 |
— means not in the top 50. Titles and authors are fictional.
Afterword
If readers find your work through someone else’s shopfront, Content Engine makes your own site the source they — and the search engines — trust first.
Finis
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