Not to taste, and usually not to marketing. To a description a retailer truncated, a subject code nobody set, and a feed a library never ingested.
The large distributors publish a bar of around eight titles a year. Below it sit several hundred independent presses doing serious work with nowhere to go — too small to be represented, too committed to stop.
The advice they get is to make better books. Usually they already do. What is actually wrong is duller than that: metadata that fails validation, ONIX that never reaches a wholesaler, no route into the trade, and no way to tell which titles sold or what came back.
None of that is glamorous and all of it is fixable. We built the tooling to fix it, then went further: for the presses no distributor will take, we take the inventory ourselves. Sūtra House runs its own list on this platform before we offer it to anyone else — if something is wrong, it costs us first.
The assessment is free and frequently concludes that a press needs a fortnight of unglamorous metadata work rather than anything we sell. If a distributor would take you, we will tell you to go to them — we would rather be their feeder than their competitor.
Every figure a publisher sees is derived from the underlying record rather than restated. Nothing is deleted; a correction is a new entry beside the original. If our arithmetic and yours disagree, you can find out where.
Returns are real and part of a payment is held back against them. We say so in those words, on the screen, with the release date visible — rather than discovering it together when the money is late.
The Readiness Report names every gap, what closing each one takes, and the order to do it in — written to be worked through rather than filed.