No jargon assumed. If you publish four books a year and have never sent an ONIX feed in your life, this is written for you — and so is the platform.
Three separate things, and a book can fail at any one of them while looking perfectly fine to you. Most presses that feel stuck are failing at the first, and cannot see it because nothing announces it.
A bookshop, librarian or reader searching for your book gets a result — with a cover, a description, and enough information to decide. This is “metadata”, and it is the part that goes wrong most often.
Having found it, they can actually buy it — through the wholesaler their shop already has an account with, on terms they recognise. If they have to set up a new supplier relationship to stock one book, they will not.
The money finds its way back to you, on a schedule you can predict, with a record you can check. Including when books come back — and some always do.
These come up constantly and are rarely explained, because everyone in the trade assumes everyone else already knows.
FIC022000 is Mystery & Detective, and so on. They decide which shelf your book appears on, both physically and in every online browse. A book with no BISAC code is not filed anywhere.A distributor sells your books into the trade for you — they hold the relationships with the chains, the wholesalers and the library suppliers, and they take a cut. Being represented by one is the single biggest step a press can take.
The catch is that the large distributors publish a bar of roughly eight titles a year, and they mean it. Several hundred serious presses sit below that line. Being under it says nothing about the quality of the books — it is a question of whether representing you covers their costs.
So there are two honest answers, and which one applies to you is a matter of fact rather than ambition:
Almost everyone gets told the first answer regardless. The free assessment exists so you can find out which one is actually true for your press.
Fifteen questions about how your press runs. Free, four minutes, no account. You get a score, your three sharpest gaps, and which of the answers above applies to you.
Your catalogue lives here, with a health score against every title telling you exactly what is missing and why it matters. Import an existing list from a spreadsheet — it shows you what it would change before it changes anything.
We generate ONIX and check it against the official code lists before it leaves, so a whole file does not get rejected over one bad value. Export it yourself any time — it is your metadata.
Whether a distributor takes you or we do the selling, you get a ledger: what sold, to whom, what came back, what you are owed, and when the held back portion releases. Every number traceable to the order behind it.
Still unsure whether any of this applies to you? The assessment answers exactly that, and costs nothing.
The Readiness Report names every gap against your press, what closing each one takes, and the order to do it in.