Publisher Information

Would there be a way to add information on publishers to the statistics page? It might help writers looking to break into the industry to know which publishers are putting out books similar to the one the new author has created, especially if the author reads a lot in the genre they're writing in.

This might be an interesting bit of data but it would require creating a separate publisher field. I think the publishing information field we have right now is not as limited.

>1 jade_kadir: +1 but for a different reason. Both Goodreads and The StoryGraph have a separate dedicated publisher field but neither (TSG may be adding for Plus users) grant access to the user for stats/tracking purposes. When I first joined LT I used to rely on a tag to identify the publisher but gave up and decided since I already use Calibre as my main book catalog database (has publisher field built in) I would just use Calibre data to generate all my reading statistics and graphs. I use the publisher field to generate stats/graphs on most read publisher, traditional vs indie/self-pubbed by # read/ratings comparisons and the total publisher list for a high level view of how many publishers I've read over time that have gone out of business. It was interesting to discover (via charts) that the traditionally published books I read in a specific year consistently rated lower than the indie titles. Anecdotally I knew I was regularly surprised by the low quality coming out of a Big 5 publishing house but to see the pattern aggregated across a larger data set was cool.

When I go to price my books, I use Bookfinder, which has a publisher field, and is a good way to separate the different editions of a book. Different editions can have very different prices.
Many older books have multiple publishers, and being able to differentiate them can be important.

>1 jade_kadir: I would like this feature.

Both for the reasons >4 margaretbartley: says about older works, but also for new-ish ones similar but not limited to >3 Taliesien:
When looking for new books to read/purchase: most of the ebook sites don't allow searching by publishing imprint (or at least it doesn't function well / come up with results), but I've found that there are some consistencies in books I like based on what publishing imprint worked on them (I'm assuming it has to do with editorial teams and both what they pick to buy and also how their own value-add to the work). Even for authors who are auto-read authors, I realized in some cases a particular publishing imprint was an indicator of which were my favorites. (Not that they're necessarily better, but I hadn't realized some of the commonalities until I was sorting through my library for a different reason related to figuring out which books had DRM).

I've been tagging things with publishing imprints, but that doesn't help me find other books by the same imprint unless other people start doing the same thing. And going to an imprint's website just to browse books usually doesn't do much either since most are NOT set up for browsing or if they are, it's just to advertise what they're trying to promote (current releases, usually).

>5 parlerodermime: I've used Amazon's advanced search for years and years to find specific titles based on publisher, genre, theme etc. It's got the best metadata search interface of any online book site that I've ever found. If they had a Narration (POV) filter it would be close to perfect. :)

As an example, I peeked at your publisher tags and randomly selected Lyrical Press, saw that you seem to go for historical romance from them and performed the following search on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&bbn=23&rh=n%3A283155%2Cn%3A23%2Cn%...

That's just down to Romance -> Historical. As you can see from the page result above, you can drill down even farther by protagonist type, romance sub-plot, time period. The link above is sorted by publication date, newest to oldest, so future/most recent releases are the the top. This sort is usually how I stay on top of upcoming books long before authors/publishers start promoting them.

>6 Taliesien: Huh. I mostly boycott Amazon (I do accept free books and occasionally cave for $0.99 deals for books stuck in KU prison if I really want to read them), but hadn't thought it had particularly good search features based on recently trying to get it to show me works just by an author without putting in clutter before another chunk of results and the fact that getting it to sort search results by price low to high using the toggle is basically pointless. I'm incredibly impressed that you've managed to get it to spit out something that actually has exclusively matching results for the first several pages... and for the publisher! Neither Kobo nor Google Play books can do that.

I'm having slightly less success modifying your search options to select for the particular iteration of Berkley I'm interested in, but it's more effective than other ebook stores I've tried.

I mostly find new books via Twitter or as a recommendation in one of the author newsletters to which I'm subscribed.

Kobo's search functionality got worse (for me; maybe others prefer it this way) sometime relatively recently, apparently prioritizing exact title matches less than it used to. I've been known to resort to finding the ISBN someplace else and search Kobo för that.

I used to find Amazon's recommendations quite good (esp. for music), but they made it progressively harder to tell the system I owned stuff I'd acquired elsewhere, so I gave up.

>7 parlerodermime: Hopefully you're not trying to modify the url and using the advanced search form -> https://www.amazon.com/advanced-search/books

What Berkley imprint are you not having luck finding?

I don't have Twitter or any of the social mania stuff, and keep author newsletter subs to a minimum. The ability to search for and filter upcoming book releases with the Pub date fields is indispensable to me. Most of the time pre-orders are up on Amazon long before marketing for the book begins and I used that early info to rec the titles to my libraries so I could get the #1 hold position. Unfortunately the move to Libby eliminates that perk effective May 1. Overdrive 2023: "We eliminate this feature to annoy you and make things generally more irritating." It's amazing how relevant Python content remains this many decades later.