I registered a publishing imprint. It is called Hartzer Press, and it is a new arm of Hartzer Consulting, LLC.
The first question people ask is why a search and domain consultant would start a book publisher. The honest answer is that I did not want to publish a book nobody could find. After 25 years of fixing that exact problem for websites, I was not going to walk straight into it with a book.
What Hartzer Press Publishes
Technical, marketing, and digital marketing books written by practitioners. Six subjects to start:
- AI and search. AI search, answer engines, and what it takes to be found and cited by any of them.
- Technical SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Crawling, indexation, site architecture, structured data, rendering, and log file analysis.
- Website development. Building, migrating, and maintaining sites that hold up under load and under scrutiny.
- Domain names and DNS (Domain Name System). Domain strategy, valuation, registrar and registry practice, security, and recovery.
- Digital marketing. Paid and organic acquisition, analytics, attribution, and the measurement that settles what worked.
- Reputation and risk. How companies and individuals are judged online, and what can be done about it.
The test for a title is short. Has the author done the work, and can a reader do something with the book on Monday morning? A book that surveys a field without teaching a method does not make the list.
Why an Imprint Instead of an Upload
I could have uploaded a manuscript to Amazon over a weekend. Plenty of consultants do. Instead I bought a block of ISBNs from Bowker, filed a Texas DBA, built the imprint, and set up trade distribution through Ingram. That took months and cost real money.
Here is what it buys.
The catalog record decides who can stock the book
An ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is not a barcode. It is the key to a catalog record, and that record is what a bookstore buyer, a library acquisitions system, and a wholesaler actually query.
Take the free ISBN a platform hands you and that platform becomes the publisher of record. Your Amazon listing then reads “Independently published.” A librarian sees that field and moves on. No Books In Print entry to find, no imprint to look up, no trade terms to order against.
Registering my own numbers means every Hartzer Press edition — paperback, hardcover, ebook, audiobook — carries its own ISBN under the imprint’s name, with correct BISAC subject codes and matching title and contributor data in every channel. Four formats, four numbers, one record that agrees with itself.
That is metadata work. It is the same job I have been doing on client sites since the late nineties, pointed at a different index.
What AI search does with a book
This is the part that decided it for me.
Answer engines cite sources. What they cite well are things with stable identifiers, clear authorship, and a publisher that resolves to a real entity. A book with a registered ISBN, a named imprint, an author with a verifiable record, and a catalog entry sitting in several systems at once is far easier for a machine to attribute than a PDF on a company blog.
I have been testing how AI systems pick and credit sources for a couple of years now, including building a reference site to watch it happen. The pattern holds: structure and provenance beat volume. A book is the most structured thing most experts will ever publish. Publishing it in a way that strips the structure back out is a waste of the writing.
The Part Most Consultants Get Wrong
Consultants write books to establish authority. Many then publish them in the one way guaranteed to produce none.
I have watched this play out more than once. The book gets written, uploaded, and listed. The listing says “Independently published.” No library carries it. No bookstore can order it on trade terms. The author cannot get it reviewed, because most outlets will not look at a title with no publisher behind it. The book exists. It is not findable, not orderable, and not citable.
The writing was the hard part, and they did it. Then they skipped the last twenty percent that decides whether anyone runs into the thing.
If you have already written a book and it is sitting on a platform under a borrowed ISBN, that is fixable. A new edition under a real imprint gets a new record. It is not too late. It is just work.
The First Title
The first Hartzer Press book is The Unofficial Ballot: Trust, Risk, and Taking Sides in a Divided Era, which I wrote. It is a non-partisan method for deciding when an organization or an individual should take a public position on a contested issue, and when to stay out of it. The deciding happens in advance and on the record, rather than in the twelve hours after something goes wrong.
It is forthcoming in 2026 in paperback, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook. Chapter detail and retail links are at theunofficialballot.com, and ISBNs and the publication date go up as they are assigned.
The List Is Open
Hartzer Press is not a vehicle for my own books. I would rather publish the best book on a subject than the one written closest to home.
If you work in one of these fields and have a book in you, send a proposal: a one-page overview, a chapter outline, and one sample chapter. Not a finished manuscript. If the structure is wrong, finding that out at the outline stage costs you a week instead of a year. Proposals go to [email protected].
One thing worth stating plainly, because every author asks and few small presses answer: we do not charge authors to publish. No reading fee, no setup fee, no marketing package, no requirement to buy your own copies. If a publisher ever asks you for money to publish your book, that is the moment to walk away.
I have spent 25 years telling clients that the best content loses to worse content that is properly structured and properly indexed. That has been true of websites the whole time. It turns out to be just as true of books, and the catalog record is where it gets decided.
Hartzer Press is at hartzerpress.com. Proposals, review copy requests, permissions, and trade orders all go through the site.