This is a hypothetical engagement. The company is fictional.
The problems are not — I’ve seen every one of them, across multiple clients, in exactly the configuration described here.
The publisher had been in business for thirty years. They had relationships with hundreds of authors. They had a catalog that included several award-winning titles and a few genuine cultural artifacts. They had a marketing team of four people, a website that hadn’t been significantly updated since 2019, and a blog that published “news” at completely irregular intervals — a press release about an author’s award here, a post about an upcoming event there, nothing that would cause a reader to come back.
The irony of a company that understands books not understanding content was, to me, immediately obvious. To them, it wasn’t irony at all. Books and content were different things. Books were products. Content was marketing. They were separate departments with separate budgets and no one in the organization whose job was to ask whether the content was representing the intellectual culture of the press.
The diagnostic.
The first thing I do in any engagement is look at what exists before proposing what should exist. A content audit is not about judging what’s already been published — it is about understanding what the current state of the content library reveals about the organization’s relationship to its audience.
What the publisher’s content audit revealed:
The website had significant organic traffic — a surprise, given the sparse content. Most of it was coming to book-specific pages, driven by people searching for specific titles. The blog was invisible in search. There were no topic-based pages, no author-expertise content, no material that positioned the press as an intellectual authority on the subjects its books addressed.
The authors — who were, by definition, experts in their fields — had zero visibility on the press’s website. Their bios were four sentences. Their books had descriptions that read like catalog copy, because they were catalog copy.
The audience, such as it was, had no way to understand what the press stood for, what its editorial sensibility was, or why they should buy from this press rather than finding the same author at a different publisher.
What we built.
The engagement had three phases, proposed after the audit and selected by the client.
Phase 1: Editorial identity.
Before producing any new content, we defined what the press actually stood for — not in the marketing language of mission statements, but in specific editorial terms. What subjects did this press take seriously? What was its perspective on those subjects? What would a reader know about the world if they read ten books from this catalog that they wouldn’t know from ten books from a competitor’s catalog?
This is brand voice work applied to an editorial operation rather than a marketing function. It produced a one-page document — not a style guide — that described the press’s perspective in language specific enough to make editorial decisions. Content that fit the perspective: yes. Content that didn’t: no.
Phase 2: Author expertise architecture.
The press’s most underutilized content asset was its authors. We built a content program around author expertise: long-form Q&As that explored the research behind the books, guest essays from authors on the subjects they’d spent years studying, reading lists curated by authors in their fields.
None of this was expensive. It required editorial coordination — reaching out to authors, developing the questions with them, editing the responses — but the content itself came from people who had already done the intellectual work. The press was a conduit for genuine expertise it already had access to. It just hadn’t occurred to anyone to use it that way.
Phase 3: Subject-matter authority pages.
The press published books in roughly eight subject areas. We built one substantial, well-linked resource page per subject area — not a category page listing books, but an editorial introduction to why this subject matters, what the press’s best thinking on it was, and where to start if you were new to it.
These pages accumulated organic authority over eighteen months and became the highest-traffic pages on the site after the homepage.
- What the publisher learned.
The thing that surprised the marketing team most was that none of what worked was new. It was the application of editorial judgment — the same judgment the press applied to deciding which books to publish — to the question of what content to produce.
The press knew how to commission and develop work on important subjects. They knew how to identify expertise and present it accessibly. They knew what their audience cared about and why. They had just never applied any of that knowledge to their content operation, because content was marketing and marketing was separate from editorial.
It isn’t. Content strategy is editorial strategy applied to a digital channel. The skills travel. The judgment transfers. The publishers who figure this out have an enormous advantage over the marketing-native content operations they’re competing with, because what they’re building is something the marketing team cannot manufacture: a genuine intellectual identity, expressed in content, that makes a reader want to come back.
Jacob Clifton is principal at Clifton Creative.