The process of publishing has changed very little. Discoverability is what has changed.
Thirty-five years ago, readers discovered books and articles through bookstores, libraries, magazines, newspapers, and word of mouth.
Twenty-five years ago, websites, blogs, and search engines transformed how people found information online.
Today, search engines, AI assistants, social media, and online recommendations all influence how readers discover new content.
Publish for readers
The challenge of finding readers hasn’t fundamentally changed for publishers, but the ways readers discover books and content have changed.
Whether you’re publishing a book, an online article, or a blog post, people still have to find it before they can read it.
However, before even thinking about discoverability, the first priority is always to publish quality writing in a form that readers will enjoy.
For books and ebooks, it means being attentive to typography, formatting, paper quality, and a high-quality cover.
Reading a print book is different from reading an ebook, so attention to paragraph length and line spacing is vital for ebook reading ease.
Online publishing of articles, blog posts, or essays also needs careful formatting to please a reader’s eye.
In most cases, white space plays an important role in reducing reader fatigue and improving readability on small screens.
Formatting a text, whether short or long, for print or screen, is an essential part of publishing because it improves the reading experience.
But no matter how well a text looks or reads, only readers who discover it can appreciate it.
And that’s the major challenge publishers need to adapt to in a rapidly changing world.
Publish for discovery
Whether you’re publishing online or self-publishing books, you need to think about the routes readers take to discover your work.
Today, that means search engines, AI citations and summaries, social media, bookstore algorithms, and recommendations or reviews from readers.
You might have published the perfect book or article, but how do you help readers discover it?
The answer sometimes lies in the first four sentences of any text. Does it have a “hook” to grab readers’ attention instantly?
Think about someone selecting a new book in a bookstore. What do they do?
They look at the cover and title, maybe read the back blurb, but will almost always read the first few sentences on page one.
It’s the same process online with book preview reads.
For online writing, the first few sentences are even more important because there is no glossy cover to attract a reader’s attention.
If the heading or title and the first few sentences don’t interest a reader, they will click away.
When it comes to algorithms, search engine crawlers, and AI retrieval bots, they read any metadata embedded in a page.
But they also analyze the opening paragraphs to understand the subject, context, and purpose of the page.
That’s one reason the beginning of an article matters so much. It needs to engage human readers while also making the topic immediately clear to crawlers and bots.
We know about influencers on social media, but that’s rarely a role publishers can successfully play. However, attracting attention is still the aim.
Social media works in much the same way. The aim is to attract attention with only a few words, often supported by an image or video.
Find the right balance
If you have been publishing for a while, you’ll remember how easy it used to be to attract attention and rank in search engines.
For a while, a common SEO approach was to use a keyword in the title, the first sentence, the first heading, and several times throughout the text. Even for authors, a similar approach could work reasonably well when using a book title as a keyword.
Whether fortunately or unfortunately, this approach no longer works and can even be detrimental to gaining exposure from search engines.
That’s why I believe that the first few sentences are now the “glue” that can bind all discovery paths together.
Yes, it might mean a little editing of what you thought was a perfect piece of writing, but it only requires changing a few lines.
If you get it right, it opens up three opportunities.
1. For readers, the first few sentences decide whether they continue.
2. For search engines, the first few sentences help establish the topic.
3. For AI systems, the first few sentences provide context for retrieval and summarization.
Keep in mind, too, that social media platforms are now using AI more and more. My site is regularly scanned by social media crawlers, search engine bots, and AI assistants looking for information to index, summarize, or recommend.
These include bots from Facebook, TikTok, Google, Bing, Apple, Meta, OpenAI, Amazon, Anthropic, and many others.
From this, you can see why AI retrieval is becoming such an important cog in the wheel of discovery.
I’ve written before that you have only 30 seconds to hook a reader, but you may have less than a second to make an impression on a bot crawler.
Keep things in perspective
You can’t expect everything you publish to succeed on every front.
The world is a very big place, and interest in any particular form of writing is often small and highly niche.
That’s why you need to impress the potential readers you can attract by ensuring that you publish for readers as your first priority.
But that doesn’t mean you should forget all about possible discoverability routes.
You should definitely use all the tools at your disposal, whether it be online, offline, social media, promotional blog posts, or advertising.
No one is going to discover your writing by accident. You need to make it happen.
However, don’t go overboard or to extremes. Simply make sure you can please readers and use the best metadata to accommodate technology.
For a book, make sure you optimize your metadata fields when you publish.
These include your book title, subtitle, author name, book description, and selecting the appropriate categories (genres) and search keywords.
When publishing online content, the metadata is similar. Use a compelling or intriguing H1 headline, add a meta description, have a table of contents if possible, use headings, and include an author box.
And don’t forget the power that your first three or four sentences have.
Summary
Publishing has never been about pleasing bookstores, newspapers, search engines, or AI.
Those are simply the routes that connect readers with your work.
The real goal has always been the same: create something worth discovering and worth reading.
And that’s a challenge all publishers have faced in the past.
The only thing that has changed is the number and type of routes available for readers to discover your work.
Related Reading: Publishing The Same Content On Multiple Platforms
English teacher, writer, and author. Passionate about grammar, creative writing, and self-publishing. Always exploring new tools and tech to help writers succeed.
