Learning How Creative IP Becomes Discoverable Online
In July 2022, Royal LaKill founder Selena Houle published their first novella, Dear Atlas: I’m a Planet Still Orbiting Your Supernova.
The 125-page experimental poetry novella explores love, loss and healing through the lens of astronomy, grief and physics.
But the goal of the project wasn’t really to sell books.
We wanted to answer a bigger question:
How do you take an original creative work, turn it into a legitimate published product, and make sure the internet knows it exists?
At the time, most of our marketing experience came from service-based businesses. We had helped companies sell products and services online, but we had never worked with a client whose primary asset was intellectual property.
So instead of treating Dear Atlas as a traditional book launch, we treated it as a low-cost experiment.
The Experiment
The rules were simple. Create and publish a book while avoiding expensive traditional promotion methods and excessive heavy-lifting.
That meant:
- No book signings.
- No posters or physical promotion.
- No free copies sent to influencers or reviewers.
- No large advertising budget.
- No expensive publishing services.
Instead, we focused on the digital infrastructure that makes books discoverable:
- Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.
- Google Books.
- Goodreads.
- ISBN registration.
- Author profiles.
- Search-friendly book descriptions.
- Digital portfolios and showcases.
Which also meant learning the process from front to back.
Building the Book
Before publishing, we had to learn the entire production pipeline:
- Editing and proofreading.
- Inserting illustrations (a la Rupi Kaur or Aphrodite Made Me Do It).
- Designing the cover and interior layout.
- Writing author and publisher descriptions.
- Creating copyright information.
- Registering ISBNs.
- Formatting paperback and EPUB versions.
- Preparing files for print-on-demand.
Surprisingly, publishing was easier than expected.
Amazon’s tools made distribution incredibly accessible.
The difficult part was everything around it.
Small details like:
- correct print dimensions,
- colour profiles,
- EPUB formatting,
- cover templates,
- metadata,
Not having an in-house expert to check made these tasks much harder than expected.
The biggest lesson:
Self-publishing is not difficult because the technology is inaccessible. It’s difficult because there are many small, annoying and tedious technical details that are more convenient to hand off to a traditional publisher.
How Do You Make A Book Discoverable?
A large portion of the promotion strategy was built around search because we had a question we wanted to answer.
If you create a new digital object, how do you teach search engines that it exists?
A blog post can exist online without becoming a recognized entity. A social media profile can exist for decades without ever getting a summary or a Wikipedia page.
But we assumed publishing a book had different advantages. It could be described everywhere in the exact same way with minimal changes to content or copy.
So, we started registering and distributing Dear Atlas through established platforms to create a network of connected references:
- An ISBN.
- An Amazon listing.
- A Google ebooks entry.
- Goodreads
- Design portfolio pages.
- Medium articles discussing the book.
Each platform we added was meant to reinforce the existence of the others.
The Results
We initially expected the book to sell to friends and family.
Instead, over approximately four months, Dear Atlas sold:
- 11 ebook copies.
- 16 paperback copies.
With sales split pretty evenly between Canadian and American readers despite sharing a very similar name with another book by a different author.
However, the more interesting result wasn’t the number of copies sold.
Spending $15 to sell 27 books isn’t terrible, but it’s not great either.
What really caught our attention was the implications for online identity and personal branding.
In May of 2025, Google introduced AI search excerpts.
And almost immediately, search engines and AI-powered search tools began consistently associating “Selena Houle” with:
- writing,
- illustration,
- and the novella itself.
The book jacket copy written for Amazon and Google Books became the foundation for how the project was described online.
With many search results referring to Selena as the first-time author of a “prose poetry novella”, with much of the phrasing taken directly from how the book was summarized in articles and on the Amazon listing.
This has some interesting implications for online credibility building. Especially because repeated taglines on social media profiles, “full-time geek, casual writer,” became foundational to AI search answers.
Publishing and repeated framing created a clearly defined digital object that search systems could understand.
Which then made the author easier to summarize as well.
What We Learned
1. Publishing Creates More Than a Product.
A book is a structured digital asset which makes it and products like it unusually useful for structuring context in a way that is legible to AI search.
ISBNs, retailer listings, author profiles and metadata create a network of references that make the work easier for search engines to understand.
Which then in turn makes other entities attached to it easier to embed in training data for recall.
2. Existing Platforms Do a Surprising Amount of Distribution Work.
Amazon, Google Books and other publishing platforms already have massive discovery systems built in.
For small creators, the challenge isn’t always creating attention.
Sometimes it’s simply about making sure the right systems know the work exists and refining the context surrounding it.
3. Warm Audiences Continue to Outperform Tiny Ad Budgets.
The $15 Facebook advertising experiment produced almost no meaningful results.
The strongest signals came from existing relationships, creator platforms and people already connected to the project.
4. Metadata is Marketing.
The descriptions, categories and information attached to a product are not just administrative details.
They become the language search engines, retailers and AI systems use to understand and describe an object. The clearer and more consistent the language surrounding that object, the easier it is for modern AI search to understand.
5. Small Experiments Can Answer Expensive Questions.
The goal was never to create a bestselling book.
The goal was to understand the independent publishing ecosystem before investing in larger creative projects, specifically in media production ecosystems.
By completing one small publishing experiment, we now have a repeatable process for future books, films and other original IP projects.
As well as some interesting insights into long-term brand development.
What's Next?
The biggest takeaway wasn’t that we published a book.
It was that we love promoting things we’re passionate about, structuring search context in complex media ecosystems and creating original IP projects.
Preferably for money, but also for science.
We have a few more experiments planned. And are currently planning the roll-out for Selena’s next book Reasonable Doubt.
In the meantime, if you’re curious about Dear Atlas, you can (obviously) find it on Amazon and a bunch of very sketchy looking mirror sites.