User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-1506468-20190827123101/@comment-24894325-20190911212848

I could not understand why, after being so forceful and clear that the stories were published by Arcbeatle Press, why would Mr. Wylder, in the middle of this discussion, state the publisher as "James Wylder" and not "Arcbeatle Press"? It seemed to have been counterproductive.

So I tried to investigate. This is an unexpected result of my investigations.

First, a short explanation of the method. Each professionally printed book is supplied with a unique code called ISBN. An ISBN makes it easier to find a book online or in a store. Wiki pages for books typically include an ISBN in the inbox, which is a clickable link leading to a page with links to Amazon and other online book sources. Naturally, books published by Arcbeatle Press have ISBNs too.

Given that this standard is well established and global, there are multiple search engines, allowing to search books by ISBN. I have run some of the ISBNs of books listed on Arcbeatle Press website on such a search engine https://isbnsearch.org/, but they were not listed as published by Arcbeatle Press.

Fortunately, with this search engine one can also search by the publisher's name, so I tried to search for the publishing companies producing Doctor Who prose, including the small presses mentioned upthread. Here are the links to the search results (note: the search field may not be displayed correctly, but the search results are):
 * Candy Jar Books - 9 pages worth of published books;
 * Obverse Books - 6 pages worth of published books;
 * Thebes Publishing - 2 pages worth of published books;
 * Random Static - 1 page worth of published books (only 5 books, of which 1 is a false positive);
 * Mad Norwegian Press - 7 pages worth of published books;
 * Telos Publishing - 26 pages worth of published books;
 * BBC Books - 100 pages worth of published books;
 * Arcbeatle Press - 0 books.

While the search is not specific to the publisher's name and may return some false positives with the search term in the title or other metadata (as happened when "Random static" appeared somewhere else in a book), there do not seem to exist any books published by Arcbeatle Press. Or at least, an aggregation engine that seems to contain all the books covered by the wiki does not register any books by Arcbeatle Press. I was surprised to discover such a stark difference between Arcbeatle Press and every other publisher of Doctor Who prose, including other small presses.

The situation was not made any clearer by the following statement from Mr. Wylder: "My first book I'm the publisher on just released! It's an amazing scifi thriller filled with mystery and time travel :). I hope you check it out! #bookstagram #booklaunch https://www.amazon.com/Greater-Good-Echoes-Nathan-Butler-ebook/dp/B07VPY2894/"

- J. Wylder (@arcbeatle) on Instagram on July 30, 2019

This statement is unexpected because this post was made this summer, whereas Arcbeatle Press website lists books published as early as 2013.