ASK ZEKE
Publishing Services
Built by a publisher, for publishers.
Zeke — Chief Morale Officer | Labrador/Rottweiler | Very Good Boy
Get in Touch
I'm Jay Hartman. I've spent years running independent publishing imprints — managing author rosters, processing quarterly royalties, wrangling ISBN registrations, and doing all the behind-the-scenes work that keeps a small press running. I know what this work actually looks like, because I do it myself.
I built Ask Zeke because the tools publishers need either cost a fortune or can't do what we actually need them to do. This is different. It's a boutique service built by someone who lives in the same world you do — not a software company that read about publishing from the outside.
Every service Ask Zeke offers is something I built to solve a real problem in my own operation. If it wasn't good enough for my authors, it's not good enough for yours.
Pick what you need. Use as little or as much as makes sense for your operation.
Quarterly royalty statements for every author on your roster — professionally formatted, accurately calculated, ready to send. You provide the retailer reports from your platforms. We handle the math, the currency conversions, the carryover tracking, and the PDF generation. Your authors get clean, professional statements. You get your time back.
Optimized keywords, BISAC and BIC category codes, KDP browse categories, and back cover copy — built by someone who understands how books actually get discovered. Available as a complete package or as individual elements. You choose what you need.
See exactly which titles are carrying your catalog and which aren't earning their keep. Channel-by-channel performance breakdowns, quarter-over-quarter comparisons, and the kind of business intelligence that most small presses have never had access to — generated from the same files used for royalty processing.
Straightforward from start to finish.
Tell us about your operation — your imprints, your authors, your platforms. We'll walk you through our onboarding checklist and make sure everything is set up correctly before we process a single number.
We provide simple templates for your author roster and title catalog — one time only. Once your setup is on file, you never have to explain your operation to us again.
KDP, Apple, Ingram, Google Books — whatever platforms you use. We provide clear instructions for exactly which reports to pull and how to send them.
Professional PDF statements for every author, editor fee statements, a complete payout summary for your bookkeeper, and everything packaged in a single ZIP file — typically within five to seven business days.
Let's have a conversation. No pressure, no sales pitch — just a publisher talking to another publisher about whether this is a good fit.
jay@askzeke.co