🔖 ISBNs, barcodes and listings

Do you need your own ISBN?

An ISBN identifies one edition of one book in one binding. The question is not whether you need a number, but whether you take the printer's free one or buy your own — and that choice is hard to reverse.

What belongs on a copyright page

Almost no reader reads it, and almost everyone who handles your book professionally does. Line by line, what a copyright page carries, which lines are obligatory, and what has to change between editions.

Barcodes, and the price code beside them

The barcode on a back cover is your ISBN in machine-readable form, and the small block beside it is the price. Both need space designed for them, and the price code has a currency trap worth knowing about.

Categories and keywords, without the folklore

Categories decide which shelf your book sits on and which books your rank is measured against. Keywords feed the search box. Both are ordinary metadata, and most of the advice written about them is folklore.

Should you invent a publisher name?

An imprint is a name you publish under, not a company you have to form. What inventing one gets you, what it definitely does not, and the ISBN catch that decides whether anyone outside your book ever sees it.

Pricing a self-published book

Your price sits between a floor set by real costs and a ceiling set by what readers expect to pay in your category. Here is how each one is calculated, and why page count is a pricing decision.

Going wide, or staying exclusive

List your ebook everywhere, or commit it to one retailer's exclusive program. The terms change constantly, so here is the shape of the trade, what usually decides it, and the detail most authors miss.

Pre-orders: what they buy you, and what they cost

A pre-order is a live listing for a book that does not exist yet. It buys you a link, a runway and sometimes a release-day sales spike — in exchange for a date you are held to.

Copyright: what you have automatically, and what registering adds

In most countries you own the copyright in your book the moment you write it down, and no registration creates that ownership. Registering, where it exists, adds a public record and sometimes procedural advantages.

Translations and foreign rights, for a self-published author

Your book is a bundle of separable rights, and self-publishing in one language uses up almost none of them. What a translated edition really involves, which books are plausible candidates, and why a cheap translation is unrecoverable.

Metadata: the fields that decide who ever sees your book

Metadata is not paperwork. It is the only version of your book that stores, libraries and search indexes ever read, and several of its fields are hard or impossible to change once you have published.

Print on demand or a print run?

Print on demand makes one copy when someone orders it, with no inventory and no risk. An offset run is far cheaper per copy and paid for up front. Which one fits depends on distribution and certainty, not ambition.

Getting into libraries and bookstores

Libraries and stores order from a distribution catalog, not from you. Here is how those buyers actually work, the two terms that get most self-published titles rejected, and what a workable approach looks like.

Selling books directly to readers

On a direct sale you keep far more of the money and you find out who your readers are. Here is what that costs you in work, what direct is genuinely good at, and where it fails.

Paid publishing services: how to tell a deal from a trap

The most expensive mistake in self-publishing is not a bad cover. It is a contract that takes a large fee up front and a share of the revenue forever, for work you could have commissioned once.

Author profiles, and why they are worth an hour

Most retailers and several reader platforms let you claim a free page that collects your books under your name. It is the cheapest discovery you will ever get, and most authors never claim it.

Uploading your files for the first time

The upload screen looks like an exam you did not study for. It is not. Every store and printer asks for the same things in roughly the same order, and knowing that order in advance removes most of the fear.

CIP data, legal deposit, and the library end of publishing

Two obligations and one optional block that self-publishers confuse with each other. What a CIP block is and why your book probably cannot get one, what legal deposit asks of you, and what a librarian actually needs.

Publishing under a pen name

A pen name is the name on the cover, the spine and the listing — and normally not the name that holds the copyright or receives the money. The mechanics, and the four things authors get wrong.

Book awards and competitions, and which are worth entering

The word "award" covers three different businesses — a prize, a paid competition open to everyone, and a merchandise operation with judging bolted to the front. They all produce a gold seal that looks the same.

Series numbering, and getting the books to find each other

A series holds together because two metadata fields agree on every volume. Spell the series name one character differently, or number a book in a way the store cannot sort, and four books become four unrelated listings.

Taking a book out of print, and what survives it

Unpublishing is a deliberate production decision, not an undo button. Some of what a book leaves behind — its identifier, its reviews, the copies already sold — does not come back down with the listing.

Crowdfunding a book

A campaign is a pre-order with a marketing campaign attached and a fulfillment obligation at the end. Most first campaigns fail on the arithmetic — shipping, mainly — rather than on the pitch.

Selling to schools and libraries

Institutions buy at list price, buy several copies, and keep a book in circulation for years. They also buy through channels most self-published titles never enter, and to a physical standard most never meet.

Rights, book fairs, and whether they are for you

Rights are the separable licenses inside your book, and trade fairs are where publishers trade them. Here is how that market actually decides, why attending rarely pays for a self-published author, and what does work instead.

Book clubs and reading group editions

A reading group edition is your book with a few pages added at the back: questions a club can run a meeting on. It is one of the cheapest things you can add, and almost nobody does it.

The copyright page of a translated book

A translated edition contains two creative works and has to say so. The extra lines a translation carries, why it needs its own ISBN, and the rights question to settle before the work starts, not after.

Distributors, aggregators and who actually sells your book

Retailer, distributor, aggregator and printer are four different jobs, and one company often does several of them at once. Untangling them is what turns the go-direct-or-not decision into something you can answer.

Publishing a thesis or an academic book

A thesis and a book are different documents written for different readers, and publishing the first unchanged is the commonest mistake. What the revision involves, what your field counts, and what the finished object has to have.

Reprinting a public domain book

Republishing an out-of-copyright work is legal, legitimate and extremely crowded. What decides whether yours is worth buying is the text, the typesetting and what you add — plus knowing which edition you are actually copying from.

The records a self-publisher needs to keep

The unglamorous filing that saves you when something goes wrong years later: which ISBN is on which format, what you uploaded and when, who owns the art, and what you typed into the listing form.

Bulk and corporate sales

One buyer taking several hundred copies is worth more than a strong month in a retail store, and most nonfiction authors never ask. Who buys in bulk, what that buyer needs from you, and how the pricing actually works.

Special sales: the places books sell that are not bookshops

Museum shops, heritage sites, garden centers and gift shops buy books, choose them by fit rather than by sales rank, and stock almost no competing titles. For the right book this channel outsells retail entirely.

Getting your ebook into libraries

Libraries lend ebooks and audiobooks under license, on terms that look nothing like a retail sale. How the channel is structured, why a borrower can be worth more than a buyer, and the move most authors never make.

When a book becomes a second edition

Fixing typos is not a second edition. Substantially changing the text is, and it needs its own ISBN, its own edition statement and its own listing. Where the line sits, and what going wrong in either direction costs you.

What happens to your books after you

Your books keep selling after you die, the royalties keep arriving, and nobody else can log in to any of it. What a successor actually needs written down, and which questions belong to a professional.

Selling the same book in more than one country

Most self-published books go on sale worldwide from day one, whether or not the author planned it. What actually differs between territories — price, tax, printing, rights — and the metadata that quietly travels badly.

Hiring a publicist, and whether to

A publicist pitches your book to people who already take their calls. That is a real service, and it is the one most often bought for the wrong book at the wrong moment, months after the window it needed.

Buying your own ISBNs

Once you have decided to own your identifiers, the rest is mechanics and arithmetic — who issues them, why they are sold in blocks, how many a working author actually gets through, and the registration step most people skip.