Self-Publishing Woes: ISBN and Formatting

Blast and damn!

My uncle likes to say "Art is not for the weak, timid, or humble." It takes balls to make something creative and then to say to somebody, "Hey, you should buy this. It'll improve your life. Trust me." Not only that, but it opens you up to rejection or people telling you that you suck.

But if you want to write for a living, you have to firmly clasp your cojones and do it!

While I originally got my first public start on Inkitt with my first novel Remnants of Chaos: Chaotic Omens, which I think has been doing well, jumping into the inhospitable waters of self-publishing is a whole new ball game. But, services like Amazon's Kindle Digital Publishing do make it easier. Not much, but they do.

So, anyway, a few months ago I was thinking about finally jumping into the world of self-publishing. I was working on a book at the time that would become my Defining Beauty: A Philosophy on Feminine Beauty. And I thought about how much it could do for me if I published it. But then, I really started thinking. "Hey," I thought, "I've got this play lying around that I wrote in college. It was my Honors Project, so it's pretty much already professionally done. Why don't I publish that? People like Shakespeare and the idea that someone wrote a play in the Shakespearean style might really blow some minds." So, I decided to self-publish that also.

Then, I joined a mailing list called Authors Publish Magazine. It's essentially a newsletter that tells other authors about who's publishing right now and what they're looking for. In one of their newsletters, they detailed a few sites and publishers looking for horror short stories. As it so happens to be, I've been sitting on one that again, I did back in college. I thought I might submit it and see if it got in, but then I had a brainwave...

"Why submit my story to this site, which has all these submission rules, when I can self-publish my story? Yeah. Then that way, I can have complete publication rights on it, and I can keep making money off it instead of just once. Heck! I know what I'll do, I'll write a couple more horror shorts and combine them into an anthology and self-publish that bitch! Yeah!"

Well, here we are a few months later. And how has it gone? Well, it's alright I suppose. I unfortunately just finished the horror shorts and I am now in the process of editing them. I hope to have them self-published by Friday. But what about the other two projects? The Passion of Gloucester and Sinead and Defining Beauty?

Well, I decided to e-publish The Passion first, and what a learning experience that was. For the Kindle edition, I just uploaded the document and I was finished. But, the paperback edition... holy shit! I spent hours on that bitch. I'd never heard of trim size and gutters, and I've never messed with margins. And just because I messed with paper size and margins on one page of the document, didn't mean it would work on all pages which is weird as hell. Thank God for ctrl+A.

But even still, I wanted to pull my hair out. One of the more interesting things that happened with The Passion was that after I messed with paper size, all the scene information, i.e. which scene it is, where it is, who's in it, all that got separated from the dialogue. The first time around, I just accepted it uploaded it that way. Thank God no one bought it yet as just yesterday I found a way to finagle it so that it would all be together. And to keep things consistent, I made sure that Kindle edition and the paperback were exactly the same in terms of layout which required multiple re-uploads.

As for Defining Beauty, the process was much easier, but still took hours! Seriously, Amazon KDP is not in a rush to get anything done. But there was still a complication: ISBN. What is ISBN? Basically it's an identification number that all books have that register them as existing. It's like a birth certificate or social security number. Thing is though, Kindle and other e-format books don't need one, but physical books do. You can either buy them yourself, 1 for $125, 10 for $575, or 1000 for $1000, or you can be supplied one. Amazon supplies one for free. So, that wasn't the problem.

The problem was that when I first decided to make paperback versions of The Passion and found out about the teeny details that go into formatting a paperback, one of the pages that were in the sample was an ISBN page. Now, you don't need an ISBN page because the ISBN will be on the back of the book with the barcode, but to keep things elegant, I went ahead and put both the ISBN-10 and ISBN-13 on my copyright page of The Passion, and there were no problems. But Defining Beauty... ugh! I don't know what happened.

I did the same thing as I did for The Passion, but I've already gotten three emails from Amazon telling me that something is off about my metadata. Apparently, if you try to print the ISBN in the book itself, it has to match the ISBN that Amazon gives you. No problem there, but when you have one book that has both the ISBN-10 and -13, and another where you only have the -13 because Amazon told you there was an issue, it drives you a little nuts. Especially because the system is so damn slow to process and with paperbacks, every time you change the content, you have to go through a formal approval process where you inspect a digital copy of the book to make sure everything looks fine but that also takes forever. So, we'll see what happens with Defining Beauty.

But, uh, pro tip for you all. If you format your file with a page size of 6"x9", and choose a slightly larger trim size for your book as a whole, you won't have to mess around as much with gutters, margins, and outsides. That was a huge pain in my ass.