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Write the Damn Book Already
Writing and publishing a phenomenal book doesn’t have to be ridiculously complicated or mind-numbingly overwhelming. From myths and misconceptions to practical tips and sound strategies, Elizabeth Lyons (author, book writing coach, book editor, and founder of Finn-Phyllis Press), helps writers feel more in control of and comfortable with the business of book publishing. Her interviews with fellow authors discussing their writing processes and publishing journeys aim to help you untangle YOUR process so you can finally get your story into the world.
Write the Damn Book Already
Ep 110: ISBN Essentials for Indie Authors
Click Here to ask your book writing and publishing questions!
This episode explores the critical role ISBNs play in the self-publishing journey. It's not the most glamorous part of publishing, but understanding the role of the ISBN is critical when it comes to managing book sales and metadata ownership.
Topics covered:
• The importance of ISBNs for indie and self-published authors
• Differences in acquiring ISBNs in various countries
• Components of an ISBN, explained
• Challenges authors may face with hybrid publishers
• Situations where it’s acceptable to use a free ISBN
Resources Mentioned
Kindlepreneur barcode generator
7 Critical Questions to Ask Hybrid Publishers
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Hello and welcome to the Write the Damn Book Already podcast. My name is Elizabeth Lyons, I'm an author and book editor, and I help people write and publish thought-provoking, wildly entertaining books without any more overthinking, second-guessing or overwhelm than absolutely necessary. Because, let's face it, some overthinking, second-guessing and overwhelm is going to come with the territory, if you're anything like me. In short, I love books and I believe that story and shared perspective are two of the most impactful ways we connect with one another. A few things. I don't believe in gimmicks, magic bullets and swoon-worthy results without context, as in. Be sure to reveal that a result took eight years or required a $30,000 investment in ads, because those details are just as important. What I believe in most as an author the long game is the shortcut For more book writing and publishing tips and solutions. Visit publishaprofitablebookcom or visit me over on Instagram at Elizabeth Lyons Author bookcom. Or visit me over on Instagram at Elizabeth Lyons author.
Speaker 1:Hello, hello my friends, all right, today is a solo episode. You've just got me today and we're going to talk about something that is extremely important in the publishing world, especially if you are an indie author, and is often not talked about and definitely not well understood, sometimes until it's I don't want to say too late like it's dire, but it can be too late in the sense of, like man, I wish I had known that sooner, I might have done things a little bit differently. And now it's kind of a bit of a cluster, you know what? So that thing is the ISBN. A lot of times, authors, if you're traditionally published, you really don't even need to worry about this because your publisher will take care of assigning ISBNs to your book and all of the stuff that goes along with having an ISBN. You don't even have to think about it. But if you are an indie author, meaning you are self-publishing, you are self-publishing and hiring a publishing services company to help you with some aspects of the process, which may include getting and assigning and registering an ISBN or ISBN-Z. Or you're working with a hybrid publisher where you are footing the bill up front and then they are taking a percentage or sometimes none, but it's usually a small percentage of sales off the back end. You want to understand what the ISBN is, why it's important and how to handle some of the various aspects associated with it.
Speaker 1:First and foremost, the ISBN. It stands for International Standard Book Number and the most important word in those four words is international. Lots of times authors will ask OK, if I'm publishing in the US, can I and I'm getting a US ISBN, or I'm getting my ISBN from a US agency is really a more appropriate way to say that. Can I still sell my book in Europe or in Canada or Australia? And the answer is yes.
Speaker 1:The ISBN number is international. It is recognized everywhere. The difference is that different countries have different processes and pricing for the acquiring and registering of an ISBN. So in the United States we go through the US ISBN agency, which there's sort of a I don't know if I want to call it a third party, but you don't go and apply at the US ISBN agency. You apply through a company called Bowker B-O-W-K-E-R and that's also where you will register your ISBN to the title of your book and assign it a version. And we're going to get to all of that. In Canada it's free to get an ISBN, which is lovely. In the United States it's not. There are a few exceptions to that which I'm going to speak to. In almost 100% of cases I do not recommend I personally recommend getting a free ISBN, but there's one instance when it sometimes makes sense and I'll get into that. So you're going to get. If you're in the United States, you're going to get your. Your ISBN is going to be assigned through the US ISBN agency and if you are an indie author in any capacity, you are going to want to know who is your ISBN owned by.
Speaker 1:Let me break down the ISBN quickly so you know what it is and is not. If you look on the back of any print book so paperback or hardback you will see a barcode in the lower right-hand corner and above it it usually says ISBN and then is followed by either 10 or 13 digits or there are just 10 or 13 digits at the topmost level of the barcode. That is the ISBN. Until 2007, they had 10 digits. Then, I think, they ran out of numbers so they had to switch to 13 digits. So some books have a 10-digit ISBN and a 13-digit ISBN. But nowadays when you go out to Bowker which is not at bowkercom, which you would think it's actually myidentifierscom Don't ask me why I was not part of that decision the ISBNs that you will purchase and be granted and then assigned to a title will be 13 digits long Underneath that digit which.
Speaker 1:This is completely separate from the ISBN. But I just want you to understand this. There is a five-digit number. What that five digits represents is the dollar. It's a price, it's a pricing designator. So the first number represents the currency, the number five is US dollars. The next four numbers represent the suggested retail price. So if you see a barcode, and above it you've got the ISBN, and then just slightly below that to the right-hand side, if you see 51495, that means that the suggested retail price of the book is $14.95 in US dollars.
Speaker 1:In many cases today, what you will see on the back of paperbacks is all zeros, especially from indie authors. All that means is or sometimes you might see a five if they're in the US, and then four zeros, but either way it's fine All that means is that you aren't declaring a suggested retail price on the book itself. You will, of course, set your price when you upload your book to Amazon, ingramspark, draft2digital for the digital version, smashwords for the digital version, etc. But you're not committing to a hard and fast suggested retail price on the back of the book. And that works well in instances where authors want to leave that pricing to the discretion of, say, a bookstore or somebody else who might be selling it in person. They just don't want to necessarily commit to a hard and fast price, especially in today's day and age, when the price of paper and printing is going up a little more regularly than it once did, and so authors are needing to increase the price of their book and they don't want to do a full reprint in order to do that. It looks odd if the back of the book says it's $14.95, but the sticker says $17.95. So that's that.
Speaker 1:And then the third component is the actual barcode, and just like any other code like barcode, upc code, for example, when you go and you buy your Haagen-Dazs ice cream that you will eat the entire pint of in order to get through the writing, publishing and or launching of your book, when you take it to the register, you scan the barcode and it pops up in the system oh, this is Haagen-Dazs coffee and it costs well these days $5.99. Didn't used to be that way. And so that's how everybody knows what you're buying, what it costs, and then the store knows what they owe Haagen-Dazs. That's how they keep it all straight. It's the same with an ISBN, it's the same with the barcode that is associated with an ISBN.
Speaker 1:So lots of times people wonder well, how do I get that barcode? Do I need to pay for that? And you can pay for it, but you absolutely don't need to. There are a variety of free barcode generators. My favorite to use is over at Kindlepreneur and I will put the link to that in the episode notes. Dave Chesson is an incredible wealth of information when it comes to independent book publishing. He's also been in the space for decades and he has a free barcode generator over on your site. So you don't need to pay for that part anywhere.
Speaker 1:But you do need to pay for the ISBN, and I'm gonna get into why. Well, I believe you need to and I'm gonna get into why the ISBN is important because, like I said, it identifies to a. It identifies really to the rest of the world who is the publisher of record of this book. When you're looking at a print book, whether it's a hardback or a paperback there's that. But then also with e-books, e-books have an ISBN too, as do audio books. They don't have to, but they should. Again, this is just my two cents, but I truly cannot imagine doing this like changing my mind on this one. I am open to changing my mind on all kinds of things, but I don't see this one changing.
Speaker 1:So essentially, when a book is assigned an ISBN and then that book is purchased, this is how the seller whether it's Amazon or a Barnes Noble store or your local indie bookstore, whomever knows who to pay like knows what they're selling and or knows who to pay. If you're with a brick and mortar store, they've arguably already purchased the book. They've purchased it wholesale, probably through Ingram, and so they've already made that payment. But if the book doesn't sell, or if the books don't sell, then they can return them within their 90-day return window or whatever they have contracted with the wholesaler, and that's how they kind of know what's where.
Speaker 1:It is a tracking system. So that's on the commercial side of it. On the other side of it, like on the author side of it, it's who owns the metadata as well, and by metadata here's what I mean. Your metadata is your title, your subtitle, your keywords, your categories, when you're talking about an Amazon listing or an IngramSpark or a Draft2Digital Smashwords, whatever. Wherever you list your book for distribution, it's all the various stuff that you put in there that helps identify what your book is, who it's by, what it's about and who it's for and it helps the potential readers find you. So it acts very much for discoverability and it impacts discoverability. What a lot of people don't realize is that, when it comes to the largest search engines in the world, the largest is currently Google, and we're in January of 2025. Second largest is YouTube, third is Amazon and fourth which a lot of people don't realize, is Pinterest.
Speaker 1:So whenever you are using any of those platforms, you've probably heard or thought about the importance of using the right keywords, the right descriptions, the right titles, all those sorts of things so that your content can be discovered by the people who you most want it to be discovered by. Whomever owns your ISBN owns your metadata. So, again, if you're with a traditional publisher, you don't need to worry about this, because your traditional publisher will assign you an ISBN that is correlated with that publishing house. With the 13-digit ISBN, every digit has meaning in the grand scheme of things. So there is a collection of those digits that identify a publishing house. They are unique to a publishing house and then there are other digits that do other things. With a traditional house, they will assign you one of their ISBNs, obviously, and then they are in charge of making sure that your book is categorized properly and has the right keywords, and those two things happen in parallel keywords and those two things happen in parallel. So what your ISBN is doesn't define what your keywords are, but whoever is in charge of the ISBN is in charge of all of those keywords, the one small exception being that if you are working with a publishing services company and they allow you to use one of their ISBNs but the listing is under your account, whether it's your Amazon account, your KDP account on Amazon, your IngramSpark account, your Draft2Digital account, whatever you own the account so they in most cases, if it's a publishing services company, I would argue, in all cases they are uploading to your account, not to their account.
Speaker 1:When you're talking about a hybrid publisher, however and this is a publisher not to be confused with a hybrid author A hybrid author is an author who publishes both independently and traditionally. A hybrid publisher is a publisher where the author pays a portion up front to have that hybrid publisher do the legwork of publishing, and I would argue that that publisher is not just taking anything that comes across their desk. They're vetting the manuscripts and the projects that come across their desk and they're agreeing to kind of go into it with you in partnership, agreeing to kind of go into it with you in partnership. So you pay a portion of the costs of publishing up front and then they still take a small percentage, usually off the back end, but it's not nearly the same amount that a traditional house would take off the back end, considering that the traditional house has put forth 100% of the investment to get the book out there in the first place.
Speaker 1:When you are with a hybrid publisher, they usually I mean they should have their own ISBNs that are assigned to their publishing house. As publishers we buy them in bulk typically and then we just assign them as necessary. As an author, you need an ISBN for each version of your book. So if you have a paperback and an e-book and a hardback, you need three separate ISBNs. And then there are different times and reasons why you would need to get a new ISBN for the book, such as you change the title or you do a second edition, or you change the trim size, so you go from a 6 by nine book to a five by eight book, or it's translated into a different language. All of those things would necessitate a new ISBN. Changing the cover design does not necessitate a new ISBN and changing some of the interior because you noticed some typos or you wanted to add a paragraph. That does not necessitate a new ISBN.
Speaker 1:One of the biggest challenges when it comes to an ISBN, when you're working with a hybrid publisher, is what happens if that publisher goes out of business. Who, air quote, owns the ISBN? And in almost all instances, the answer is going to be the hybrid publisher. So then, in order to get that back and to get your rights back, what kind of hoops would you have to jump through? Would you have to repurchase your rights to the book if the publishing house goes out of business? I've seen that happen. Would you have to start over from scratch with a new ISBN, which means starting from zero reviews and zero search history, which I've seen happen when a hybrid publishing house goes out of business?
Speaker 1:And this isn't a warning not to use a hybrid publishing house, I might add. It's simply. It's actually a question to ask. And with a hybrid publishing house, the question again is often who owns the listing? Is it the publishing house or is it you? And with a hybrid publishing house, in most cases it's going to be the hybrid publishing house, because all payments for book sales will come to the publishing house and then they will cut you a check for your portion, whether it's monthly or quarterly or semi-annually, whatever the agreement is. So if you want to have your book listed as an indie author and be in charge of the listing at all times and all of the data at all times, but you don't want to do the legwork to get the thing listed in the first place, then the person you would want to work with, or the group you would want to work with, is a self-publishing services company or a self-publishing packaging company, not a hybrid publisher. That's getting sort of into the weeds on some other things, and I have an article on the blog about the seven critical questions to ask a hybrid publisher before signing a contract with them, just to make sure that you fully understand what they're going to do, what they aren't going to do, what happens if they go out of business, how money is exchanged how often, who owns the ISBN, who owns the metadata, all those sorts of things. So I will put a link to that article in the show notes so that you can check out those questions and ask them if you are considering pursuing a hybrid publishing agreement.
Speaker 1:So let's talk about metadata briefly, because because, again, the ISBN doesn't decide necessarily who determines the metadata, but whoever owns the ISBN is undoubtedly in charge, aside with the ISBN. If you are assigning your own ISBN or if a hybrid house is assigning it for you, but especially if you're doing it yourself, do not formally. You can buy the ISBN, but do not formally register a title to it. Do not assign your book title to it until you are 100% sure of what the title is going to be. If you change even a word of your main title, you will have to get a new ISBN.
Speaker 1:Once it's assigned, it cannot be unassigned and I've had to throw away, figuratively speaking, more than a few ISBNs because the author was sure of their title and then at the last minute decided to change one word or change the whole darn thing. And even if you make a word plural that was previously singular or the reverse, the ISBN is now no good as it was assigned. So wait until I do not assign ISBNs, until it's one of the last things I do when we're talking about metadata, if you own your listing and you are doing your own upload, because you're truly self-publishing and you're not even getting any assistance from a self-publishing services company, then you will also be in charge of all the metadata, which is like what categories this ISBN going into, or what categories associated with this book, that this ISBN is attached to the book and the ISBN travel holding hands. Think of it that way, always. So if you want to change your book description because you want to add in some new keywords, you want to add in a blurb or a testimonial, you want to change the categories you're in, all of that is associated with the ISBN. You have to access the ISBN, not in Bowker, but you have to be able to have access to the listing that is associated with the ISBN. And so if you are self-publishing, you have that. If you are hybrid publishing, you probably do not have that, and if you're using a self-publishing services company, you have that, and you want to make sure that you know how to access your listing once the self-publishing services company has listed it for you, if that's something that you are hiring them to do.
Speaker 1:I'm actually putting together right now a whole backend collection of quick videos that show authors who work with self-publishing services companies or who self-publish how to get in on the backend of Amazon, ingramspark and Draft2Digital to see what are my sales numbers, what are my earnings numbers, how do I change the price? How do I order author copies? How do I change my categories? How do I change my description? How do I add A-plus content, which is all the really pretty stuff that you might see on Amazon listings specifically under traditional books. But we can now have that as independent authors as well. So I'll let you know when that's ready to go, but it's something I'm putting together now because oftentimes authors hire a publishing services company or they work with a hybrid publisher who allows them somehow to have access to their listing, but they have no idea how to get in there and change anything.
Speaker 1:So with a hybrid, you're probably not going to have access, but as a self-published author, you have 100% access, and so you want to be able to know and make sure that all of the metadata if you've got the air quote wrong metadata associated with your ISBN or your title, it's going to be showing your book to the entirely wrong population. So, no matter how you and lots of times when folks work with, when indie authors work with hybrid publishers some of them are excellent about doing their keyword research and writing really great keyword rich and SEO rich descriptions for their Amazon listing or their Ingram. Whoever the distributor is making sure that they're in the right categories and other times they don't. It's somebody who has very little experience or knowledge about it. They're just like throwing it up there and just guessing at keywords, guessing at categories and none of us is perfect at that. It takes some finessing and some honing and some reviewing over time.
Speaker 1:But it's another great question to ask a hybrid publisher. If you're working with them, like, how much research do they do into that? Can you have input into that, into letting them know what keywords you think the book should be searchable for, what the description should be and all of that kind of thing. So don't just assume that because it's part of their package, that they know how to do it and or that they're taking the time to do it. In your best interest, one would hope that they are, because with a hybrid house, when they make money, you make money. But when you're working with a publishing services company, if they are doing the uploading of your book, you want to make sure that they're really taking the time if you're paying them to do so to let their expertise help guide them in terms of keywords and other metadata. So that's just a little bit of an aside.
Speaker 1:I mentioned that I was going to speak quickly to when it's okay to use a free ISBN, and there's really only one instance when it makes sense. If you use a free ISBN from Amazon and I understand anything free we get super excited because nothing's free anymore. But the only place you can sell that book is Amazon, so it cannot go through barnesandnoblecom, it cannot go through any like. No retail store can order it through Ingram, like it is exclusive at that point to Amazon. And further, when you look down at who published it, it will today probably either say Amazon or independently published, which is just a pretty big red flag. It's not a red flag the quality of the book, but it's a flag that immediately says this is self-published and there is nothing wrong with self-publishing. We have more and more air quotes successful self-published authors all the time. There's still a stigma associated with it, however. So if there's an easy way to get around that, it's by not using a free ISBN from Amazon and by investing what is really, in the grand scheme of things, not a lot of money in getting your own ISBNs.
Speaker 1:Many publishing services companies have an ISBN. They have ISBNs that are assigned to whatever they've named their publishing house and then they'll let you name the publishing house, the imprint, whatever you want, and they'll just file that as an imprint under their publishing house, but it doesn't say Amazon or independently published. I think it's a really smart move for indie authors to make. The only time that I have experience with it being free makes sense to use a free ISBN is if you really truly genuinely only plan to sell direct to consumer and for some reason, you're loading up to Amazon just in case and you're like, hey, if I sell a few books off Amazon, cool, but I'm going to be doing the vast majority of my sales in the back of the room at speaking events or at events that I'm in a host or out of my garage or on my trunk or something I don't know. I have yet to have an experience where that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Because, again, if later on, for some reason, you need to get a new ISBN that lets you be outside the Amazon ecosystem, you've got to start all over with a brand new listing, which also means brand new reviews, so all those reviews that you've clawed and sweated to get, which, if you've started that process, you know that's really what it is. It's clawing and sweating and then clawing some more, and there's some begging in there too. To start all over again just is silly, in my opinion. Over a pretty small investment, to go ahead and have some ISBNs that are directly linked to your publishing house whatever you're calling your publishing house or an imprint of an already existing hybrid publishing house.
Speaker 1:So I know this was quite clinical and I also know it can feel quite confusing. It's not. It's not. So if there's any aspect of this that I can make simpler, please do not hesitate to reach out to me, either via email or over on Instagram. You can DM me, you can leave a comment, whatever, and I will be sure to do my very best to clarify whatever you're feeling confused about, because, in the end, none of this needs to be whatever you're feeling confused about, because, in the end, none of this needs to be any more complicated than absolutely necessary, and it's just not that it's a crazy industry, but it's not a terribly complicated one at its base.
Speaker 1:So I'll talk to you again next time. In the meantime, just keep writing. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode. This is your friendly reminder to follow or subscribe, leave a quick review and share it with someone you know has a great story or message but isn't sure what to do next. Also, remember to check out publishaprofitablebookcom for book writing resources and tips and to see all the ways we can work together to get your book out into the world. Again, thanks so much for listening and I'll talk with you again soon.
