Time for another installment of our long-running, intermittently-published question-and-answer roundups. Yes, it’s another Monday Mailbag in which we gather questions from my email inbox, from the comments on the blog, and from strange calls in the middle of the night from distraught authors wondering just where they went wrong. Once again I’ve reached deep into […]
Do You Know Where Your ISBNs Are? (Free Logbook Download)
Back in 1986 it took a lot longer to get an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) from Bowker. I remember talking to the women who issued the ISBNs from an office somewhere in New Jersey. There was an administrative fee, as I recall of about $35, and once your order was placed, eventually a large […]
Self-Publishing Basics: Introduction to Metadata
Self-Publishing Basics: Introduction to Metadata for beginning book publishers along with a 5-step process for dealing with your book’s metadata
Self-Publishing Basics: How to Organize Your Book’s Front Matter
Self-Publishing Basics: How to Organize Your Book’s Front Matter includes a checklist of front matter items.
Author Blogging 101: The Blogging Mindset
There’s a bit of a leap you have to make when, as a writer, you decide to start an author’s blog. But what you hear if you ask writers why they decided to start blogging, are things like these: My agent/publisher told me to do it I heard you were supposed to Joe Konrath has […]
Saturday Q & A With the Book Designer 01
Saturday Q & A With the Book Designer 01 Video blog, Joel Friedlander discusses Bowker’s Books in Print Database and book metadata for self-publishers
How to Set Up Your Book on Bowkerlink for Books in Print
How to Set Up Your Book on Bowkerlink for Books in Print and the importance of metadata to make your book discoverable by search engines
Book Page Layout Preparation: The Local Formatting Problem
Book Layout Preparation: The Local Formatting Problem and how to move your files from Word to InDesign quickly and efficiently by using powerful software tools
Self-Publishing Basics: The Title Page
In an earlier post about the parts of a book, I briefly discussed the title page: Title page—Announces the title, subtitle, author and publisher of the book. Other information that may be found on the title page can include the publisher’s location, the year of publication, or descriptive text about the book. Illustrations are also […]
How to Create, Register and List Your New Publishing Company
When an author decides to publish their own book, there are many questions to be answered. It’s the first of these questions about self-publishing I want to address in this article, and that has to do with starting a publishing company. Some authors will decide to simply print copies of their book for their own […]