🔖 ISBNs, barcodes and listings

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.