Should you invent a publisher name?
Look at the spine of a self-published paperback. Sometimes there is a small mark and a name — Cold Harbor Press — and sometimes there is nothing, or the print company's own name. The first reads as published. The second reads as printed.
That difference is worth twenty minutes of your time — and worth knowing exactly what you are buying.
What an imprint actually is
An imprint is a trade name books are issued under. Big houses run dozens, which is why one company's science fiction, romance and literary lists carry three different names.
For a self-publisher it is simpler than it sounds: a name you choose and then use consistently. In most countries you need not form a company, register anything, or file a document to publish under a name that isn't your own. You pick it, print it on the copyright page, enter it in your retailer metadata, and it is your imprint — with no legal existence separate from you unless you go and give it one.
Why authors bother
It looks published. "Cold Harbor Press, Portland, Oregon" sits where a reader's eye expects a publisher. A print-on-demand company's name in that slot announces the manufacturing route, which the book need not volunteer.
It keeps your name out of the record. Retailer and library records carry a publisher field. With no imprint, it holds your legal name or the printer's. If you write under a pen name, or would rather not sit in a searchable commercial database next to a home town, an imprint is the clean way out.
It scales. Across a series or several genres, one name ties the books together — and it costs nothing, which is not a small argument for a presentation decision.
What it does not do
The marketing around this is bad, so be clear-eyed.
It does not get you distribution. Bookstores, libraries and wholesalers care about discount, returnability and who distributes you — see Where to print.
It does not fool a reviewer. Anyone reviewing professionally will search the imprint, find one author and three titles, and know inside a minute. Plenty of good books come from one-author presses — just don't build a plan on the disguise holding.
It gives you no legal protection. A trade name is not a company and not a liability shield.
It confers no rights in the name. Printing it on a book does not stop anyone else using it, and is not a trademark.
In the Interior Formatter. Your imprint name and city go onto the title page and the copyright page as you type them, in every interior style — Literary, Modern, Genre, Compact and Classic — and carry through to the separate large print edition. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
Choosing a name that works
Check that it is free. Search the major retailers' book catalogs, your national ISBN agency's publisher listing, and the plain web. You are looking for another publisher, active or recent, with the same or a near-identical name. Sharing one is a real problem: records merge, search results collide, and you may be asked to change it later. Check the domain too; if every version is taken by an existing press, that is the same warning in different clothes.
Avoid the obvious traps. Nothing so close to a famous house that it reads as borrowing. Not your surname plus "Publishing," if keeping your name off the record was the point. Nothing that pins you to one genre if you plan to write across several.
Then commit. Say it out loud, set it on a mock spine, live with it a day. The cost of a name is not choosing it; it is changing it after six books.
Use it consistently
Print it on the copyright page with a city, and on the title page. Then enter that exact string as the publisher in every retailer's metadata, character for character. "Cold Harbor Press," "Cold Harbor Press LLC" and "ColdHarbor Press" are three different publishers to a database, and splitting your catalog across three records helps nobody.
A small logo on the spine and title page is optional — keep it simple enough to survive at a quarter of an inch.
The catch that decides it
Here is the part that gets skipped, and it matters more than the rest combined.
A free printer-supplied ISBN usually records the printer as publisher of record. The number was issued to them and belongs to them, and their name propagates into the retailer and library records built from it — whatever your copyright page says.
So a book can read "Cold Harbor Press" inside and list a print-on-demand company as the publisher everywhere anyone looks it up. The imprint is real on the page and invisible in the data.
If the imprint matters to you, that is the strongest argument there is for buying your own ISBN, where you are the registrant and your imprint is the publisher in the record from the start. If it doesn't, the free ISBN is a fair trade. Do you need your own ISBN? works through the decision.
Registration, trademarks, bank accounts
Separate decisions, and the rules vary by country and state. Treat this as the shape of the question, not the answer.
Business registration. Trading under a name that isn't your own may require a local filing — a "doing business as" registration or its equivalent — particularly if you want to be paid under it. Using an imprint purely as a publishing name usually does not. Check locally.
A company. A tax and liability decision, not a publishing one. Plenty of authors with established imprints never form one.
A trademark. Registrable most places, worth it once the name carries real revenue. For a first book, an expense with no return.
A bank account in the business name, only if you intend to be paid in that name.
None of it is required to put a name on a book. Start with the name, use it properly, and take the rest on when there is a reason.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Do you need your own ISBN? · Also in this guide: What belongs on a copyright page · Barcodes, and the price code beside them · Categories and keywords, without the folklore