I was going to try to group some of these self-publishing set-up details because these posts could become mind-numbing. But a big reason I am writing these posts is to prepare you for the level of detail you will be facing should you decide to self-publish in the future. So, I think I’ll take a different tack, and maybe feature a few of the issues I encountered that to this day, still kind of confound me.
The first step, as mentioned previously, is that you need an ISBN. Now, the ISBN is inextricably tied to the identity of your book, and how people, institutions, and vendors find your book. One important point I read is that having ONLY ONE ISBN associated with your book is the best way to go, because if several ISBN numbers are associated with your book, the person, vendor or institution won’t know which ISBN to choose, and therefore may get, say, a version of your book that they did not want.

Why would you even have more than one ISBN, you ask? One possible scenario is that you self-publish, and then your book is picked up by a traditional publisher. Depending on the ISBN you chose to self-publish, your traditional publisher may not be able to use that same ISBN.

When you look at my chart, you see that there are two choices that incur little (Custom ISBN) to NO (CreateSpace-assigned ISBN) start-up cost. In starting up, you have to invest money in order to self-publish, so keeping costs down is ideal. However, should the aforementioned scenario occur, you will not be able to transfer these two types of ISBN, which means you’ll have one from self-publishing and one from the traditional publisher. You could spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on all these different choices; deciding whether or not you think it’s worth the investment is not an easy task.

Also, did you notice that all the ISBN choices have expanded distribution available? What is a distribution channel? Traditional publishers have to have a way to get their books out to stores, so they use these channels (will get into this more next time). This doesn’t necessarily mean it WILL be distributed through these channels, but simply that it will be available. Big difference.

Expanded distribution however does not include the channels that libraries and academic institutions utilize. They have their own distribution channels requiring a separate ISBN!

Ultimately, my reasoning was to give my book as many future options, knowing if necessary, I could assign a new ISBN to it in order to gain access to the academic side of the retail equation. I therefore chose the custom universal ISBN to give myself some flexibility, which I suspected would be key in this process moving forward.

This is my 100th post, by the way, so thank you all for reading on with me!

I can’t believe we are finally at this point in the story, but here we are! I felt confident that there could be NO technical issues left to impede uploading and publishing.
 
Take a look at this page, for this is the page you will encounter once you decide to self-publish. See that row of beige and yellow boxes up top? You get to go through every last item in each of those boxes. The darker boxes show when you’ve completed the steps, so if you don’t complete them in one sitting, then you know where to pick up next time you work on this.
 
One of the first steps is to purchase an ISBN, which you do through an association called Bowker. You will fill out information about your book; these thankfully are straightforward questions. Then you get two ISBNs: a 10-digit one, the ACTUAL one, and a 13-digit one that is printed with a barcode on the back of your book.
 
Then there’s the meta data, perhaps the word with the silliest definition I have ever read. However, it’s probably the most important step you can take with your book set-up. Why? Because any search that takes place going from any entity, be it an individual or an academic institution, will use this meta data to FIND YOUR BOOK and present it to the searcher.  Now you can imagine how, now after 3+ months of working on the corrections to the content and the technical specs for this book, that at this point I wanted to hurry up and be done. Instead, I took a breath and started very deliberately filling out this part as best I could. This is a difficult process because not only do you want to introduce broad terms like children’s, picture etc., so that more searches will initially include your book, but you really want to be targeted about the more descriptive terms (luck, Miao/Hmong, kindness, community) you include so that your book will be categorized and subsequently found by the person or entity who really wants to find you.
 
Another important step that might NOT have occurred to you is to register for copyright. You cannot use the copyright symbol unless you can show proof that you’ve registered. And besides, it’s a quick, low cost step to take.
 
Next post, we’ll get to more set-up details, like distribution channels and LCCN numbers.

OK, let’s review what issues we’ve solved thus far: we’ve straightened out our format, we’ve solved our muddy color issues, we’ve dealt with transparency woes, and we’ve even gotten philosophical about the virtues of digital illustration techniques. So, where to next?

A long time ago (October 20, 2015) we discussed that I had to break up each spread image I had originally created into its two separate pages. This was a specification of the submission process, so I did what they told me to do. Now as you all know, plenty of books contain illustrations that spread across two pages, but you’ll also note that a book has a binding, where the pages get held together. This means a part of the actual page gets used in the binding. So, if my illustration went all the way to the right edge of the left-hand page, and the left edge of the right-hand page, then that piece of the illustration would get gobbled up into the binding. This particular edge had to be handled differently than the bleed margin, as discussed in the October 27, 2015 post.

With the bleed margin, I got to add a bit to the overall size of the page on 3 sides: the outer edge of the book, the top, and the bottom. This would allow for the page to be trimmed down to the final 8.5” x 8.5” size, resulting in the color of the background covering the entire page.

Now with the gutter, I had to move the image AWAY from the edge about a quarter inch, while allowing the background to extend the entire width of the page. This is because this portion of the page will be used to glue the book together. If I didn’t do that, the picture itself would be disjointed in the middle (left), rather than seemless (right).

HOORAY! Now, all we have to do is repeat this process on 30 more pages….hooray…