Imprint & ISBN
For my trilogy, I planned to release three formats for each first edition: paperback, hardcover, and ebook. To hold full control of each book (eg quality, distributer, branding) and to limit the erosion of an ever dwindling slice of the revenue pie – it’s incredible how much of that £RPP vanishes along the chain to you! – I chose to publish under my own imprint, LifWynn Books, and my own ISBNs. This provides full flexibility to choose my distributor, and to easily switch/add channels as needed without rebranding, or having to change ISBNs because they belong to someone else. And given that I’m proud of the quality of the published books, I want to retain my name/imprint across the work.
ISBN
In the UK, Nielsen IQBookData runs the ISBN agency and provides a range of services to the book industry, aiding the discovery/distribution of books. They also provide authors with the means to manage book metadata via their Title Editor - see a separate blog on that. In the US, Bowker does the same. In Canada, ISBNs are free, and organisations such as BookNet Canada support metadata needs.
The ISBN is needed if you’re planning on selling printed books through any form of retail channel. It is the go-to reference for discoverability, ordering & distribution, sales data, library lending etc. If your book does not have an ISBN it won’t be found, sold.
What about ebooks? If you sell, eg via Amazon, they use their own standard reference, ASIN, so you don’t strictly need an ISBN. But if you don’t use your own ISBN, Amazon will be listed as the publisher. That’s not in itself a bad thing, but I decided that since I’d worked hard to ensure that the published product was in great shape, I wanted to attach my imprint to it. Doing that aligns it with my print books. Also, if I choose set my ebook as non-exclusive to Amazon – eg open out to Apple Books, B&N, Kobo, Google Play Books etc – I want to be the publisher of record across each platform. I want readers to be assured that the standard is the same across all platforms. Having a single ISBN (and its associated imprint) for the ebook across all platforms allows that to happen.
I purchased a block of ten ISBNs from them, cost-effective as I knew I was allocating nine to the trilogy. Top Tip. Keep a record of each ISBN and the book edition/format it belongs to. Whenever you need to reference your ISBN, whether in metadata, in the front matter of your book, on your back cover barcode, make sure you check, double-check you’re referencing the right ISBN. I got it wrong on the second book of my trilogy. I used the same manuscript for the paperback and hardcover, forgetting that the ISBN I’d listed on the copyright page had to change between formats! I caught it just after I pressed go on 40 printed copies for my own sales. Luckily, IngramSpark hadn’t started the print run, and so were able to halt the order. I was lucky.
I chose to distribute my print books via IngramSpark and Amazon KDP, setting up in that order, and using the same ISBN for both. So long as you don’t enable ‘expanded distribution’ on KDP, this works fine – with one caveat. I set up first on IngramSpark, and used the digital and print proofs to check all was okay with the manuscript/layout etc. In the meantime, Amazon is very quick to spot this in the background sharing of metadata, so will list your book for preorder even before you’ve approved/enabled global distribution in IG. So, when you come to set up your KDP print book using the same ISBN (which is what you want), KDP will recognise that the book is already ‘published’. You can go ahead and get everything ready in KDP, including ordering a proof, but you won’t be able to use the ‘schedule a release feature’ – if you try it will respond along the lines that you can’t use the ISBN of a book that has already been published. This can be scary when you first see it, but all it means is that you will need wait until 24hrs or so before your release date, then use the ‘Publish Now’ option. It will work! I’ve seen some folk who suggest setting up on KDP first, but since I’ve not tried it that way, I can’t comment on whether that allows you to schedule a release on KDP, and to set up the preorders on IG. I chose to stick with what I knew worked!
Imprint
Why would you set up an imprint? Well, if you’re going to use your own ISBN for the cataloguing and distribution of your book as outlined above, you will need to assign it to an imprint, a record of the publisher/owner of the ISBN. The imprint name is used by the distributer, the retailer, and any holders of catalogues of your book. If you use eg the Amazon free ISBN, your imprint name will be ‘Independently published’.
I chose to set up my own imprint because I wanted to assign my own ISBNs to my books to ensure consistency of profile across platforms. As I mentioned above, I’d put in the effort to ensure the quality of the product, so thought it worth the extra effort.
You could set the imprint to your name, your author name, or to a creation of your own. I landed on LifWynn Books as ‘lifwynn’ or variants thereof, mean ‘joy of life’ in Old English. It sounded good, had resonant meaning, and wasn’t in use.
Once you’ve landed on something that works for you, you’ll find you’ll need it at various key stages in your publishing journey, and it will soon become embedded in the metadata that zips around the planet. Whether you choose to lever your imprint in other ways, eg maybe having aspirations to expand your self publishing to other authors is, of course, your call. For me, it simply helps maintain a consistency across my current books, and, in time, future books.
Do you need to set up a company under this name? For me, this was a step way too far. Under UK regs, I’m a sole trader, and don’t need a company registration. That works for me!