Earlier this year, when I was getting ready to publish Fete For A King, I thought, I want to level up and buy my own ISBN again, like I did for Six Harvests.
An ISBN is the identifier that allows bookstores to sell your books and libraries to catalogue them, and while Lulu will issue you one for free, they retain certain rights if you accept, and I like to own as much as possible of the work that I do. In other countries, you can just...ask for an ISBN and it’s given to you, but in the US some shady-ass nonsense company called Bowker owns all the ISBNs. One will cost you $125, but you can also buy in bulk; 10 will “only” run you $295. And I thought, well, I will probably write nine more books in my lifetime and if not, I can give them to friends.
And then I wrote two more books this year and published a compilation of all three.
Each book needed two ISBNs, one for epub and one for paperback, and the compilation needed three because of the hardback, so this year I went through nine ISBNs. Given that I have more books in the pipeline and could use to assign ISBNs to some of my older work, I went back to Bowker today to look at buying another bulk of 10, and noticed that for $575 you can buy 100 ISBNs.
I’m worried what kind of output I’ll ramp up to if I know I have 100 ISBNs to fill before I die, but I definitely could fill more than another 10 ISBNs just with my back catalogue, and if I buy two sets of 10 ISBNs that’s $590 anyway.
I’m gonna need to wait a paycheck or two, but...yeah I think I’m gonna buy 100 ISBNs. And then just...pray for my immortal soul or something.
I mean, if we subtract twelve-ish for the books that already exist that need them, and another eight for various special editions (hardcovers, compilations, etc) that’s 80 remaining, and if each book requires two, that’s forty books. Which is only one per year if I live to be eighty-three.
Forty books. And that’s terrible.
I suppose I could just like. Become a publisher. There's nothing saying I have to WRITE all forty...
