Things You Should Know About Writing a Book - Our Journey (Part 4)

By: Stan Washington
Date: February 23, 2015

Another week passed and we still had our books to write. We were on a huge tangent getting all the “stuff” together that we should have collected before we started writing the book. We had our outline, content and plan, but had no idea about all the other “stuff” it takes to self-publish a book.

Choose Size and interior of the book. We chose the 6” x 9” format since this is common amongst paperback books. There are plenty of book templates out there where you can load your content into the template and upload it onto your self-publishing website.  We chose CreateSpace.com as our provider. This is our second account.

Purchase an ISBN. ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number.  Yes, you need one of these too! We chose to get our own in order to remain flexible. CreateSpace.com has free ISBN’s that will lock you to their site for sales. We chose Bowker.com to purchase our ISBN’s. Please note that you will need at least two ISBN’s, one for paperback and one for eBook. This is the third account we set up for free.

Download a FREE Bar Code. Now that you have an ISBN, it’s time to get a barcode. We had the price of our book in mind already so all we had to do was go to http://bookow.com/resources.php, add our price and our ISBN and download a bar code. This generated a free ISBN JPG file to put on the back of our cover. This is great for those who are going to use a paperback book style.

Your self-publishing company will provide the sizing spec for your ISBN Picture.

Download a FREE QR Code. A Quick Response code is used with apps on smartphones to quickly take your customer to your site or information. We chose Google Chrome QR Generator https://www.the-qrcode-generator.com/. You can add your website or some other information related to your product or service. 

More to come in part 5!

Our books have been featured in Small Business Trends!

Blessings to you!