Start Your Own Self Publishing Business

LCCN or Library of Congress Catalog Card Number.

You can fill out an ABI form on the internet for free, so there’s no reason not to do so. Go to the R.R. Bowker website for publisher services, www.bowkerlink.com, and click on the “Books In Print” link at the left of the screen. Make sure you apply about six months before your book rolls off the printing press. You must have an ISBN before you can fill out your ABI, so don’t procrastinate on that, either.

You buy one digital file of the Bookland bar code for your book, and then you have it printed on the back cover of each copy. The cost is reasonable, and you can get them from a variety of sources.

In addition to your ISBN (or ISSN), you’ll need a bar code for each book title that you publish in hard copy.

There’s no charge for an ISSN. For more information, check out the ISSN International Centre website at www.issn.org.

Name, Rank, and Serial Number

For more information, you can download a PDF of ISBN-13 For Dummies on the ISBN website.

We placed basic ISBN costs under your company setup expenses since you will need to purchase these numbers in groups of at least ten at a time, regardless of when you intend to use the numbers. They must be purchased through R.R. Bowker in New Providence, New Jersey (www.isbn.org).

And the audiobook of Raising Radishes will have its own separate ISBN, different from both the book and DVD versions.

The Japanese-language version will have a different ISBN than the English one.