How to get an ISBN, create cover art, copyright your book, and set your print-on-demand ROYALTIES!!!

Hi friends! You have such a rosy glow from all your Thanksgiving indulgences! It becomes you. Now down to bizness:

Once you have your book formatted properly (see my last post), there are a few other things you’ll need to do before your book can be published. Namely, you’ll need to buy an ISBN, create your cover art, copyright your book, and decide how rich you want to become. So, here’s a li’l how-to guide for each of these:

ISBN: The official U.S. ISBN-selling agency is www.myidentifiers.com, and it’s super easy to buy an ISBN on that website. It’ll cost you $125, but that’ll be just about your only cost for self-publishing.

Copyright: You can upload your book directly to the U.S. Copyright Office website at https://eco.copyright.gov/. You’ll have to register a username and password and then follow the instructions, which aren’t entirely straightforward, but I was able to figure them out, so I reckon that means that just about anybody can do it. Your book copyright will cost you $35.

Cover Art: With Createspace, you have a few options. You can use their free “Cover Creator” at https://www.createspace.com/Special/H... (You may have to create an account with a username and password in order to view this page). I didn’t use the Cover Creator, so I can’t say whether that’s an easy tool to use. Alternatively, you can have someone design your cover for you, and you can get a template for your chosen book size online (my paperback is 5X8, which is a great size for a paperback). On this page, you enter your book dimensions, you’ll be provided the template: https://www.createspace.com/Help/Book.... Another FANTASTIC option is to use CrowdSpring (http://www.crowdspring.com/). On this website, you enter the name and synopsis of your book, how much you can pay a designer, and then designers COMPETE to win the right to design your cover! Designers will submit artwork for your review, and you pick the best one! If my fabulously talented friend John hadn’t been willing to design my book for me, I would’ve used Crowdspring.

Royalties: The good news is that you can choose your cover price! So, if you want to make a zillion dollars, you can set your list price at $100,000 per book, and you will be rich if you can find a sucker who will pay your price! However, one thing I’ve learned is that the CHEAPER your book is, the MORE you will sell. So, I recommend setting your book price as low as possible. If you want to use Createspace to sell on Amazon, you should be aware that Createspace is going to take the first five and a half bucks per sale (they’re printing the whol thing, so this is reasonable), and then Amazon will take an additional dollar and a half (ish). So, for example, my book is priced at $7.99. If I sell a book directly from the Createspace website (www.createspace.com), I get paid $2.21. If, however, I sell from Amazon (which is where I do the VAST majority of my sales), I only get paid 61 cents. This is fine with me, because I have MORE than paid my costs for publishing the book, and I’d rather sell lots of books than make lots of money. That’s a personal choice, and you might make a different one. But since most self-published authors never sell more than 200 copies, and I wanted to sell a LOT more than 200 copies, I figured I’d do everything I could to make that happen. And it worked.

Createspace will walk you through the steps for uploading your ISBN and cover art and selecting royalties. Now you are ready to publish, YAY!!!!! DO IT!!!! Your book will be available the next day on Createspace, but it might take a week or two for it to show up on Amazon. Be patient – it’s cominnggggggg!!!!!

Next week I’ll write about how to publish to Kindle, Nook, iPhone, etc… Til then, have fun being you.