The only thing I don’t understand is what happens when if the book is picked up by a print publisher? Does it then move out of Booklocker’s ISBN and into that of new publisher?

My situation is a bit different: I wasn’t even thinking about using a POD who claims to sell a single ISBN #–I already own an ISBN since the 80s when I self-published four books the old-fashioned way under Freelance Publications. So my concern was whether to use one of the leftovers or not. I can see now that wouldn’t work since ISBN indicates book source, and I certainly don’t want to get into filling that role again!!! Your long explanation of the role of the ISBN is very illuminating.

If a book we publish gets picked up by an traditional publisher, then our ISBN gets retired – essentially set to “out of print” – and a new ISBN gets assigned by the traditional publisher.

This is the case, though, no matter who owns the initial ISBN. So in other words even if the ISBN belongs to the author, it will still get replaced by one from the traditional publisher.

The only caveat to watch out for is that the old ISBN, and thus the old book information, is forever in the Bowker system. So when the traditional publisher releases the new version of the book, they should make it clear to customers the book is a new edition. They can easily do this by changing the cover graphic and calling out the edition in the book description.

The reason the old ISBN information is still kept in the system is so companies like Amazon.com can sell used versions of the book, if they exist.

This sometimes confuses authors who terminate their relationship with POD companies like us. They will take the book off the market, then later see it is still listed on Amazon.com. But even though the book is still listed there, it doesn’t mean Amazon.com can actually get a new copy to sell. If you try ordering the book, Amazon.com will take your order, then email you later and say they can’t get the book anymore.

There’s been a lot of talk online about how owning your own ISBN is a benefit. An ISBN, for those who don’t know, stands for International Standard Book Number, and is essentially a product ID. You need one to sell a book through a retail channel, such as a bookstore.

The conventional wisdom is that a self-published author needs to actually purchase an ISBN for his or her book. In other words, the author actually owns the ISBN. In fact, one POD service company is touting the ability to sell single ISBNs directly to authors.

The ability to purchase single ISBNs from this POD service company has been heralded by some as a great, liberating event for self-published authors. Previously, an author had to go directly to RR Bowker, the only agency allowed to sell ISBNs, and buy at least a block of 10 numbers (though rumor is you could by single ISBNs if you knew who to contact).

The purpose of an ISBN is to identify the supplier of a book. The actual owner of the ISBN and the owner of the book do not have to be the same entity, even though historically in publishing they have been. An author who self-publishes and retains all rights still owns and controls the book, regardless of who owns the ISBN.

So the premise I put forth is that, if an author goes to a POD service company, he or she does so for the purpose of that company doing the order fulfillment. And if that is the case, then there is no benefit for the author to own the ISBN. It is just a number for facilitating the ordering process, which the author has by default elected not to be part of.

Before I get into the details of my reasoning, here is a tutorial on the relationship between a book’s ISBN and the traditional book distribution system.

BookLocker uses Ingram, the world’s largest book distributor, to distribute its books. The ISBN record at Ingram for a book shows BookLocker as the supplier of that book, and it does so even if an author used his or her own ISBN. (Booklocker.com is one of the only POD publishers that allows authors to use their own ISBN if they choose to do so.) This is logical, as Ingram needs to know who to go to when they need more copies of a book. And since it is our job to deal with Ingram, BookLocker is who they come to.

There is also a directory called Books-In-Print, which is put out by RR Bowker – the United States ISBN agency. And ISBN record in Books-In-Print lists only the publisher, not the supplier. And the “publisher” in Books-In-Print is whoever bought the ISBN from RR Bowker. The founding assumption of Books-In-Print is that the owner of the ISBN is both the publisher and supplier of a book. This was, of course, true for many years as there were no other publishing options for an author. It is not true today, as it is now possible to separate the two roles by using a POD service company.

Another important point – if the POD service company owns the ISBN, it creates the records at Ingram and Books-In-Print. If the author owns the ISBN, he or she only creates the record at Books-In-Print, not Ingram (this will be important later, when I explain how to take a book out-of-print).

So, the information to take away from the explanation above is that there are really two database records for a book if it is published through a POD service company that uses Ingram – one at Ingram and one at RR Bowker.

How does this play out in the real world?

Most bookstores order from Ingram. (Borders is an exception. They also will order from Ingram, but tend to also contact publishers directly through their listing in Books-In-Print.) When a bookstore calls Ingram for a book, Ingram goes to the supplier listed in the ISBN record. If that same bookstore looks the book up in Books-In-Print instead, the order gets routed to whomever the publisher is (AKA the owner of the ISBN) because that’s the contact information in Books-In-Print.

Now, when you remove a book from the system, that book’s ISBN is essentially “decommissioned”. It cannot be reused, even if nothing in the book or on the cover has changed. If the supplier changes, the ISBN must changed. However, the ISBN record isn’t deleted. It’s changed to say “out of print” or “unavailable.” Remember a few paragraphs back when I explained that if the POD service company owns the ISBN it creates the records at Ingram and Books-In-Print? Well, when you remove a book, the POD service company changes the ISBN record in both places. When the author owns the ISBN, the POD service company can only change the ISBN record at Ingram. The author has to change the record in Books-In-Print. This is how a book can be listed as both “out-of-print” and “in print” at the same time. It depends on where the party ordering the book looks.

Moreover, Amazon.com, BN.com and most of the online bookstores get their book information from the ISBN record at Ingram, NOT from Books-In-Print. So if a book is out-of-print in Ingram’s database, then it is also listed as out-of-print in every store to which Ingram supplies books.

Here is my reasoning as to why using your own ISBN, when you are also using a POD service company, is a mute point…

Let’s assume you are an author, using your own ISBN. You take that ISBN to a POD service company and set up a book with them. A year later, you decide you want to leave and form your own publishing company. The only way you can keep that book’s ISBN active when you publish the book through your new company is if you:

a.) don’t want to sell through Ingram or any of its partners (Amazon.com, BN.com and most of the online bookstores)

b.) you only use a traditional, offset printer; or a POD printer not associated with Ingram.

The reason is that the ISBN is now dead in the Ingram system (remember, the POD service company had to decommission the ISBN when you left).

Furthermore, if you try to submit that ISBN into Ingram’s system, or the system of any of Ingram’s partners, you’ll create a conflict that causes the old book information to reactivate and/or prevents the new book from appearing. (There can only be one record associated with an ISBN, and, per our example, you already created a record when you signed up with the POD service company a year ago.)

Basically, unless you are willing to give up most of your sales outlets, you must assign a new ISBN.

Now, this specific POD service company who is selling individual ISBNs to authors claims the author can take the ISBN with them when they leave. How can they do this, given what I just explained above? The sources I asked said there is a process whereby the author “proves” he or she owns the ISBN, and thus is allowed to keep the ISBN active in the Ingram system. However, this source also stated the process is far from perfect. Getting Ingram’s partners to change what they need to change is very difficult, and in some situations it may never get changed.

So the moral of the story is: if you are going the pure self-publishing route – forming a company, hiring a printer, negotiating with a distributor, and fulfilling customer sales yourself – then you absolutely need to have ownership of your ISBN. But if you are having your book printed by a POD service company – a company you go to specifically to handle all that backend stuff – don’t bother spending the extra money. If you ever leave, you really need to assign a new ISBN anyway.

NOTE: This is for our black-and-white interior program only (with color covers, of course). We don’t yet offer color-interior POD publishing to authors in Europe.
Our submission form is HERE.

Also, if you are a small European publisher looking to break into the US market, we’d love to hear from you. Chances are we can get you into Ingram’s US distribution system faster, cheaper, and easier than if you approached them directly.

Here’s the problem, though – it is freaking hard; not only to write fiction, but to also sell it.

And while I would never bemoan an author’s attempt to use POD to launch a fiction career, there are easier ways to make money with POD.

Steve Weber points out a great idea on his blog – using the quick turnaround advantage POD has over traditional publishing to capitalize on current events.

Specifically, Weber references a project of specialty publisher Black Dog & Leventhal to quickly get a book out on Barack Obama.

But an even more compelling strength of POD is its ability to reach narrow markets at a low-cost. While RVing, my wife and I once met an author who had built an entire publishing business around writing and publishing his own versions of Radio Shack’s various product manuals, since the originals were so poorly written. This is a perfect application for POD – a market far too narrow for traditional publishing, but still large enough to make some money.

If you look around, you’ll find hundreds of such profitable book ideas.

Dehanna Bailee has a great explanation as to why that isn’t the case in traditional publishing. Money starts flowing out the authors’ pockets the minute they start querying agents.

I’d add that traditionally published authors give up all rights to their work (POD authors don’t, or shouldn’t anyway). And that value is undetermined at the time those traditionally published authors sign their contracts. So a traditional publisher might be getting a steal if they paid next to nothing for the manuscript.

That is not to say there are plenty of unscrupulous POD companies. There are. But if you keep your setup costs low, keep all your rights, and can easily get out of any contract, you can use POD to test the market while you shop the book around to traditional publishers. Then you’ll know the book’s value before you enter negotiations to sign away the rights.

Basically, that list is missing all the mass market outlets (Walmart, Target, Costco, Sam’s Club), plus all the Christian bookstores. So it isn’t necessarily an accurate count of what everyone is buying.

Though not as easy to manipulate as Amazon’s Bestseller list, it is certainly possible, if you have a lot of buying power, to manipulate the New York Times Bestseller list. Reportedly, this is what The Church of Scientology did with the “bestseller” Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.

I think authors, especially new authors, pay way too much attention to these lists. The lists simply don’t capture the breadth of book-buying behavior. There are a lot of niches that can yield good money-making opportunities if authors would just look for them.

It talks about some comments a Kent Larson made to one of Bob’s previous posts on self-publishing.

Kent wrote:

1. There are a lot of companies that prey on self-published authors, selling them services that, they say, will get their books sold or better known. Some of the so-called “Print-on-Demand” publishers (really vanity publishers that use POD) are particularly agregious.

He is right that many POD companies have a business model where selling services is their primary revenue generator. It gives companies like BookLocker a bad name by association. We’re trying to provide an inexpensive alternative to the traditional publishing route, with an emphasis on “inexpensive”.

We can put a book into the marketplace in six weeks (usually much less) for a setup and original cover design fee of $392, and small percentage of each sale. We take care of everything necessary to package the book, to sell the book online (through our site and all the major online bookstores), and to distribute the book through Ingram so brick-and-mortar stores can order it. And we do all that without taking an author’s rights, or restricting their ability to negotiate a traditional contract or walk away from us at any time.

There is no way someone wanting to self-publish could get all those benefits on their own at a lower cost. (Just securing the minimum-sized block of ISBNs is $270.)

However, there are definite caveats with our model which I haven’t been able to resolve to my satisfaction (though I’m trying to come up with ways every day). The most glaring is marketing. Our model really requires an author with the aptitude for self-promotion. We shy away from offering specific marketing services because we have a ethical problem with the “double-dipping” issue – getting paid to perform a service which results in sales that we also get a piece of.

Also, a good marketing campaign is a custom endeavor. Anything custom is by definition expensive because it requires an expert. (The services other POD companies are selling as “book marketing” are weak efforts at best.)

That being said, the BookLocker model, as defined now, works. We sell tens of thousands of books each year. And those are books sold to the public, not authors buying their own books.

Our model works because, among other things, the costs to get into the market (setup/service fees) are very low and the commission we pay authors on sales is high. The benefits of using a POD company starts to decline precipitously as you raise those setup/service fees.

Kent wrote:

2. All self publishing has a poor reputation in the industry. Booksellers often assume, without reading, that any self published book isn’t worth reading, let alone stocking in their stores. Self published authors usually have to do quite a lot of work to overcome this disadvantage.

A lot of self-published books are crap because there is no vetting process. This is because most every POD company publishes everything submitted to them. They have to. Otherwise their revenue stream – selling services to authors – dries up.

BookLocker, on the other hand, does not. We reject most of what is submitted to assure the quality of what we do publish is above average. This is one of the reasons, I’m sure, that we regularly process orders from bookstores.

But Kent’s comment implies something that isn’t true – namely, that the book has to be “stocked” in a bookstore in order be a commercial success. That is just not true. Most traditionally published books aren’t stocked in bookstores.

In addition, consider that at least half of the books on the shelves of any large bookstore chain will never sell copy one. They are there simply for decoration. Bookstores can afford this type of interior design because they don’t have to pay for those books. They can return those books to the distributor for credit.

Our sales to brick-and-mortar stores represents a fraction of our total book sales to the public. Most sales are online through BookLocker.com, as well as Amazon.com, BN.com and all the other online bookstores. Of course, you could argue that is by design. And it is. But also realize that the online customer base for books is enormous – certainly large enough to support self-published books.

But here is the elephant in the room no one wants to talk about – the traditional publishing process sucks. Many manuscripts go unpublished every year not because they are bad, but because traditional publishers don’t know how to find the book’s market in a cost-effective manner. That is where POD publishers like BookLocker can provide a real service, as long as the return on investment is good. And the return on investment is good if, and only if, the upfront costs to get into the market are kept low.