Tuesday 10 August 2010

ISBN and Anniversary Heaven - 10th August 2010

It felt almost like Christmas today, but not quite – there was only one present. There might be a few more in three days’ time. Let me explain.

There are three milestones (or is that millstones) in the measurement of success of a new publishing venture. Firstly will it survive the first year? Secondly, will it survive the second year? Finally, thirdly, will it survive long enough to get past its first allocation of 100 ISBN numbers?

Clearly, the first two can only be reached and passed as time goes on. You can expect a bumper post in three days time – when we pass that first milestone – the company was actually registered on 13th August last year so that is our official first birthday. At that point one down, well actually two down – today we received our second allocation of ISBN numbers and we’ve needed them for a while.

So in part it’s a euphoric feeling – so many new ventures fail within the first year, especially in the current world-wide economic climate – and we’re still here, despite the dire predictions of so many know-it-all experts. To be fair, they mainly said two years, and of course we haven’t got there yet, I don’t own a time machine. Expect a fairly over the top celebratory blast in just over a year’s time.

The big thing is the ISBN allocation – I can now bring our ISBN numbering up to date, retrofitting the numbers to the remainder of our shorts and getting them registered, at the same time regenerating every format and uploading all of these to each and every retail site. All in order to satisfy Apple and Sony’s need for all stories they list to have an ISBN number on them – which has not historically been the case for short story e-books with most retailers.

I’m celebrating this? That’s a shed load of work so I might be fairly quiet here for a couple of days, while I get cracking and get on top of it.

A publisher’s work is never done......

3 comments:

  1. WooHoo! First milestone down and the second too close not to count as a win. I'd say that deserves a party!

    So get to work, David, so we can do this again next year!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Congrats, David! Feels good, don't it?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi all, yeah it feels good and we're set fair for the second year too!
    Party Friday and again next year.

    ReplyDelete