Yesterday I requested Library of Congress Preassigned Control Number (PCN), for my new, bigger compilation of Senior Spectrum columns, The Big Book of Ken's Corner: With a Cat Named Boo, some 127,000 words, 415 pages. The number was emailed to me this morning, and I put it on the copyright page of my editing copy. (I'm going through line by line on a printed copy, looking for previously missed typos and making other adjustments and fix-ups.)
I had to request a PCN account with LoC. In order to do that, I had to have a block of ISBNs (ISBN is one of the fields in the PCN request form). That, in turn, required registering with Bowker and buying the ISBNs (probably way more than I will ever use, but time will tell).
As part of the whole process, because I am not going to have a large offset print run, but will continue to use POD (including a short run up front), and because Lulu is too expensive for my purposes now, and Createspace did not seem right for my most serious planned books, I needed a Lightning Source account. That, of course, also required ISBNs and some other preparation. By the way, the PCN is one of the requested fields for the Bowker/Books in Print listing. All of these things tie together.
The one place where I really simplified is to simply publish as Umbach Consulting & Publishing. No invented publishing company name. (I tried picking one a while back, but all the ones I wanted were taken or were too much at risk of infringing on someone's trademark. I should have kept a dba that I used many years ago, but let lapse.) I'll split the difference by referring to "Umbach Publishing" for short, but for the record, as publisher, I am Umbach Consulting & Publishing. Ok, fair enough. I am very bad at pretense, make no bones about publishing my own work and that of selected other people, and see no need to use a more imaginative name. (Anyway, there are good examples of individuals whose names are also their publishing company names. It is not as though this is unheard of.) Yes, there are pros and cons. C'est la vie.
In any event, The Big Book of Ken's Corner is my proof-of-concept volume for Lightning Source and the right steps with ISBN and PCN. Yes, I think it is a pretty good book, in its way, even if primarily for a local audience. The fact that nearly all of the content has been published in a newspaper column says something for it. I'd rather make it the first test of the new approach (as opposed to my old method of using Lulu.com, self-publishing on training wheels) than make someone else's book the first test. When I move on to a book by another author -- one is very much in the works, albeit not yet signed to a publishing agreement -- I'd like to have the procedures down pat.
I also have to be sure that I can properly use a Lightning Source cover template with Photoshop CS5. So far, so good. It is trickier than what I do with Lulu, but one step at a time.
I'm not exactly giving away trade secrets here . . . this is the kind of thing we talk about at NCPA and that everyone else in my shoes eventually learns. But I might as well document the process for those who wander by The Accidental Publisher.
Comments