To apply for an International Standard Book Number online took about 3 minutes for both of the books, here are the simple steps you need to take to register an ISBN for your own book…
Sarah Spear
Self-Publishing Organising
Today has been busy. Sending off contracts for our illustrator, paying 50% of our printing and remembering about ISBNs. As soon as we seriously considered publishing Nerdy Numbers and Sci-Fi Shapes, I contacted our illustrator and printer. They’re my top priorities. Without them we don’t go ahead. So, after our Kickstarter success, I sent an email to book them in.
An Interview with Sarah
Last week Sarah was interviewed on a popular women’s business podcast. She talks about self-publishing, working from home, balancing being a full time mum and businesswoman, online marketing and plenty more.
Listen Now!
Themes Keep it Real
We’ve developed different back-stories for the new books: Nerdy Numbers is set at a birthday party and Sci-Fi Shapes is all about an imaginary astronaut adventure.
I believe it’s important to make learning meaningful. Like any parent does every day – counting the objects, or identifying shapes around them. Our youngest (2) went through a phase of identifying the triangles wherever she was. That’s what we want for our numbers and shapes, that children will start identifying the number 42 or a twin helix when they see one. I mean truly – how cool would that be!
Andrew Decides Not To Think
“It’s too late, I need to do something that doesn’t require any thinking… like building a website” – Andrew
The Fun of It
We love the early stages of making the book, as it’s when our creative juices are able to be unleashed. We like to put all our ideas down and then tweak-or-delete later on. It’s going to be fun to look back on these rough sketches once the book is finished and see how they grew into a professional product! Here are some of our ideas so far…
Early Sketches & Concepts
Andrew and I have had two evening meetings when the children are in bed. After the second meeting (last Monday), my item to do was: make the book spreads clearer. The reason for this, was the first draft spreads I was editing were 3cm x 7cm (approx), so getting quite hard to read. I have 8cm x 16cm (approx) spreads made from creating cells in a Pages file (Mac) and enlarging it to a big size.
How to Self Publish
I wrote an article The Self-Publishing Dream in the June/July 2012 issue of Her Business Magazine, which tells the process of publishing our first book. What we thought would be really helpful for anyone interested in how-to self publish is to have a blog actually showing you how we self-publish.