Sunday, September 04, 2011

Tying it all together (IPJA)

I've been going back and forth between the Bowkerlink and LightningSource web sites for a few days now.

Bowkerlink is where you register your title, linking it with the pre-purchased ISBN and specifying publication info for the books in print database. (Category, page count, cover image, type of book, retail price, etc.)

On the other hand, LSI is where you upload your cover and text files. And set the retail price, discount, etc.

All this overlap is making my brain hurt. For example, both sites allow you to specify the retail price and discount, but there's no info explaining which takes precedence.

Does LSI feed their data to Bowker, or do you have to manually add LSI as the distributor on Bowkerlink? No idea!


I'm not the first person facing this confusion, but searching the web hasn't turned up much. I found a book on Amazon covering the topic, but it's only available as a print title and by the time it arrives I'll be well past my deadline.


Tomorrow I'll probably give in and email customer support at LSI, but I really prefer to figure these things out for myself.


Simon Haynes is the author of the Hal Spacejock and Hal Junior series (Amazon / Smashwords / other formats)

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