Deception of the Magician, Waldgrave Part 2

As I have promised, I am planning to have Waldgrave Part 2, Deception of the Magician, out by November. To facilitate this, my big project today has been looking over the final draft before sending it off to Barnes & Noble and Amazon.  My plan is to send it off tonight; after that, my next big hurdles are formatting Arrival for iBooks, and then doing the paperback and iBooks editions for Deception.

I'm using Smashwords as my route to iBooks, because the application process through Apple was looking a little harder to manage than it needs to be.  Smashwords is an "Apple-authorized global aggregator."  iBooks is different than Nook and Kindle self publication because Apple requires an ISBN to publish, whereas Nook and Kindle assign there own unique identifier and allow the option of an ISBN.

Sometimes online self-publishing services will allow you access to an ISBN, like the free one I got from Createspace for my paperback.  When an ISBN isn't offered through a service, an author would need to apply for and be assigned one or more ISBNs for use on the various editions of their book; there is an application fee to do this on your own, and it doesn't grant you any more or less validity or ownership of your work with regard to copyright.  What the ISBN does is allow publishers, libraries, bookstores, and other book handlers to easily find and distinguish a book from other books, and between various editions of the same book (i.e., the print vs. the paperback).  So thus far I have foregone buying an ISBN--I got a free one for my paperback, and the Nook and Kindle are on company specific identifiers right now.

However, to get on iBooks, my iBooks edition will need an ISBN.  Smashwords offers both free ISBNs (which will show Smashwords as the publisher of that edition), or paid ISBNs (which show you as the publisher).  I am a big fan of free, so that's what I'm going with.  Yesterday I started to format Arrival to Smashwords' specifications; it's tricky.  They only accept strictly formatted Word .docs into their premium catalog, which is a far cry from the universal .epub format I am used to working with.  However, I am going to work through it, and when I'm done, I'll detail any tricks I learn for anyone who might want to know.

Al