ISBN Number

The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a unique book identifier. The 13-digit number identifies the country in which the book is published, the publisher and the book. There is no legal requirement to have an ISBN but without it a book is invisible to the public.

The ISBN costs £98.90 plus VAT for 10 numbers and is only obtainable in the United Kingdom through the UK ISBN Agency. Other countries have their own arrangements for issuing ISBNs.

When you publish with The Choir Press, your ISBN ensures your book will be available for order on bookselling websites including Amazon, and thousands of retail outlets worldwide.

Some firms will only offer registration of your book using one of their ISBNs. This makes it more difficult for you to change suppliers if you’re dissatisfied with the service but it can also mean that your book will be more quickly identified as self published because some publishing imprints are instantly associated with self-published books. Does this matter? Well, that depends on the calibre of production of the self-published book but as any bookshop manager will tell you there are a lot of badly produced self-published books out there which damage the image of self-published books. The more distance we can help you to put between your book and the average self published book the greater your likelihood of success. We encourage our customers to register their own ISBN as it is usually in their best interest. There may be circumstances where you prefer not to do this in which case we may be able to issue an ISBN from our sequence if your book meets our editorial criteria.

Bear in mind that if you register your own ISBN, you keep control of the process and you will pay less for your books and make more profit on each book you sell. Indeed we’re so confident that our royalty payments are unbeatable that we’ll guarantee to match or exceed the royalty percentage on any printed book of the same price and number of pages from any publisher.

[Please contact us for more information] or visit one of these pages on the site:

[Book Cover Design]

[Copyediting / Proofreading]

[ISBN Number]

[How to Copyright a Book]

[How to Market a Book]