When the printer completes the book run, he'll immediately fedex a copy to you, and then proceed with the packing and shipping of the books. If there is something terribly wrong, best not to ship them here, pay freight etc. work on the problem there.
How often do you see a gummed label on book with the barcode and price? Don't all books already have the barcode and price printed on the book? If they expect to be sold in bookstores they must, since books stores handle inventory control with that universal bar code. As you learned from the book, the bar codes is only the second half of the deal, the first half is to get the number, the ISBN behind the code, from Bowker.com, and then have the barcode produced, and then applied to the book in the printing process. This is rather expensive, adding maybe $100 to he price of the book.
It is possible for there to be a slip twixt the cup and the lip, and the bar code is fouled during the book cover design process, and the bar code does not work when scanned in the stores. For this reason alone you need a technically competent cover designer. I paid $300 for my extremely simple cover (as you shall see) the motif just being a plain white sheet in a typewriter. A commonly read people pay thousands, but that is a bit much....
If the bar code as printed does not work, out come the gummed labels, at your expense, to be put on the books. In my case it would be 1000 copies, but of course I could get the bar code fixed for the next print run, insh'Allah.
For this reason, as soon as I had the real book by fedex, I walked into a bookstore and explained this was fresh off the press and would they scan it? No problem, scan, and up it came, my book, there on the computer. All systems go!
So now I am working on my next book. It is like digging a ditch, which I did once, 165 feet, utility ditch, so, 18 inched wide and 30 inches deep, 165 feet from the house, across the yard, up the hill, along the fence, and to the street. There as many routes I could take, but once I decided the route, I began by tracing the route with the blade end of the pick head. and then it was a matter of going over the same route, time and again, ever deeper, dealing with what obstacles occurred, until the ditch was code-perfect.
As I advise, be open to the world with your work. But Ogilvy says advertising is all in the headline, and anyone can write copy. So it is with titles to books. Titles are your best saleperson, and they must be directed to your audience. David kindly intimated my title is a head-scratcher, and he is right. As I was writing the book, it was directed at academics who would get the play on words. Now my market is everyone, most of whom will just think I am advocating murder. O well.
too late now.
Titles cannot be copyrighted. You can write a book and call it "Gone with the wind" or "The Bible" and there is no law against that. On my present book, since it is heading into a crowded field (economics), I want to keep the title private, lest some person whose book is done hear my title and capture the same for his book.
I helped a cop write his book, and for the cover and title he and his artist son came up with something catchy. So catchy, others had done it before. His title and cover is 99% the same as another autobiography of a cop. And his particular title is the same as hundreds of other works on amazon.com. That makes it hard for customers to find you. Search for your title on amazon before you decide on anything. At least there is only one book ever entitled Perish Your Publisher, and it is mine
So, I hope you are all now digging trenches, tracing out your book, and find it such joyful activity, in spite of the suffering, that you jump to it first thing, with your coffee.
