Member-only story
No, Your Book Doesn’t Need an ISBN, But You’d Better Think Again
Authors spend years working on books that they hope will be well-received, but there’s one tiny thing that makes all the difference in their lives. What is it?
Over the past two years, as I began my journey writing flash fiction and essays, I met a number of people who all write. They are a colorful cast of characters. One woman pretends she’s a pre-teen boy who “friends” young pre-teen boys on social media to tap them for their life stories, their dreams, their fears, and any other bit of their lives she can weddle out of them.
Yeah, she’ll then go on to write books to appeal to these same boys, and they will never know a woman in her 70s wrote every one of those books. Deceptive? Yeah, you could say that. Prior to this, she presented herself as someone who had special powers to read the future, and little, old, and willing ladies flocked to her until the doorman thought there was some funny business going on in the building and she was asked to move.
One guy, in particular, has managed to overcome a pretty awful disease, and he has spent the last six or seven years working on his novel. When it’s finally finished, he’ll have a swamp of publishing ahead of him (an agent?), and the one little boat he’ll need (if he self-publishes) is something many new authors give little thought to…
