I woke this morning to an email from Lulu, the printer of my latest book Ye Olde Astrology Activity Book Volume 2, informing me of my book’s rejection from their Global Distribution program. Well this naturally dashed my dreams of making an impact in the life of some bored little girl on a farm in the middle of nowhere and kind of bummed me out for the morning.

What went wrong? I didn’t have a sufficient amount of content because my book is a puzzle book. The Lulu guidelines specifically state that while you can have those kind of books handled and printed and sold in the creator catalog, global distribution is going to be a hard pass no matter what. It wasn’t until I ended up re-reading the same paragraph from a little over 2 years ago that I understood my error and it all clicked back into clarity. When I was originally working on Ye Olde Astrology Activity Book Volume 1, I had already done all this research—I just forgot!

So naturally, the next thought is to take the files over Amazon and upload them separately through the KDP program. But did you know it’s not that easy? (It’s never that easy.)

If I didn’t do my research all those years ago, I would have probably selected the option to use one of Lulu’s system-provided ISBN barcodes for my publication. If I did that, each book that is published using those barcodes will be locked into the Lulu eco-system. This is the same way Amazon KDP works with the ISBN barcodes they provide as well. Once you use one of those provided barcodes, you are locking your publication to that printer and cannot upload the same files to another service like KDP.

Fortunately, I do my homework. Even more fortunately, I have terrible luck and a strong sense around “what happens if…”

So I decided way back then to purchase and own my own set of ISBN barcodes which I got directly through Bowker Identifier Services. Why? Because I read that statement about the puzzle books getting auto-rejected from global distribution and I was already in tomorrowland for my future self making sure I had the settings right so I could just move from one service to the next as needed.

Moving on, the special delight that was Volume 1 was published as limited edition specialty run and the inevitable transition to Amazon was unnecessary. To not diminish the value of the limited edition copies, Volume 2 was born as the official beginning of the series. It took a minute to design with a full-time job, a dying dog, and the grief that follows.

So, I guess I should give myself a little grace for having forgotten for a moment that I was always meant to be rejected from that program and subject to the inevitable frustration of making my files oh-so-fucking-perfect just for Jeffrey. This little lesson cost me the $5 distribution entry fee Lulu charges when applying for that program as well as the 3 weeks of literally twiddling my thumbs while they waited to tell me “No” that I could have used just moving my shit over to Amazon literally the exact same day.

Oh well.