I finally did it. I completed my revisions of The Warden of Everfeld: Memento and sent it off to my book designer for formatting.

I feel… anxious? I don’t know. I’m glad to have it done, and on deadline, but suddenly the reality of publishing this thing is washing over me.

I think I’ll settle in once my book designer sends back a sample of what he’s thinking for the interior design. Until then, I’d like to remain productive.

Sunday night I purchased a pack of ISBNs and a bar code from Bowker. I haven’t assigned my title to any of the numbers yet, but I started poking around Bowker’s submission system.

Like CreateSpace, Bowker has a lot of fields for the bibliographic information of the book you’re submitting. A couple of things caught my eye and have been nagging at me over the last couple of days.

Series, Title, Subtitle

I feel like it shouldn’t be this hard or this convoluted to title your book. Ever since I don’t know when, I’ve been referring to my novel with one title: The Warden of Everfeld: Memento. Not “The Warden of Everfeld Part 1”. Not “Memento”. All one title.

But of course, when I started digging into the distinctions between a title and a subtitle on CreateSpace’s forum and innumerable blogs, I started wondering if I had made a mistake. Is Memento supposed to be my subtitle? Is The Warden of Everfeld my series title or the main title? If The Warden fo Everfeld is my main title, and Memento is my subtitle, can I use The Warden of Everfeld as the title of a different novel, with a different subtitle?

These questions went around and around in my brain for a full day. Finally, one loophole rule made the decision for me. Amazon and Bowker both mandate that the title of the novel on the cover match exactly the title provided in the book information.

The title on my cover reads:

The Warden of Everfeld: Memento

All together, with the colon included. Thus, it’s all one Title. No subtitle or series nonsense to worry about. Whew! Once again, my cover designer’s thoroughness saved me from myself!

Contributors

The next piece of the book information that caught my eye was the Contributors section. You can type in names and label them as editors, illustrators, cover designers, etc. However, I didn’t know if it was appropriate to do so when none of these people are listed on my cover. (They’re named on the interior title page and in the Acknowledgments.)

I haven’t really been able to find anything about this online, to be honest. One blog I stumbled upon said it was courtesy to include these people as Contributors in the bibliographic info, so I’m going with that.

That means I will be listing my editor, my cover designer, and my book designer as Contributors. I don’t really know what that means for the book details on Amazon or in Bowker’s catalog, but it seems fair to me.

Author friends — did you add Contributors to your novel’s info? Are the distincitons between Title and Subtitle really that important??

Steve D