My First Book

The book cover was designed in November, long before the publication date, but the word 'padi' in the title was later changed to 'paddy'. It was exciting to see the cover for the first time!

I didn't have any say about the cover at all. I thought the huge footprint would make people think of a monster's footprint. I know it reminded me of Big Foot immediately.

My editor applied for the ISBN from the National Library and he told me this bit of information on 12 November 2009, my birthday. It had been exactly one year since I emailed the last chapters of my manuscript to the publisher.

So what is this ISBN? It stands for International Standard Book Number and it is a 13-digit number that is unique to every book published in the world. The ISBN of my book is 987 986 5222 511.

This is what I found regarding ISBN in pimpmynovel bogspot...
The breakdown for said number is as follows:

• The first three digits denote the type of publishing. (They're either '978' or '979'. '978' is book publishing.)


• Here it gets tricky but for American books, the next digit is a group identifier and indicates in which language the book is published. (The group identifier for English is '0' or '1'.)


• The next three or four digits are assigned by the National ISBN agency (the National Library in Malaysia?) and are specific to the publisher. Many large publishers have different sets of publisher codes for their various divisions and imprints.


• The next four or five digits are the item number for the individual book and are selected by the publisher.


• The final digit is a check digit which is the result of a mathematical formula being applied to the previous twelve digits. This is an error detection and prevention measure employed to prevent the ISNB data from being corrupted, mis-copied, etc.

Well, now you know...