You're not supposed to know all of this.

When I published my first book, No Loose Ends: The Smart & Slightly Morbid Guide to Estate Planning & End-of-Life Tasks, with Wiley in 2026, I expected to learn about writing, editing, and promotion. I didn't expect the identifiers, metadata, library records, retailer profiles, review submissions, awards, and other work orbiting the actual book.

I didn't expect to learn an entirely new alphabet.

ISBN. LCCN. CIP. ISNI. VIAF. OCLC. ONIX. BISAC.

In order: International Standard Book Number, Library of Congress Control Number, Cataloging in Publication, International Standard Name Identifier, Virtual International Authority File, Online Computer Library Center, ONline Information eXchange, and Book Industry Standards and Communications. Every one of them is in the glossary.

Each one turned out to be part of a larger system connecting a book to publishers, retailers, libraries, review publications, awards, search engines, and readers. Then came another set of questions. Which professional review publications matter to librarians? Who is allowed to submit? How many months before publication is already too late? Which records could I correct myself? Which awards were worth considering? What did my publisher handle, and how could I check?

None of this is a complaint about traditional publishing. Publishing a book takes a large team and a remarkable amount of work. It's just easy for a first-time author to assume that every important system will connect itself automatically.

Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. And nobody watches the whole life of a book as closely as the person whose name is on the cover.

I started keeping notes on everything I learned while publishing and promoting No Loose Ends. Those notes became a checklist. The checklist became a much bigger checklist. AuthorChecklist.com is the version other authors can actually use.

Your Author Profile is free. A book is $40, once, and covers every edition and format of it. A book sorts and filters the checklist for you, keeps its deadlines, submissions, notes, and results, and marks off what is done.

AuthorChecklist.com is built for first-time authors and useful for every author: a plain-English guide to the work around publishing a book, with what to do, when it matters, who usually handles it, and what to check.

I'm an attorney, an entrepreneur, and the founder of Buried in Work. I created AuthorChecklist.com as part of the “What I Made” collection at AdamZuckerman.com (opens in a new tab). If something here saved you a headache, or if I got something wrong, I'd like to hear about it.