Build your author presence
Publish your identifier page
Create one page on your site that lists the author identifiers and profiles you've actually verified. It gives librarians, journalists, and databases a reliable place to connect those records to you.
Authors often hire help with this: website or technical.
Why it matters
Every other identity item on this checklist produces a number or a link that lives somewhere else. Without a single reference page, you will spend time hunting for them every time someone asks, and other people will guess. This is the public face of your Book Identity Sheet: the parts you are happy for anyone to see.
Your part
- What you do
- Do it. You normally do this yourself.
- Who normally owns it
- Author
- When
- At launch, once profiles are claimed and identifiers confirmed, then updated with each new edition (Build your author presence: any time, and the earlier the better)
How to do it
The full walkthrough
Once you have claimed your profiles and collected your identifiers, put them in one public place. A short page on your site, sometimes called a links page or an identifiers page, that lists your ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier), the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) for each edition, and links to your official Amazon, Goodreads, BookBub, and social profiles.
The audience for this page is not readers, mostly. It is librarians checking which record is you, journalists confirming a handle before they tag it, catalogers looking for an authoritative source, and search engines trying to connect the dots. Structured data on the page reinforces the same information for machines.
Traditionally published authors can include the publisher's author page and any publisher-assigned identifiers. Hybrid and self-published authors can include the imprint name and the publisher record that goes with their ISBNs.
The page also protects you a little. When a fake profile appears under your name, which happens, a public list of the real ones gives you something to point to.
Common mistakes
- Listing profiles you never claimed, which tells readers the wrong account is yours.
- Publishing identifiers you have not confirmed, such as an ISNI found on a mixed record.
- Burying the page so no search engine or cataloger finds it.
- Forgetting to add new editions, so the page becomes a snapshot of the launch year.
Identifiers for Publish your identifier page
Set a status on any record and it joins this step. All book identifiers.
| My status | Identifier | Why this matters | Yours |
|---|---|---|---|
| ISNI The International Standard Name Identifier: a sixteen-digit number that says which creator you are when several people share a name. | Without a shared number, databases across publishing and libraries have no agreed answer to which person wrote what, which is how one writer's books end up grouped with another's. It matters most if you have more than one book, share a name with another writer, or work with a publisher that already carries these numbers in its metadata; a first-time author with an uncommon name and one title can reasonably do nothing. You may have one already, because many are created from data that libraries and other contributors feed in, so on every route the first move is normally to search the database rather than to request anything, and a traditionally published author can also ask whether the publisher requests them as part of its metadata practice. Record the sixteen-digit number only after checking that the works under it are yours. | Add your ISNI | |
| ISBN The International Standard Book Number, printed above the barcode. Most formats sold through the book trade get their own. | Every retailer, wholesaler, and library orders and lists your book by this number, and the title, contributors, format, price, and publication date attached to it are what those systems display, so one wrong detail shows up in many places at once. Traditionally and hybrid published authors normally receive the numbers from the publisher and check what is attached to each one. If you publish the book yourself, you buy the numbers and assign them, and you are the one who decides whether your imprint or a platform is recorded as the publisher. Keep one list of every ISBN beside the edition and format it identifies so you can check listings against it. | Add your ISBN-13 |
A template for this
Book Identity SheetThe single source of truth for your book: every settled fact, from exact title and International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs) to subject codes, descriptions, and contacts.
When to use it: Use this when the title and formats are settled, usually around nine months before publication. Keep it current for the life of the book, and copy from it every time a listing, form, pitch, or entry asks for a detail. Do not use this when a fact is still undecided. Mark it provisional rather than guessing, because everything downstream copies from here.
What done looks like
- One page at a stable address, linked from the site footer or the biography page.
- Your ISNI and any other creator identifiers you have confirmed.
- ISBNs for each edition, grouped by book.
- Links to every profile you control, labeled as official, and nothing you do not control.
- Structured data on the page that mirrors the visible list.
- A last-updated date.
Sources and last checked
- Official source
- No single official page for this step.
- Last checked
- Not checked against its source yet.
- How confident we are
- Verified