Barcodes for Indie Authors

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In my free how-to – ‘How to print your novel with Kindle Direct Publishing’ – I mentioned that KDP and IngramSpark both provide free barcodes. Unfortunately, not all Print-On-Demand companies do. If the company you choose to print your book says that you need to provide your own barcode, you can either buy a barcode from Bowker, or you can create your own free barcode.

In this how-to, I’ll show you exactly how to do it.

To begin, there are only TWO things you need in order to create your own, free barcode:

1. an ISBN for your book
2. a free online barcode generator

In Canada you can get an ISBN for free. In the US and Australia, you can buy an ISBN from a company called Bowker. The web address for the Australian company is:

https://www.myidentifiers.com.au/

If you want to know where to buy an ISBN for your own country, go to the website of the International ISBN Agency:

https://www.isbn-international.org/agencies

You should be looking at a screen like this:

Click the small down arrow [circled in red] to display a drop down list of countries. Scroll down to your country and click it. You should now see a detailed contact screen for the ISBN agency in your country. In the example shown below, I clicked on ‘United Kingdom and Ireland’:

Once you have your ISBN, you can go to the following website to use the free, barcode generator [you do not have to register first]:

https://www.bookow.com/index.php

On the Home page, select ‘Free ISBN-13 Bookland Barcode Generator’ as shown below:

You should now be looking at a page like this:

1. From the top of the page, type in your 13 digit ISBN, including the hyphens [or cut and paste it in].
2. Next, type 90000 in the Price textbox. This ensures that the scanner checks the bookshop’s own database for pricing.
3. Type your email address, twice.
4. Click inside the ‘Consent to email’ checkbox.
5. Leave the DPI at the default [300].
6. Now you have a choice of getting the barcode as a PDF file or as a PNG file. I find the PNG file easier to work with but the choice is yours. Either way you’ll end up with a picture of the barcode that’s been generated from your ISBN.
7. Save the barcode to your computer.
8. Insert the barcode into the back page of your book cover graphic [or get your cover designer to do it for you.

Done. 🙂

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