Locked Metadata
A few fields are locked. Everything else on a book can be edited, including all of your print specs except binding.
Title, for the Life of the Book
An ISBN identifies one specific title. Bowker won't let you retitle a registered ISBN, and neither will we, because a book under a new title is a new product rather than a corrected record. Your store listing's web address is built from the title too, so renaming would break every link already shared.
If there's a typo in a title that isn't on sale yet, contact us before it goes out. Once it's selling, the answer is a new book with its own ISBN.
ISBN, Once a Valid One Is Saved
An ISBN identifies one specific edition of one specific book in every catalog that carries it. It's your store listing's SKU, it's what retailers order against, and it's what your royalty records are joined on. Changing it wouldn't correct that record, it would point your book at a different one.
If you saved the wrong ISBN, contact us. It's a fix we do by hand because of everything downstream of it.
Binding, Once You Approve the Digital Preview
An ISBN identifies a binding, by long-standing trade convention. A paperback and a saddle-stitched edition of the same book are two products with two ISBNs, not one product that changed its mind. The binding also sets your page count limits, 2 to 50 for saddle stitch and 50 to 800 for perfect bound (750 on cream paper, which is thicker, and fewer for the two 8.5"-wide trims, Letter and Square, whose spine has to fit our cover sheet: 384 pages on white, 364 on cream), and the whole cover template is built around it.
If you need the other binding, add it as a new book with its own ISBN. That's what a retailer expects to see anyway.
Publication Date, Once the Book Is Listed
Your publication date decides which month each sale earns its royalty in. Once your book is listed in the store it can have sales, and moving the date backwards into a month we've already paid out would strand those royalties where nothing goes back to look for them.
Imprint, Once the Book Is Listed
Your store page's web address is built from your imprint, so the imprint a book is published under is baked into the link you hand out. Moving the book to another imprint would either move that address and break every link you've already shared, or leave the page filed under an imprint the book no longer says it has.
Before the book is listed you can move it freely, and a book you only sell in bulk orders never gets a store page, so its imprint stays editable for good. If you need a listed book moved, contact us and we'll look at what it takes.
What About Print Specs?
Trim, laminate, interior paper, interior color, duplex cover and page count are all editable, on any book, at any time. Most of them change the shape of your file, so we ask for a new one and your book comes off the store until you approve the new digital preview. Editing a Book lists what each change costs you.
Every change is recorded in the book's change history, which you can open from the book's page.