As I wormed my way deeper into the self-publishing apple, and learned the mysteries of ASINs and ISBNs and required metadata and all that cool publishing sh*t, I realized I was bumping up against the pithy core by naming my website after my first book – The Extrapolated Man. I mean… there are more books in the works, and short stories, and artifacts. Pretty obvious in retrospect, I know. Let’s just say I was in a hurry to get something online, and I ran with what I had in hand, which was the book title.

But now I have to go buy ISBNs – which are the unique numeric IDs that get books into bookstores and libraries and virtually any online platform except Amazon – and they are not particularly cheap. We’re talking $125 per ISBN in quantities 1-9, and then $295 for a 10-pack. Which is conveniently and extractively sized to make you buy the 10-pack because you need at least 2 ISBNs and more likely 4, since they are specific to a unique product (ebook, paperback, audio book, hardback). Which is a bit of an astonishing ripoff if you think about it, because we’re talking about $125 for a single record in a database, that you create yourself. As a former database guy, I’d guess their incremental cost is in the pennies zone. Such is life in a world jammed full of monopolies. 

But I digress.

Where I was going with ISBNs is that they include IDs for your product and for its publisher. Which in turn linked to a website. Which made me step back and go, huh, I should have a cool publisher name, and a nifty logo on the spine of my book. A row of Mars & Torchship logos lined up on my bookshelf would look pretty sweet. That appeals to my compulsive over-organized visual brain. But what website should it link too? Oh. Yeah. This one, ideally. 

And so before I got too far along, it seemed best to change the website’s name to something more inclusive. Now, the usual drill is for authors to name their websites after themselves, because they’re the product, right? Or at least the brand. Douglas Franklin! W00t! But something about that kind of bugs me. I mean google doesn’t care. If I manage to get this lumbering beast off the ground, then searches on me will link to here just as easily as to me.com. And while “you are your brand” fits this end-stage-capitalism moment, where we are expected to monetize every fucking thing, it fails to capture the messy reality of life. I’d rather my brand was the worlds I create.

So here we are. Welcome to Extrapolated Worlds, home of author and maker Doug Franklin!