Register a Company Name

(This is the 7th installment of my How To Publish An Ebook thang.)

When you publish an ebook, you'll have to identify who is publishing it. Publishing is a business and by publishing a book you are going into business for yourself.
 
You might say Steve Poling Publishing, but why should you publicize me? Instead, come up with a cool name for a publishing company. When you come up with a cool name, google it and make sure nobody else has something close.

Run it past some friends to get their reactions, because it's really easy to not-see problems with the name. I have a friend who came up with a cool name for a company that just happens to differ by only one letter from a slang term for an unnatural sexual act.

Once you've got a name you like, you have to register that name. How will you register the name depends upon your jurisdiction and how you want to organize your publishing company. Maybe you want to organize your publishing company as a multinational corporation. Get a lawyer and ask him what to do.

To start a little smaller, you can organize as a sole proprietorship and file for what I call a DBA. The letters stand for "Doing Business As." This probably won't need a lawyer. It depends upon your jurisdiction. In Michigan all you need to do is fill out a form, give it to the County Clerk with a fee and get approval. I suppose they check to make sure someone else doesn't already have that same name. (Just for laughs, why not try to file "Ford Motor Company" and see what happens.)

If some MBA tells you different, believe them instead.

Once you've got the name you are going to publish under, get ready to use it in a number of places. Starting with your ebook's metadata.
(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)