Creating book products manually
When you only need to add a book or two, you can create products by hand. You provide a few basics and Bookhead does the rest — looking up the cover and bibliographic data and writing a finished product to your Shopify store.
When to use this
Manual creation is best for small, one-off additions:
- A single new arrival that wasn't part of a distributor shipment
- A special order for a customer
- A book you're adding outside your normal receiving flow
For adding many books at once — like a shipment from a distributor — use Importing a distributor file instead. It's far faster for bulk additions.
What you provide
Bookhead can build a complete product from just three pieces of information:
| Field | Required | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| ISBN | Yes | ISBN-10 or ISBN-13. This is how Bookhead looks up the cover and bibliographic data. |
| Quantity | Yes | How many copies you have. |
| Price | Yes | Your selling price. |
Steps
- In Bookhead, choose to create a new book.
- Enter the ISBN, quantity, and price.
- Save. Bookhead looks up the cover image and bibliographic data for that ISBN and assembles the product.
- Bookhead checks your Shopify catalog and then creates the product on your Shopify store (or updates the matching product if you already carry that title, so you don't get a duplicate).
After creating
Open your Shopify admin to confirm the new product — cover, title, author, description, price, and quantity. If a brand-new or obscure ISBN came back with limited data, the product is still created; you can edit it to fill in anything missing.
Need a hand? Email [email protected].