This week I had to come up with a publishing imprint; I invented the name and AI helped me with the logo.

My novel, Broken is Beautiful, will be launched on 18 March. As for any indie (independent) author, I am on a steep learning curve about all the things that need to be done to publish a book i.e. get it from a document into the commercial sphere. Publishing has many more facets than just printing. For a start, printed is only one format for book distribution - Broken is Beautiful will be a printed book, an e-book, an audio-book, as well as available via print-on-demand on the internet. Print-on-demand is one off copies made feasible by our digital age, compared to times when printing required massive layout of the document and print copies could only be done cost-effectively en masse.

One aspect of publishing is attaching a publisher's name to your book. The named publisher is the first point of contact for a book, not the author. This seems like a hangover from the times of print only, but it very much still exists. As an indie author, you are advised not to use your own name. Why is this? Because indie publishing is still seen as something down-market, compared to 'real' publishing, where you beg companies to publish your book and they tell you to change it to be what they perceive as marketable, decide what the cover and look should be, and then give you 10-15% of the net profit for your writing efforts after you have waited a year or more for the book to be published. You can start to see why I went indie rather than traditional, as someone who has been self-employed for twenty years.

I have been getting inquiries about my book and one of the first things you are asked is for an ISBN number. ISBN refers to International Standard Book Number – it's a product identifier for books. You need a lot of ISBNs, it turns out. You need one for every form in which the book will be provided, with paperback, hardback, print-on-demand, different e-book types and audiobooks all requiring their own ISBNs. So I needed to apply to the National Library for my ISBN set. However, to do that, I needed the name of the publisher.

Quick, I'd better come up with a name. I should be good at generating a name - it's not so different from a song title and I have had two years of practice generating song titles. I generated names while cycling (my best venue for inspiration). My first thought was 'pa harakeke publishing', named after our house in Gibbston. However, using Māori names risks challenges of cultural appropriation. That didn't seem like a good idea so I did some more thinking and came up with little. When I got home I looked at our cats on the rocking chair, three eyes between them (only two eyes visible in this photo). I liked the idea because it has the added meaning of the 'third eye', as an invisible eye providing perception beyond ordinary sight. I looked up domain names and 3EyesPublishing.com was available so the 3EyesPublishing imprint rapidly came into existence.