Damien Soitout
Count a series by the language you can hold. English is three quick guides. Spanish is two. A closed page is not a book.
The same cover, repeated, is still one edition. A series is counted by the language you can open.
On 30 June 2025 the short books I publish under the name A Quick Guide do not share one number. They share a test. A series is real in a language only when that edition can be held. You open a page. The page answers with a title, a language, and a way to receive the book, on paper or on a screen. If the page does not answer, you do not have a volume in that language. You have a wish that the set looked finished.
I learned this the ordinary way, by watching people talk about a set as if the largest badge on any one cover applied to every language at once. Three sounds complete. Two sounds like a delay. The person who has to buy the book does not live inside the badge. They live inside the language they read. Give them the count that matches that language, or you have sent them to a shelf that will not open.
An ISBN is the trade's name for one edition. The International ISBN Agency is where that identifier is administered. I use the number the way a shop should use it: as the name of an object that exists, not as a promise that a neighboring language already has the same object. Paper and a Kindle file can share a language and still be two formats. Two formats are not two languages. A translation that has not been opened is not a third format either. It is not in the count.
In English the series is Book 3 of 3, and each volume has one job.
The first is the shorting guide. The Kindle went public on 11 January 2024. The shop pages for the paperback and the Kindle followed later that month. The job of that book is to say what short selling is and what it is not. You borrow a security, you sell it, and you hope to buy it back at a lower price. The loss is not capped the way a simple purchase is capped, because the price can rise without a ceiling you chose. The book is an explanation of the tool. It is not an instruction to place an order on Monday. The paperback sits here: A Quick Guide to short selling.
The second is Time Mastery, a field manual for hours. The English paperback is dated 8 February 2024, ISBN 9798877044777, and the listing calls it Book 2 of 3. I wrote it because a time book becomes another to-do list unless the book forbids that use. Inside it you will meet the tools I actually use with people who are already in a short day: the Eisenhower split between urgent and important, the Pomodoro as a bounded bout of attention, a SMART check so a goal has a finish, and the cue, routine, and reward loop that turns a repeated hour into a habit. None of those tools invents an hour. They tell you which hour you already have, and which task is allowed to sit in it. The older pages on this site still carry the habits in prose. Stop making to-do lists is the argument against length disguised as control. It is time to change your habits is the argument that a habit is a practice, not a mood. The paperback is the object you can hold while you do that work.
The third English volume is Behind the Ledger. I published the paperback on 1 June 2025. It runs 153 pages, the ISBN is 9798286063734, and the series line on that edition is Book 3 of 3. I wrote it from years of work with intelligence agencies whose subject was financial networks. The public banking screen is a window. Large creation and large settlement sit on servers behind that window, in the network I call the Farm, classed from clean money to illegal data, and gated by institutions a citizen can name: the Federal Reserve as liaison, the European Central Bank on the euro, Euroclear when the unit becomes a security, and the International Monetary Fund when the form touches the balance of payments. The longer account is the book, and the piece titled Behind the Ledger: the third quick guide. The fact this count needs is smaller. The English page opened, so English includes a third volume. You can open the listing yourself: Behind the Ledger.
Time Mastery reached this shop in June 2025, paper first and Kindle a few days later. Before that, a reader who wanted the English object used the bookseller. After 7 June the paperback has a page here, and after 11 June the Kindle does too. Those dates matter because a series page that links a product before the product exists is a door into a wall. On 30 June both doors are open.
The English paperback is Time Mastery in the shop. The English Kindle is the same book as a Kindle file. Same language, second format. If you are counting languages, count one. If you are counting files a buyer can choose, count two. Say which count you mean. An unlabeled six is how a shelf starts to sound larger than the languages on it.
The same June opening covers the translations of the time book that were already real as books and could finally be ordered from this shop. French paper: Un guide rapide, maîtrise du temps. French Kindle: the French Kindle. Spanish paper: Una guía rápida, dominio del tiempo. Spanish Kindle: the Spanish Kindle. Six shop editions of one book, three languages, two formats. That is the honest arithmetic. It is not six books, and it is not three languages plus a ghost.
Spanish has its own series line, and the line is the count. Dominio del tiempo is Book 2 of 2. The paperback date is the same 8 February 2024, and the ISBN on that edition is 9798878302357. Book 2 of 2 means the Spanish quick guides are the shorting guide and the time guide. There is a Spanish shorting edition in the shop, Una guía rápida, venta en corto, beside the time book linked above.
I do not take the English words Book 3 of 3 and paste them onto Spanish so the shelves look symmetrical. Symmetry is a feeling you get in a stockroom. A reader in Spanish needs the two books the Spanish label names. Behind the Ledger is an English paperback. It does not become a Spanish volume because I also wrote the English one, or because the ideas would survive a translation. When a Spanish third exists as a page you can open, that page will carry the count. On 30 June 2025 the Spanish count is two.
French is the language where the mark and the shelf are easiest to confuse. Maîtrise du temps is Book 2 of 3. The French Kindle of that book, listing B0CTGGR2VJ, came out on the same February day as the English paperback. The shop now holds both the paper and the Kindle, linked above. French also has the first volume. The paperback is Un guide rapide, shorting ou vente à découvert.
Book 2 of 3 means the French series has a third place in its own numbering. A place in a numbering is not a book. On this date the French quick guides you can order are the shorting guide and the time guide. I will hand you those. I will not hand you a French title for a third volume, because a title you cannot open is not an edition.
