One of the things that I didn’t realize when I first began my self-publishing journey was just how much it was going to cost me to publish The Gravedigger’s Guild.
Don’t get me wrong- I knew I was starting a business. And businesses had start-up costs. But how much could it be? Self-publishing is “free” right?
Straight out of an exhausting job and with limited funds (Hello, halving our household income!), I was determined to bootstrap err-thing.
As you can imagine, I nearly hamstrung myself instead by refusing to pay for anything. After a particularly *attractive* meltdown one night and lots of blubbering over a calculator, my wonderful husband convinced me that we did indeed have the cash to buy what I needed to make headway with this thing called being an indie author.
(If you’ve ever been curious about what it’s like being an author, it’s much less glamorous than the movies make it out to be. It’s wonderful, but there’s a steeeep learning curve.)
So here is the breakdown of how much it has cost me to self-publish my first book:
Necessities:
- Proofreading – $131.25 (This now costs me $400-500 a book and is totally worth it.)
- ISBN – $50- 2 at $25 / each (Pack of 10: $250. Each version of the book takes its own ISBN, so the ebook has 1, and the paperback has 1. I later added a hardback version and used a third ISBN.)
- Ingram Setup – $49 (I have since decided that I have so few books ordered wholesale through Ingram that it makes more business sense to use Draft2Digital’s free print service which runs off of Ingram. I take a slight royalty hit, but until I start truly selling lots of wholesale copies, it’s better to avoid the upfront cost.)
Cost of Doing Business Tools:
- Canva Pro – $119/yr
- Bookfunnel – $100/yr
- Mailerlite – $15/mo (their free tier is excellent and a great way to go for beginning authors)
- Later – free version
Tasks I Saved On:
- Cover Design: Pete, my husband (Usually costs: $300-500 custom design -OR- $30-50 for pre-made
- Developmental/Copy Editing: Me (Usually costs: $1000-1500+. I have a background in editing so I created my own development guide and copy editing checklist. Then I used Word’s Editor, Grammarly, ProWritingAid, two rounds of word cloud checks, and an audible check before sending it to my beta readers who had a month to go through it. THEN I sent it to my proofreader who had it for a month. After going through my proofreader’s suggestions, I did one final read-through with fresh eyes. Yes, this seems like overkill. Yes, it took me about 3 months total to get all the editing done. Yes, it was worth it.)
- Formatting: Me (Depending on the project, I use the built-in formatting options of Atticus or the free options of the Reedsy BookEditor.)
What I skipped:
- Paid ads and promotions (First book, with no backlist so I’d have a high CPC with no benefit from a read-through rate.)
Not listed:
- Courses I’ve taken along the way.
- Royalties I pay to my distribution services at Draft2Digital, Ingram, Amazon, and Google. These services are “free” to list your books on or take a nominal fee to set up- except they take anywhere from 15-60% of your profit of all sales depending on how you’ve selected them to sell your work for you.
Total Spent To Publish First Book: $639.14
As you can see, self-publishing isn’t free. I’m grateful to have skills and people in my life who can help lower the cost. While there are ways to do it even more cheaply than I have, I don’t recommend them as they drastically affect the quality of your book.
While some of these costs are fixed (I’ll have to pay for proofreading and Ingram set up each time), overall these costs will go down with each book as publishing costs scale really well. I might add additional costs by outsourcing certain tasks or adding on some minimal advertising, but if I’m smart I can keep my overhead fairly low.
The more I publish, the more I will be able to minimize my costs (I can buy ISBNs in larger, lower-cost packs, the cost of subscriptions becomes more spread out) and maximize profits by selling directly and having a higher read-through rate as customers who love one book discover others that I have written.
*This list doesn’t include materials I’ve purchased to supply my office, purchase proof copies, or fulfill giveaways. Most of those have been minimal this past year as I’ve kept many of my promos digital.
