avatarAlison McBain

Summary

The text provides a comprehensive breakdown of the hidden costs associated with self-publishing a novel, emphasizing the importance of professional editing and design services.

Abstract

The article "Hidden Costs of Self-Publishing" delves into the financial and resource investments required for authors to produce a professional-level book through self-publishing platforms. It outlines the expenses for various editorial services, including developmental editing, line editing, copyediting, and proofreading, as well as the costs for cover design and book layout for both print and eBook formats. The piece underscores the value of hiring professionals for editing and cover design to avoid an amateurish final product, which can negatively impact sales and reviews. Additionally, it explores the costs of marketing services such as book reviews, giveaways, and virtual book tours, providing a range of options for authors to consider. While the total cost of a self-published book can range from 10,000 to 20,000, the author suggests that bundled services and careful selection of freelancers or companies can reduce expenses to between 5,000 and 8,000. The article concludes by advising authors to invest wisely in key areas to ensure their book's success.

Opinions

  • The author, an experienced editor, stresses the necessity of professional editing for creating a high-quality book that stands out in the market.
  • Investing in a professionally designed book cover is deemed crucial, as a poor cover can deter potential readers.
  • Layout and formatting are acknowledged as important, but there is potential for authors to DIY to save costs, provided they are willing to learn and use self-publishing service tools effectively.
  • Marketing is presented as an essential, ongoing process, and while there are services that can be purchased, the author suggests that authors should also be prepared to invest time and effort into grassroots marketing strategies, such as social media promotion and networking.
  • The article suggests that while the costs of self-publishing can be substantial, they are a worthwhile investment for authors seeking to maintain control over their work and achieve a level of professionalism comparable to traditionally published books.
  • The author advocates for thorough research when hiring professionals, recommending that authors check portfolios, ask for samples, and read reviews and testimonials to ensure they are getting quality services.

Hidden Costs of Self-Publishing

Breaking down the dollars & cents of the “free” publishing option

Photo by Travis Essinger on Unsplash

If you’re a writer with a finished manuscript wanting to self-publish, there are a lot of options to consider when looking for services to help you produce a professional-looking product. As a freelance and award-winning editor who has worked with a number of clients to help them self-publish their books, I’ve seen firsthand the costs that go into making an author’s book stand out.

So, let’s break them down and see what the prices might be in terms of money, time, and resources. To produce a professional-level book, the more DIY the level of publishing, the more you might be spending out of pocket.

Since we can’t look at every type of book under the sun, let’s take the example of what it would cost to publish a novel of about 75,000 words with no illustrations except for the cover.

Based on how manuscripts are formatted when submitted, that would be approximately 250 words/page, or about 300 pages in manuscript format. Assuming you’d want both a print book and an eBook, let’s take a look at some of the costs to make it happen.

Self-Publishing Overview

While self-publishing has been around for a long time, the field has diversified quite a bit since its inception. The costs often depend on your skill set — are you able to design your own book covers? Can you do your own layout? Or are you looking to pay someone to do it for you?

Of course, if you’re an artist, layout, and formatting expert, copyeditor, developmental editor, marketer, and proofreader, you don’t need any of these services to create a professional-looking book that will sell well. However, most of us aren’t experts at ALL of these specialized skills, so let’s take a look at each individual cost.

Editing

While there is a whole range of what editors charge per service, a good place to start looking at rates is the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA), which is a professional group of editors who abide by a certain standard of work ethic and payment.

The EFA lists the median rates for every type of editing, from copyediting to proofreading, although you can find editors who go both above or below these averages.

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

With our example of a 75,000-word manuscript/300 pages, the median rate breaks down as follows:

  • Developmental editing (resolving problems with structure, form, plot & character — happens first in an edit) at $46-$50/hour. Estimated 4–6 pages/hour = $2,300-$3,750 total.
  • Line editing (line-by-line corrections, including style consistency, sentence structure, and syntax) at $46-$50/hour. Estimated 4–6 pages/hour = $2,300-$3,750 total.
  • Copyediting (making sure a piece of writing is accurate, clear, and correct — last substantial edit before publication) at $36-$40/hour. Estimated 7–10 pages/hour = $1,080-$1,715 total.
  • Proofreading (correcting all final errors — happens right before publication) at $31-$35/hour. Estimated 11–15 pages/hour = $620-$955 total.

Many editors will offer a discount if clients sign up for more than one service, but the baseline price if you’re planning on doing a full edit of your manuscript, just like at a traditional publishing house, will run you between $6,300-$10,170 with no discount. With a discount for bundled services, you might be looking at $4,000-$8,000.

The price might be making your eyeballs bug out, but the best advice I can give is to NOT skip this step. If you want to be seen as a professional author, having your manuscript edited is a key factor in producing a high-level book. You want readers to come back to you, not running away. A badly edited book (or unedited book) will often get bad reviews and poor sales. You want readers to focus on your great story, not on the typos.

The next question you might ask is: are there cheaper editors out there? Well… yes. But this is where you want to be careful. Not every editor advertising their services on a place like Upwork or Reedsy will be the right editor for your project — they may be very inexperienced, and you might get a poor job for a still-hefty sum of money. And beware of editors charging REALLY far below market value — why are their services so inexpensive? There might be a reason for that.

Whomever you hire, do your homework first. Ask for references or examples of completed work. Many editors will also do a “sample” edit — the first chapter of your book or the first ten pages. You can see the value of their work before shelling out thousands of dollars.

Book Covers

Again, there is a whole range of what artists will charge, and it depends on how specialized you’d like your cover. If you don’t have a design and/or art background, I would recommend NEVER designing your own cover. There’s nothing that screams “amateur” like a bad first impression. I hate to say it, but the old adage is true: people DO judge a book by its cover.

Photo by Varad Parulekar on Unsplash

Here’s where you have to do even more homework, based on what you want and your genre. There are a lot of cover artists out there, but they aren’t all offering the same or the right service for what you want to publish.

Be sure to check out their portfolios and other covers they’ve designed. And make sure they have a quick enough turnaround time and give you options in terms of being able to edit the design if you’d like to make any changes.

On average, costs from a reputable designer range from the low end of about $100-$200 (designers who are just starting out) to the middle of the road, running about $400-$1,000 (established cover designers, such as 99Designs), to the highest end of the scale at $2,500+ (Big 5 cover designers).

Can you get a cheaper book cover on places like Fiverr? Definitely, but you get what you pay for. Aside from editing the manuscript itself, one of the most important places to invest your money is your cover design. No one’s going to pick up a book with a terrible book cover.

Layout

For layout, let’s go back to the Editorial Freelancers Association and look at some of their median rates.

  • Design/layout/formatting (print) at $46-$50/hour. Estimated 4–6 pages/hour = $2,300-$3,750.
  • Design/layout/formatting (eBook) at $46-$50/hour. Estimated 7–10 pages/hour = $1,380-$2,143.

Again, many layout editors will charge a combined rate to do both print and eBook if clients hire them for both services. Once a book is formatted for print, it’s relatively easy to convert it to eBook, so you wouldn’t be paying for the same number of hours if you decided to hire a layout designer to do only one for you.

So, while the baseline price for each of them together without factoring in that discount would be approximately $3,680-$5,893 — more realistically, I’d probably estimate it to be between $2,500-$4,000 for the complete layout.

There are also other companies that bundle and charge less, such as 99Designs — they offer packages from about $400-$1,700. Just make sure you check reviews and the company/professional you choose fits with your style — it doesn’t help to pay less if you’re not getting what you want.

This might also be a place where you could DIY to save some money — it’s much easier to learn how to format a book than some of these other skill sets, since many self-publishing services have very straightforward systems that accept PDFs or Word documents. Just make sure when you publish on the platforms that you preview your file before hitting “print” and also order a proof copy to check how it turns out, so you can correct any errors you might find in formatting.

Marketing

The most important part of any book launch is, well… the launch itself. There are a number of companies that offer marketing assistance to authors, but I’ll take a look at three reputable ones in each category and some of the services they offer for a pricing comparison.

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

Book reviews

BookTrib: $415–Over 19 years in promotions, plus 90k+ visitors a month to their website.

Kirkus Book Reviews: $450 — Considered one of the top review sites for books, with a big name recognition for publishers.

NetGalley (6-month listing): ~$499 — NetGalley is the professional reviewing site for book reviewers to get their hands on copies of authors’ new releases and forthcoming books.

Book giveaways

Bookfunnel: $20-$250 — A great way to send ARCs out to interested readers and get reviews.

Goodreads: $119-$599 — The premier book review site for authors. If you’re not on Goodreads, you should be!

BookBub: $104-$788 — Various tools to advertise book discounts, deals, and book launches.

Virtual book tours

RockSTAR Book Tours & Publicity: $25-$200 — Various services from blog tours, cover reveals, social media tours in mix-and-match packages.

Xpresso Book Tours: $40–225 — Various services from 1+ week blog tours, cover reveals, social media tours.

R&R Book Tours: $45–$280 — Various book launch packages.

So if you took one service in each of these categories to launch your book, you’d be out of pocket about $500-$1500.

This is another place where you can save some money and DIY, since just ordering one service from a company won’t generally launch your book into bestseller status. Marketing is a continuous process and requires a lot of elbow grease. Talking about your book on social media, going on podcasts, making videos on BookTok — all of these are skills you can learn, and there are places you can reach out to on your own.

Conclusions

Between the editing, book cover, layout, and marketing, you’re looking at paying professionals for a self-publishing book launch anywhere between $10,000-$20,000 if you go through self-publishing services on your own.

Even if you DIY several of these options to lower the price to about $5,000-$8,000, there will be others that you probably don’t want to go cheap on.

My top two recommendations would be to hire a professional editor and a good book cover designer — without those, it’s too easy to have your book look amateur rather than professional.

Photo by Viacheslav Bublyk on Unsplash

If you’re looking at these numbers and thinking, No way anyone pays this… let me tell you that yes, they absolutely do. Many authors pay within this range to launch a single book.

Sometimes it’s a lower price with bundled deals if you’re working with an editor/designer — many freelancers and hybrid publishing companies will charge a package rate of about $5,000-$10,000 on average.

But you’ll have to make sure who you’re working with and also that they’ll produce a book you’ll be happy with. Check out other books they’ve published and if they have client testimonials. If they’re publicly advertising their services for hire but have no examples of their work, that’s a bit of a red flag.

Whatever path you take, I wish you the best of luck with self-publishing your book!

Wondering about a traditional publishing deal instead of self-publishing? Check out my related article, “How I Jumped the Line & Got a Publishing Deal,” published in The Writing Cooperative.

Writing
Self Publishing
Self Publishing Tips
Publishing
Publishing Services
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