Amazon Self-Publishing Costs: How Much I Spent to Self-Publish My Novel

so how much does it cost to self-publish a book because that is one of the first questions that many Indie authors ask because you know it can be expensive to self-publish in today's video we're going to be discussing exactly how much money I spent to self-publish this book right here in the trail to you and me I'll be talking about what I spent on the cover formatting editing some marketing stuff and everything in between I make a video like this for every single book that I publish so if you're curious what I've spent on past books I will leave a link to the playlist Down Below in that playlist I talk about the individual self-publishing costs for every single book that I publish I will say putting this video together was not all that fun for me because I spent way more than I technically budgeted for so whoops before we get started I want to note that all of the expenses that we talk about today do not include anything for the book adventure box this is the book adventure box that I created for the trail to you and me it has six individual little gifts that you open as you read the book and it has to do with something that's going on in the book as you read it so this was a separate product all in itself so I didn't want to include the cost of creating the book adventure box in the cost of self-publishing the book because I did not need this in order to self-publish the book this is kind of its own product and Adventure now with that said I have not sold out of the book adventure box yet for the trails you and me so if you're interested in seeing what the gifts are and kind of having an interactive reading experience make sure to order the book adventure box while you still can quantities are extremely limited and you can either buy just the Box or you can buy the box with a signed edition of the book link to shop this will be down below okay let's talk expenses I track all my expenses in my book launch planner it's a part of the book launch planner Series this planner is used to plan out your book launch there's pages on finding your ideal reader and a checklist in a book publishing timeline but today we're here to talk about the expense tracker so my biggest flaw is that I didn't start off by creating a budget because because the book launch planner allows you to create a budget it has a column for the different things that you'll need to spend money on and then the estimated cost and then the actual cost and my issue was is that I just never did any of the estimated cost stuff to create a budget and I just kind of started you know doing stuff and I feel like every single book that I publish I'm always like okay I'm gonna publish this one on a budget and then I don't and then I regret it anyways I'm just gonna start running through the list I have here in my book launch planner to tell you guys what I spent on everything the biggest expense by far and it's an expense that I don't think I'll ever cut corners on ever again which is kind of a bummer because it is expensive is copy edits I know copy edits are my weakness I don't spend anything on developmental edits I don't usually spend anything on proofreading anymore but I do invest heavily in my copy edits because I know that's my weak point everything else I can make up with some where somehow but copy edits I just I work with Enchanted Inc publishing everyone over there is amazing I specifically work with Natalya and she always does an amazing job on my manuscript so she was my copy editor and I spent about one thousand two hundred dollars it was technically slightly less than that but I just wanted to round up to make it an even number and I know that's a lot of money and we're starting off this video very expensive but the copy edits for me are always the most expensive thing and you can spend less on editor but I do find how much you spend does directly correlate with the quality of edits I've had horrible experience with editors and I've now consistently worked with Natalya it is money well spent because you get your manuscript back and you're like wow that's why I spent that much because she's extremely thorough the next thing we'll discuss is an illustrator so I'm a cover designer I don't typically hire someone to illustrate my books or design my books for me so this was New Territory so I actually hired and illustrator to do the cover for the trail to you and me and that is because I had this very specific vision and I wanted the couple on the cover and I can draw a landscape okay I cannot do people so that that's why I ended up hiring an illustrator I've said many times when I do book cover design I do photo manipulation that is my specialty I am in no way shape or form in illustrator so that's why I wanted to hire someone out to do it for me and then I also ended up hiring the same illustrator to redo the covers for meet me at the summit and let the rubble fall and honestly it was a great experience and I love the outcome of all of the covers but especially of the trails you and me but I spent 300 on this illustration and it included you know the full wrap um and then I also got the Photoshop files so I could go in and kind of modify things myself as I saw need now the illustration did not include typography and if you look at you know the whole cover wrap we obviously have type on the cover the spine and then of course the back of the book so I did the typography myself because you know I am cover designer so I have the skill set to do that just know if you're not a cover designer you don't have experience in Photoshop this is something you're gonna have to hire out for now I do have a book cover design course that is coming out very soon so if you want to sign up for the wait list for my book cover design course you can I actually have an entire section just to teach you typography so if you are someone who ends up hiring an illustrator to illustrate your book but you still need someone to do the typography that is an option that you could learn typography relatively easily and do it yourself so if you want to sign up for the waitlist for the course it will be linked down below next thing we should discuss is formatting so I format my books myself so I actually didn't spend any money formatting but I just wanted to mention it because it is a pretty significant cost if you end up hiring someone to format your book for you so that's something you should budget for if you are self-publishing your book um like I said I formatted mine myself so I spent zero dollars on formatting but if you want to learn how to format your book yourself as well I teach you how to do that in my course that's already out I teach you how to format your book for print and ebook using Adobe InDesign I personally feel that Adobe InDesign is one of the best softwares while you can format your book in Microsoft Word it usually leads to a lot of headache and confusion and there's just not a lot of customizability okay we've talked about a lot of things that I was able to do for free and save money on let's talk about the second largest chunk of money I spent on publishing this book and it has nothing to do with the publishing and everything to do with the marketing so this is just something that I tend to do is I like to experiment with my marketing I I'm very privileged in the fact that as an author I have multiple streams of income whether that be YouTube when I work with clients you know the actual Book Sales all of that I have multiple streams of income so I tend to have a bit of a larger budget when it comes to publishing my books so as someone who makes YouTube videos on self-publishing I kind of take it as my job to do experimental marketing things and that's that's one of the things that I did for this book so the whole reason I started doing the book adventure box in the first place was because I wanted to have my books featured in Once Upon A book club which is basically what the book adventure box is but like fancier and more professional looking so the Once Upon A book club is a book box just like this where you get gifts that are wrapped up nicely and cutely and as you're reading the book you have different gifts to open and it's absolutely adorable my dream has always been to have one of my books featured in this box and just Logistics wise that has been something that's very hard to accomplish but I've always had a good relationship with the owner of that book box and she's always told me to you know let her know when I have a new book coming out so when I had the trail to you and me coming out I reached out I was like hey can I feature the book in the box and she basically told me you know they already had their books picked out for that month but that I could do an ad insert in the box and now now I'm sure you're seeing where this is going and the thing is the people that subscribe to the Once Upon A book club box box box um are my ideal reader like that demographic you know they send they sent me the demographic information and the stats on how many boxes they sell and what their newsletter list is like and blah blah blah that demographic is is what I need for this book so it became incredibly irresistible to me and the issue was is that the ad insert for the box was incredibly expensive um like reasonable but also expensive because the ad insert was to have a flyer about my book printed and put in every single box for the Once Upon A book club box and not only that I'd also have like a little graphic feature in their newsletter so my book could potentially or would be put in front of thousands and thousands of readers and I just couldn't resist so for my ad insert for my flyer I was able to do a double-sided flyer so on one side I promoted um My Books meet me at The Summit in the trail to you and me because you can start with either of those books in the series because meet me at the Summit is book one but the trail to you and me is a standalone so I'd want to come up with a fun way to kind of make it like a game for readers to choose which book they want to read but then besides just letting readers know that the books existed I wanted a strong call to action which is why on the back of the flyer there's a call to action for a digital book signing which I'll tell you guys about now so on August 24th at 7 00 PM Eastern Standard time I'm going to be doing a digital book signing right here on YouTube so I'll be selling signed editions of all of my books meet me at the summit let the rubble fall and the trail to you and me and during that signing I'll be doing like a fun q a and of course signing the books and I'll also will be having a sale on the books as well so make sure to stay tuned for that if you want to be notified about the book signing to make sure you don't miss it make sure to RSVP to the book signing you can do that by filling out the little form in the description of this video so you can RSVP to the book signing and you'll get email notifications when we go live and also before the sale ends so you don't miss the book sale so so what I'm saying here is I ended up paying for the ad insert for Once Upon A book club box uh so if you end up getting the July box you'll you should see an ad insert for this book right here and then also an ad insert in their newsletter as well um that did not come cheaply uh that was one thousand one hundred and thirty four dollars um and I did do the math on how many books I would have to sell to even break even and it's it's not a small number but I am keeping in mind that my book will be put in front of thousands of people so my hope is that of those thousands of people that see the ad that five to ten percent of them go out and buy the book because if five to ten percent of them go out and buy the book I'm golden if less than that buy the book I'm a little less than golden so at the time of filming this the box has not gone out yet it goes out at the end of July so um I have no stats to share with you guys yet but I will assuming you know I hope it all goes well I will be able to kind of give you guys a deep dive into um numbers and you know how many sales I saw and I'm hoping and assuming that as soon as the Box ships out and people receive their box and they open the box and they open the email newsletter that I will see a significant increase in sales um and when that happens I hope to do a video on that to tell you guys hey it went really well or hey I wasted a thousand dollars but that's just you know if it honestly if it weren't for my YouTube channel I probably wouldn't have done it but I felt like I had to take one for the team for you guys to let you know if this is gonna go well or not and that's just you know I like to do little experimental things like that for my YouTube channel and that's why we are here where we are today so anyways we're gonna move on from that I promise that's the last large giant chunk of change I spent on publishing this book but it was for the sake of a small marketing experiment okay so moving on the next thing I spent money on was my book trailer now I edit my book trailers myself I produce them myself all of that I do myself but these days I've been doing book trailers with stock videos so stock videos are something that I have to purchase I use a website called storyblocks to purchase my stock videos and I do like a one month subscription um and in this case I did a subscription where I could download five stock videos and that's exactly what I needed for the book trailer and that subscription was thirty dollars and then after that I just canceled it so I only had to spend thirty dollars if you want to know more about how you can use shock videos to make a book trailer I actually have a video on it I'll leave that linked below highly recommend you watch it if you ask me it's actually a very affordable way to make a very cool marketing thing for your book another thing I wanted to mention is that for a lot of the stuff that I've talked about here is I use the Adobe program so I use Adobe Photoshop for my book cover I use Adobe InDesign for my formatting I use Adobe Premiere Pro for my book trailer so those things aren't free but it's something that I pay for regardless of whether I'm publishing a book Because you know I'm a freelancer I work with other authors to design their book covers and format their books I'm also a YouTuber so I use those softwares on a nearly daily basis anyways so I wanted to mention that I use these softwares because these softwares aren't free they are subscription based so I spend about 55 a month on them but if you're an author and you're you're publishing a book and you want to use these softwares as well it's just something to keep in mind in your budget you can just sign up for the one month that you need it and then you can cancel it or if you're someone who thinks that you're going to use it on a regular basis sign up for their yearly subscription because you'll end up saving money that way um but again I did I'm not accounting that into the costs of self-publishing my book but I did want to mention it here because it's not software that's free another expense was book funnels so this time around when I was sending out Advanced reader copies of my book I used book funnel to do that and honestly it was actually a very positive experience I tried to use book funnel previously and I kind of messed up in how I was using it but this time for the trail to you and me I had a very positive experience I was able to reach out to a bunch of instagramers and sent them links to download the book and you know book funnel is great because it just makes it super easy for readers to download the book and then it makes it easy for me because you can set up automatic emails to remind reviewers to review the book come release day so all in all it just made everything like super streamlined for me and that is another like software that is subscription based it's 15 a month at this time I've spent it about thirty dollars on it so that's what I'm putting into my self-publishing budget but I think it's a software that I'm going to continue using because I have some like marketing ideas and Outreach ideas for you know doing more stuff with instagramers to get my book notice on Instagram that way the last thing I spent money on was my vinyl stickers so these are the stickers that I included in the book adventure box but they're also stickers that I gave away to people who pre-ordered the book so I had a pre-order form would where people would fill out their information and they get a vinyl sticker as well as a signed book plate so the vinyl stickers I spent 49.98 on and that was for a pack of 100. now also note that I said that for my pre-order campaign I also sent out signed book plates so to send out my signed book plates I use sticker paper and sticker paper is just something that I already had on hand same with the ink that I used to print out the sticker paper so that's not something I calculated into the cost there's a lot of like little things that I already have on a regular basis or use on a regular basis as a business that I didn't feel counted as an individual cost for self-publishing my book so you may find as you go to sit down and self-publish your book that there's these random small miscellaneous expenses that you may not have accounted for so it's always good to put like a little bit of a buffer into your budget okay so that is all the expenses that I had for self-publishing this book right here it is time to tally up the total um so for for for this book I spent 2743.98 that's a lot I know and I part a huge chunk of that is the is the the little experimental marketing uh insert in the book box so we'll see how that goes um but otherwise if you take the the experimental marketing out of the budget which was over a thousand dollars then that meant we spent just under two thousand dollars which I feel is kind of typical for for me at least I can't speak for all authors I definitely tend to spend uh quite a bit on self-publishing but it's mainly due to what I spend uh when I go to do editing and I'm just not someone who's comfortable cheaping out when it comes to hiring an editor anyways that is it for this video let me know if you enjoyed the behind the scenes look into the cost of self-publishing my book otherwise I will see you all in next week's video

Channel: Mandi Lynn - Stone Ridge Books

Views: 5,704

Keywords: self-publishing costs, how much does it cost to self publish a book, publishing a book, self publishing on amazon, costs to self publish ebook, self publishing a book on amazon, writing a book, publishing a novel, writing a novel, self publish a book, how much does it cost to self publsh a book, cover design costs, book publishing costs, hwo much does it cost to publish a book on amazon, how to publish a book, how to publish a novel, self publishing expenses, self publishing

Id: 5uG9Tdc-5YQ

Length: 20min 49sec (1249 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 09 2023