So how much does it cost to
self-publish a book or specifically, how much did I pay to self-publish
my fifth novel? Let the rubble fall. Today we're gonna be breaking down exactly
how much I spent to self-publish this book right here on Amazon. Not only will I be talking about how
much money I spent on each individual thing, but I'm also gonna be talking
about different things
that I did in order to save money throughout the publishing process, as well as some additional things
that you might need to spend money on. If you're gonna be
self-publishing a book this year, then this video will
be right up your alley. You can be mindful of how much money
you're gonna wanna put to the side so you can self-publish your own book. But you can also watch my
other self-publishing videos, which I will link down below cuz I break
down the cost of self-publishing for each one of my books that
I have ever published. So you can kind of see how sometimes
as you publish that morphs and grows. My name is Mandi Lynn. I post weekly
videos on the business of being an author. If that sounds good to you, then make sure to subscribe and hit the
belt notification icon so you never miss a new upload. So if you go back and watch all
of my self-publishing cost videos, you may notice that things morph and
change as I've self-published more and more and I'm able to cut
corners in some places, whereas at the beginning I had to
pay a lot of money to do everything, which might be the same for you guys
as well when you're first starting off. There's just some places where you can't
cut corners and that's why I'm gonna suggest to you guys to watch all of my
previous self-publishing cost videos. But today I'll also be sharing some
tips of where you might be able to save some money throughout the process. Before I can talk about
what I did spend money on, I wanted to talk first about what I
didn't spend money on because there's just some things that I'm able to do myself
that maybe some authors aren't able to do themselves. The first
being book cover design. So Let the Rubble fall is a part of a
series called the Road Trip Snapshot series and I designed
both of the book covers. I am also a freelance book cover designer, so hence me designing the book covers. So if you're not a book
cover designer yourself, you're gonna wanna hire a cover designer, whether that be someone like me or
if you want to learn cover design. That is also an option too, but that's
something that takes a lot more time. If you are interested in
learning book cover design, I actually have a course that's gonna
be coming out later this year that will teach you how to do book cover design
and I start from the basics and work all the way up to more advanced things
like designing fantasy book covers. So if that's not something
you're interested in, be sure to join the wait
list for the course. It is linked in the
description of this video. Otherwise you're probably gonna wanna
put aside a couple hundred dollars in order to hire a cover cover designer
to design the book covers for you. Another thing I was able to save
money on is professional formatting. So as a cover designer
I also format books. So when you open my books, they
have some lovely chapter headers. I keep my formatting pretty
standard, I do industry standards. Um, and the only place where I like to dress
things up nicely is on these chapter pages where I can make it pretty. So in this case we have a lovely mountain
scene that matches the mountain scene on the cover of the book. So you can either hire a formatter
or you can learn to do it yourself. If you're interested in learning how
to format a book using Adobe InDesign, which is the software that I personally
use to format my books and my clients' books, then I do already have a course that is
live that you can take the link to that is down below. I highly recommend it. It teaches you how to format for print
as well as ebook cuz that's something you're gonna need to do no matter what. The next cost I was able to avoid was
the cost of a developmental editor. Now when I first started writing books, I hired a developmental
editor and it was expensive and that was kind of the first thing
I wanted to cut in terms of costs as I realized I wanted to make a
career out of publishing books. So what I did instead of hiring a
developmental editor was that I ended up working just with beta readers. I would do a round of Alpha readers
who kind of were the first set of eyes and then after I implemented edits from
Alpha Readers I would move on to beta readers. And basically alpha readers
and beta readers are the same thing. Alpha just means they read it first,
beta means they read it second. That's all that the difference is. And the best part about using beta
readers and Alpha readers is one they're free. And two, you get multiple opinions so you're
not just getting one editor's opinion. No matter how experienced or how
good an editor is, in my opinion, when it comes to editing
the story structure, the best thing you can do is get as
many opinions as possible cuz people are just gonna have different
preferences when it comes to stories. So if you have multiple alpha
readers and multiple beta readers, you'll be able to get a better feel of
what you should be implementing in terms of edits. The next thing I was able
to save money on was proofreading. So I used to hire a proof reader and
I think it was for Let the Rebel Fall. It was the first time I did not hire
a proofreader and that is because I felt really good about the copy
edits that had been done to my book. So I just didn't feel like there was
gonna be a lot of typos in the book, but also I just had a lot of people
helping read the book and do a final round of proofreading. I had some
writer friends, some regular friends, just people that I knew were pretty good
at catching typos in different mistakes in my book. But again, I went into it knowing that my
book had a really strong copy edit done to it. So that meant that there shouldn't have
been a lot of typos to fix in the first place. And the last thing I saved
money on was publishing fees. So in the past I've always worked with
Ingram Spark in order to do a paperback pre-order for my books as well as
getting expanded distribution and let the rubble fall. I basically said I was sick of working
with Ingram Spark and I didn't work with them at all. And why I mentioned that is because
when you publish through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, there
are no publishing fees. But if you work with Ingram Spark, there are publishing fees for uploading
your files as well as updating your files. So sometimes it can cost as much as
a hundred dollars to do your book for pre-order and update the
final files. With that said, that meant that I wasn't able to do
a paperback pre-order of my book, but honestly I didn't really care. I felt like it was more worth it
to save the a hundred dollars. So those are all the things
that I saved money on. And then I also wanted to mention some
things that are maybe softwares or tools that I've already had and purchased
a while ago that I'm able to reuse for multiple books. So if
you're a brand new author, you might need these things, but if you're an author who's
already published a few books, you might already have these
things. So first up is an isbn. I do paid ISBNs for my books. All my books get published under the
publisher name Stone ridge books. So I ended up purchasing a bulk
amount of ISBNs a couple years ago. I think I purchased a hundred ISBNs. So safe to say I spent a
lot of money back then, but now I basically never need
to publish ISBNs ever again. The next thing I already
had was Publisher Rocket. Publisher Rocket is a tool that I use
to do search engine optimization for my books. That means I do research on the best
keywords and the best categories for my book when I'm listing it on Amazon. It's something I highly recommend and
I will be doing a video on it very soon where I kind of do a
tutorial on how to use it. So make sure to subscribe
if you wanna see that. Otherwise I do have an affiliate link in
the description of this video if you're interested in trying out
publisher Rocket yourself. And the last thing I wanna mention is
the software that I use for designing my books and that is Adobe Photoshop
is a software that I use to design my covers and Adobe InDesign, which is a software that I use to
format my books for print and e-book. And those are softwares that
I have a subscription to. I believe it's like $50 a month, but that's something that I've always
paid for and will always pay for also because I'm a freelancer
and a graphic designer. But if you don't already have
subscriptions to those softwares, it's something to be mindful of if it's
something that you're gonna need to to purchase down the line. Okay, that's enough of the things that I saved
money on or things that I already had. Let's actually talk about how much I
spent to publish Let The Rubble Fall. So I broke it down to two categories. We have the book itself and
marketing because you have to spend the money on the book itself, but you don't necessarily have to
spend the money on the marketing. So let's talk about how much
money I spent to create the book. So my first expense was to hire
my copy editor and the copy editor is the person that I feel like I
can never cut out of my budget. It's the most expensive part of my
entire self-publishing budget, but again, it's something that I feel like I
can't not do cuz I can do without a developmental editor and I can
do without a professional round of proofreading. But I feel like there's
no substitute for hiring a copy editor. So be prepared for the
price tag because again, it is the majority of my
self-publishing publishing budget. So my copy editor cost me $1,244.22 cents, which again is a lot of money, but in my opinion it's
personally worth it. This is actually the first time that
I've worked with a copy editor that I really loved. If anyone was curious, I worked with Enchanted Inc Publishing
and this is the first time that I've truly been satisfied with the edits that
I've gotten back and I've actually felt like they were worth the money I paid. Other times it felt like I was paying
that much because I had to pay that much. Whereas this time I paid that much
and I actually got my money's worth. And I've had a lot of really bad
experiences with editors in the past where editors have missed stuff or editors
have missed deadlines or I've had to get a complete refund from an editor
before, like it's been a mess. My life of working with editors but
Enchanted Ink Publishing was awesome. I will actually link them down below
cuz I can't recommend them enough and I hope to work with them time and time
again for copy edits in the future, if you have a copy editor or any type
of editor that you've worked with in the past and you've really
loved working with them, please share them in the comments
down below. In my opinion, the hardest part of the publishing process
is to find a good copy editor cuz I just feel like again, there's no replacement for them like
they are necessary in the process. So if you've found someone you've worked
with and you've really liked them and you feel like they do a thorough job, please share your
recommendation in the comments. And the last fee that I had to
create the book itself is to order my proof copy. So here's my proof copy,
it's just what I ordered off of KDP. It has the lovely not for
resale bar across the cover, but it's something that I had to order
to make sure that my formatting looked okay. And I sometimes also use my proof copies
to do some proofreading as well cuz it's just easier to catch
typos when it's printed. But I paid $15.01 cent
to order this proof copy. Um, it costs that much just because I ordered
Expediated shipping cuz I wanted it as quickly as possible so I could
proofread it as quickly as possible. Otherwise it probably would've
been a little bit cheaper. So that was to pay to have
the book itself created. Let's talk about the marketing and a
lot of this stuff is stuff that you can technically go without. So take
what I say with a grain of salt. The first thing I spent
money on was my cover reveal. I work with someone who creates
an Instagram tour for me. So they work with Instagram
influencers to do uh, cover reveals and release date blast. And basically all I do is give them all
the info about my book and then they do all the hard work of arranging people
to share about the book on Instagram. So I actually did two.
One was a cover reveal, so basically everyone posts on
Instagram about my cover reveal. And then the other one was a release
day blast where everyone shared about my book on its release day. For the cover reveal I paid $32
and for the release day blast I paid $40. And the only reason there's a price
difference is that I had a coupon for the cover reveal one and not
for the release day blast. And honestly I felt like it was pretty
worth it cuz basically all you do is you pay that everything
gets arranged for you. You also have to sometimes give out
gifts to everyone who participates, whether that be like stickers or
other book swag or sometimes you give a free e-book to everyone
who participates. So you can take that into
account if you want as well. It's not something that I took into
account cuz a lot of the stuff that I gave out for free was stuff that I
already had on hand anyways. Um, so if you wanna count like stamps
for shipping, you can, but again, that was still only a couple
of dollars. So in my case, I didn't count any of that for
myself publishing expenses. But if you wanna get really nitty gritty, keep that in mind cuz sometimes you're
gonna wanna give out free stuff and you have to keep the cost of the free things
that you're giving out in mind as well as the cost of shipping
everything. But again, for me it was all stuff
that I had on hand anyways, so I couldn't quite figure out how
to break down the cost of that. So I just wanted to
mention it at the least. The next thing for book marketing was
the platform that I used to send out advanced reader copies of my book. Now normally I've used a couple of
different platforms to send out advanced reader copies. My favorite way I would say is sending
it manually using Google Docs and collecting people's information. But this time I decided to try out Book
funnel and I was super excited about it. I paid $15 for Book Funnel for
one month and honestly I was just really disappointed. Um, Book Funnel did not like the software
that I used to format my book and I didn't use Adobe
InDesign to format my book. I actually used another
software called Code B Author, which is just a really quick and
dirty way of formatting e-books. But for whatever reason, Book Funnel did not like the software
in my e-book was looking really funky. So even though I
sent everyone my ebook, I then had to resend everyone my ebook
manually because Book Funnel wasn't working and wasn't
agreeing with the software. And eventually I did get it fixed by
using a different software to format my eBooks. But like the damage was already
done and I paid $15 to still have a headache sending out
Advanced Reader Copies. So honestly I was really disappointed in
that and I'm not sure if I'll use Book Funnel again in the future, but I
figured I would at least mention that. So who knows, maybe I'll fall in
love with Book Funnel again someday. But I did cancel my subscription cuz
for that at least it wasn't worth it. The last expense I had was the
money I spent to create my book trailer. I always make book trailers for all
of my novels that I've ever released. I created a video a couple weeks ago on
how I created the book trailer for Let the Rubble fall, as well as a few other book
trailers that I've made in the past. I used stock music and stock
video to create my book trailers. So I had to invest in a
subscription for Story Blocks, which is a website that
sells stock videos. And that subscription cost me $65
because I only wanted it on a month per month basis. So I just signed
up for one month, paid my $65, downloaded all the stock video that I
needed, and then canceled my subscription. If you wanna know more details
on how I created my book trailer, be sure to watch the YouTube
video where I talk about it, which will be linked down below. So that is everything that I spent
money on to self-publish my book. So that brings us to a grand total of $1,411.23. So let me know what you guys think of
that total in the comments down below. I feel like this has been probably the
most affordable book that I've ever published. I would have to look back at all my other
videos and see what the totals were. I've definitely spent more
self-publishing a book, and again, the majority of my budget was spent
on copy editing and it was a lot of money that I spent on copy editing.
But I will reiterate once again, it felt like it was actually worth it, whereas other times I've worked with
editors and I cannot say I feel the same way. I hope this video was helpful for everyone
looking into self-publishing their books. If you wanna learn more
about self-publishing books, I have an entire playlist dedicated to it. It'll be at the end of this video and it
will also be in the description of this video. Thank you all for watching.
Be sure to hit the thumbs up, comment down below and subscribe.
