Self-Publishing Money Tips & How to Save Costs as an Author

self-publishing is expensive but it definitely doesn't have to be and that's what I want to talk about today I want to give you guys some tips when it comes to what you should be spending on self-publishing and specifically what you can do to save money when you're self-publishing your book in my opinion there are four big things that'll cut into your cost of self-publishing the most it's hiring an editor hiring a cover designer hiring someone to format your book and lastly any cost that you spend on book marketing we're going to be discussing what you can do to save money while still accomplishing those things in a professional manner hello everyone my name is Mandy Lynn I'm an author book cover designer and the creator of the book launch planner series and I make weekly videos on the business of being an author so if that sounds like something you're interested in make sure to subscribe and hit the Bell notification icon so you never miss a new upload so quick announcement before we get started I am preparing to go on maternity leave and my way of preparing to do that is by downsizing some things and one of those things I'm downsizing is my sticker store so long story short I am going to be starting fresh with the sticker store on a different platform and closing down the current website so I want to be able to sell out of all the current stocks so I can start fresh later on so I'm having a for one week only a one dollar sticker sheet sale normally I sell my stickers for three to three dollars and fifty cents and for this week only I'm selling them for one dollar so I can get rid of stock and again have a fresh start so if you want to shop stickers make sure to visit the link down below once the stickers are sold out they're sold out and I will eventually start up a new shop later on so just stay tuned for that I believe all the writing stickers will sell out extremely quickly but I do have decorative stickers calendar stick stickers and other functional stickers that you guys can check out alright so like I mentioned earlier there are four things that are going to cut into your cost most and that is going to be hiring editors book cover designer freelancer and of course marketing and you can skip the marketing part but I do have some tips for when it comes to marketing and things that you definitely want to keep in mind if you do choose to do marketing so let's work through each category together and talk about saving costs I also wanted to mention a page in my book launch planner this planner comes in hardcover as well as paperback I prefer the hardcover Edition but on page 60 there is an expense tracker I personally use the expense tracker to track everything there's a spot for your estimated cost and then what you actually end up paying and you know this is just good so you always have a budget in mind if you're like me sometimes you walk into things without making a budget and then you just end up spending way more than you meant to so make a budget and you can use my book launch planner to figure that out this will be linked down below now first things first let's talk about hiring an editor because that is personally what I spend the most money on and if you hire an editor for every single step of the process you will end up spending thousands of dollars editing your book and that is definitely not necessary so there's three major types of editors there's your developmental editor there's your line and copy editor sometimes those are two separate editors sometimes that is one editor and then of course you also have a proofreader these are all different types of edits and all different types of editors that you can hire so naturally if you hire three to four people to edit your book you're going to be spending a lot of money and that's not necessary my tip to you is to skip hiring a developmental editor I've hired a developmental editor a couple of times but I find developmental editors are Never As Good As when I just go ahead ahead and have beta readers because at the end of the day a developmental editor is one person beta readers are hopefully a decent handful of people I like to have around five different beta readers and that gives me a wide enough pool of people to really understand what I need to do editing wise developmentally to make my book better and that is always more feedback and more helpful feedback than I get from one developmental editor so I haven't hired a developmental editor for the past couple of books I've written and I've never regretted it you can also work with critique Partners now critique partners are a little bit harder to find because you end up doing manuscript swaps but it goes into the same Theory as a beta reader is that you're just getting more opinions from more people on the story of your book when it comes to editors it's also very important to know what your weak points are I know for me personally I'm the best at doing story level edits and I'm not good at doing grammar level edits it my eyes just glaze right over it and I don't catch that sort of thing so for me it makes sense to skip hiring a developmental editor but not skip hiring a line or copy editor so I always hire a line or copy editor you can definitely try to find more budget friendly line and copy editors but I personally find and I've hired a lot of copy editors that the less you pay the less quality you get so that is definitely always the biggest chunk of my budget is hiring my line and copy editor just because you do get what you pay for now when it comes to proofreading I skip hiring a proofreader assuming the copy edits went really well I skip hiring a proofreader and instead I just give the book to a lot of different people and have them proofread it because this goes back to the same Theory as the beta readers is the more eyes you have on your manuscript the better so a proofreader one thing singular person can only catch so much even if they are professional whereas maybe having 10 different friends proofread your book is gonna be a lot more eyes and a lot more chance of being able to catch everything if you have any specific tips to saving costs on hiring an editor be sure to share them in the comments down below let's talk about book cover design so there's two different routes when it comes to book cover design there's hiring someone to design your book cover which I think is what most people do and then there's doing the book cover design yourself which can feel very overwhelming so I personally am a professional book cover designer and before I was a professional book cover designer I actually did hire someone to design my book covers so I've been on both ends of the spectrum what I can tell you is that if you learn to design your book cover yourself and you're someone who plans on publishing a lot of books in your career then you're gonna save a lot of money if you can figure out book cover design design and also figure it out professionally because that's the key word here anyone can design a book cover but does it still look good that's the real question so I actually recently came out with a book cover design course the course is in three parts course number one is just on how to use Photoshop course number two is on typography and then course number three is the photo manipulation side of Photoshop to do book cover design so when you take all three courses together you should learn all the skills you need to be able to design your own book covers so if you can design your own book covers this can be a huge savings expense for you because yes you have to pay to take the course and yes you have to pay for the Photoshop software and for whatever stock photos you use but that is mere tiny little pennies compared to hiring a professional book cover designer because professional book cover designers cost anywhere from three hundred to six hundred dollars and that's on the low end so that's that's you know either you're like starter or mid-range cover designer and then the more experienced a cover designer gets the more their prices are gonna really hike up very quickly and the more you're gonna pay for one book cover so if you're an author who plans on publishing one or two books a year gosh that ends up being a lot of money so if you can figure out how to design your own book covers that's why it's hugely beneficial especially in the long run now I will let you guys know that in celebration of releasing my book cover design course I'm doing a cover design kickoff event and this is basically me guiding you guys through the courses so each week I'm going to be talking about all the content within the courses on social media and then also on the private Facebook group that's just for students I'm going to be doing live streams to answer questions so if you're someone who wants to take the courses but maybe wants a little more guidance and reassurance now is the best time to sign up so you can take part in the cover design kickoff event and kind of be guided through the different lessons and be able to ask any questions as they come up during the live streams and again these live streams are for students only that are in the private Facebook group for the course so I will leave info down below for the event as well as for all the courses so you can go ahead and click on the course landing pages and learn more about them the course is designed for beginners in mind so if you're someone who's never used Photoshop before the idea is that you take the first Photoshop course you learn the basics of Photoshop then you learn the basics of typography and then you move on to actually designing a book cover from start to finish now of course you can also hire someone to design your book covers for you like I said this can be very costly but you can definitely find more affordable cover designers out there as well just know that if they are more affordable it means they're more towards the beginning of their cover design career so it may be one of those situations where you pay what you get so if you pay 50 to 100 for a cover it's gonna look like a cheaper cover whereas if you pay a couple hundred dollars for a book cover it's gonna look way more professional clean and hopefully eye-catching no matter what you do make sure you understand book cover design and what makes a book cover work and what makes it not work because even when you hire professional if you insist on getting your cover designed one way the professional is going to do what you want them to do even if that means that it might not be the best design for that genre of the book because at the end of the day the genre is everything and you want that clearly clearly communicated in the cover alright let's move on to book formatting this is something that I actually have a pretty strong opinion on and that's that if you can do your book formatting yourself that you can definitely hire people to format your book I am a book formatter I've formatted dozens and maybe even hundreds of books at this point and I I strongly believe that if you are techy enough to be able to figure out how to use formatting software please format your book yourself not only will you save money but it will be so much easier for you as well and the reason I say this is because if you're someone who likes to constantly update typos or update the front and end matter of your book it's gonna be a pain to do that when you hire someone else to format your book because if you hire someone else to format your book whenever you have to update typo you have to contact the book formatter and have them update it and usually if you're constantly updating your manuscript the book formatter will end up charging you every single time you need an update made which is just more money so if you can put it on your little author bucket list to learn how to format your books yourself and then again if you're someone who plans on publishing a bunch of books if you learn how to format your book yourself then that's another cause that you save every single time you publish a book now how do you format your book yourself well there's a bunch of different ways my first recommendation is for the love of God please do not use Microsoft Word to format your book Microsoft Word is not made to format books it's not user friendly in that sense please just don't do it my favorite software is Adobe InDesign that's what I used to format all my books it's what I used to format all of my clients books it allows you to format for print and for ebook I highly highly recommend it it's a professional software it has a little bit of a learning curve just like any Adobe software does but once you figure it out it's a game changer and the options to format your book are endless and I do have a book formatting course where I teach you how to format your book specifically in Adobe InDesign so I will leave that linked down below I highly recommend taking it there are other book formatting softwares out there and they're okay but I find they don't let you customize your books specifically to your needs quite as much as Adobe InDesign does and if you want to learn more of my thoughts on that and why you really shouldn't use Microsoft Word to format your book I will link to a video down below where I talk about why I feel Adobe InDesign is kind of the best software to use when formatting your books professionally all right last thing to talk about let's talk about book marketing now book marketing can Encompass a bunch of different things it could be your pre-order campaign it could be ads that you pay for it could be newsletter features that you pay for and that's really what we're talking about here we're talking about any sort of marketing that you have to pay to do when you are paying to Market your book in any way shape or form I want you to always ask what the ROI is and Roi is return on investment so if you're spending a hundred dollars to have your book featured in a newsletter think to yourself how many books do I have to sell just through this newsletter to be able to break even and then you kind of do the math in your head and you're like okay I'd have to sell 50 books the the newsletter has 10 000 subscribers and that means that this percentage of people would have to be able to click and buy the book and you just kind of ask yourself how realistic is that it can be really difficult to figure out return on investment but it's something you need to really ask and consider every time you do paid marketing and most importantly if you sit down at the end of the day figuring out the budget for self-publishing and you realize you don't have a budget to do any paid marketing then then don't do it if you don't have a budget then don't do paid marketing because there's this thing called organic marketing and organic Marketing in my opinion is more effective and it's also free so organic marketing is doing stuff like content marketing like this YouTube channel is technically content marketing um doing marketing on social media where you just talk about your book it could be your author website it could be your author newsletter all those different things so if you want to learn more about organic marketing I highly recommend checking out the marketing for authors book series The Books that specifically talk more about organic marketing is how your book sells itself grow your author platform and secrets to selling books on social media then if you want to learn more about paid marketing options or just all Marketing in general definitely check out Book Sales that multiply and plan a profitable book launch and really just check out the entire book series because they are all super helpful especially if you have no idea where to start when it comes to book marketing all right those are all my tips for saving money when it comes to self-publishing your book if you have additional tips that you want to share please let let me know in the comments down below otherwise I'll see you all in the next video

Channel: Mandi Lynn - Stone Ridge Books

Views: 2,212

Keywords: self publishing money tips, self publishing costs, self publishing budget, self publish on a budget, self publishing money, author money tips, how to publish a book, self publishing, save money self publishing, how to self publish, how much money i spent self publishing, can you make money self publishing, how much money do authors make, self publishing success, money authors make, author finances, author royalties

Id: RmwNULrFmRk

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 24 2023