March 2020

I came across a recent story that went into great detail what it costs today to publish a book.

This is a good thing to know. Before you publish your first book, you need to understand what it takes and how much to pay.

The writer was very thorough. She was thorough in listing the categories, down to office supplies and postage. She gave precise numbers.

It was also unrealistic and a little misleading. Someone new to the profession could look at the list, total up the numbers, and say, “I don’t have that kind of money.”

For example, she suggested that you could spend on editing anywhere between $600 and $18,000. At the low end, with a manuscript in good shape, it would be for proofreading only. The high-end price was for five levels of editing: manuscript assessment, developmental, line editing, copy editing, and proofreading.

That, in a word, is insane.

But before you write that check, you need to ask yourself some even more important questions:

1. What is my goal? To publish this book or to publish a lot of books.
2. Why am I writing? Is it to give a voice to my imagination or to tell a story? Or do I want to make money at this?
3. Finally, how much do I want to spend? How much am I investing in this project.

The answer to each, taken together, will give you some idea of your victory conditions.

My what?

Right, your victory conditions. It’s a term I picked up from when I played wargames. These games recreated a battle, or a campaign, and it would end after a set number of turns. Unlike chess or Monopoly, the game didn’t end when there’s one person’s pieces still on the board. So, you needed the victory conditions to tell you who won.

The same concept can be applied to self-publishing. If you know when you’ve won, you have a better idea what to do to get there.

For example, if the answer to the first question was “to publish this memoir,” then that determines what services you’ll buy and which ones you can leave alone. If the answer to the second is that you want people to read the memoir, whether you may money or not, then that determines what kind of marketing services you want to buy. You may want to give the book away, or for a low price. And if the answer to #3 is “$10,000,” then you can buy a lot of editing and design services to make the book as attractive as possible.

But if you’re goal is to publish a lot of books, make money at it, and you have only $500, that’ll result in a different answer. You may choose to write to what’s selling now, join a writer’s group and use beta readers to whip it into shape, spend a hundred bucks on a genre-appropriate cover, and learn how to format the book yourself. You may buy a book on using KDP ads or get Kindlepreneur’s free course on AMS ads and use the rest of the money there while you write the next book in the series.

Different goal, different plan.

The problem with answering the question “How much does it cost to self-publish” is that it’s too variable for just one post. So that’s why I’m going to break this down for you over the next month. Once a week, I’ll talk about a different aspect of publishing, what you can do yourself, and what it might (and I stress might) be better to get someone else to do.

By the end of the month, you’ll have a much better idea of the options available to you, and you’ll be able to make a much better informed opinion.