I pay my bills as a freelance graphic & web designer, and many of my clients are authors looking to self-publish and promote their work. There is a lot of merit in that, especially if you are having a hard time finding an agent or publisher that will take an interest in your book. It is simpler and more cost-effective to self-publish than it ever has been before, and you have the advantage of not having to share any of your profits with a publisher or agent.
There is also a lot of work that goes into self-publishing. You’re responsible for literally everything, starting with the actual editing of your story. You’re going to have to get beta readers or hire a content editor to help you finetune your story into something publishable, and you will need a line editor to make sure your spelling and grammar are correct. And the work ramps up after you get your book to where you think you can publish it.
This was advice I gave to a client that was looking to make an illustrated Children’s book. so I’ve also added some of my rates (in case some of you might be interested in hiring me like she did…)
Okay. So you want to factor in how much it will cost to publish your book. Kindle direct can do it for free but they take their printing cost out of your sales. If you’re working on a children’s book, you need to factor in how many illustrations you need and whether they need to be in color or not. My base for an illustration is $100 per (My rates are pretty low compared to most of the industry).
Also you want to factor in actually formatting your book for publication, which I personally charge $200 for (with an additional $100 for creating your book cover).
And finally there is marketing and promotion, which scales depending on how much of it you want to do. You’re looking at creating websites, marketing collateral (flyers, posters, postcards, bookmarks, etc), merchandise (cafepress is a good free way to handle that), signage (for book signings and tradeshows), and digital marketing via email, social media and web advertising. You might want to look up the costs of those venues. Start with Google ads, Twitter ads, Facebook ads, Amazon ads, and mailchimp. or you could hire somebody to do all of that for you, which means you’ll have to get some rate quotes from marketing specialists.
You’re going to want to do some research into the type of markets that will actually buy your book, and depending on which resources you use, that might have a cost, too. And if you really want to do it big, You might need to look into how much it will cost to hire a publicist to officially spread the word about your book.
After you have a gist of how much that costs, then you have to look at how much capital you actually have to work with. How much can you actually, realistically allocate for all of this stuff? and will it be enough?
The good news is that once you have your budget, you can use crowd funding to raise the money you need to do what you want to do. I’d look up similar campaigns on kickstarter and indiegogo to see how others did it. If you have enough supporters (I didn’t for my crowdfunding campaign and it failed miserably), you can easily get the funds you need to make it happen. One of the many keys to having a successful crowdfunding campaign is having enticing enough rewards for your investors, and depending on what perks you offer, those can incur a cost, too.
Even with those costs, if you can generate enough support for your story, your book can still be profitable, especially if you can get a lot of good word of mouth about how good your book is. Check out the work of Renee Scattergood here. She is a successful self-publisher and an expert on book marketing.
