Budgeting for my self-published book (update)

Wel­come to anoth­er entry in my series on self-pub­lish­ing my debut nov­el, GOLIATH FALLEN! If you haven’t been fol­low­ing along, I pre­vi­ous­ly doc­u­ment­ed my ini­tial efforts to assem­ble the crew that will take my book from a mod­est draft to a best­seller list. This team includes the cov­er artist, book edi­tor, and book descrip­tion writer.

Truth be told, it’s turned out amaz­ing so far. I’ve got­ten to know these incred­i­bly tal­ent­ed indi­vid­u­als who I would­n’t have oth­er­wise met if I had tak­en the more tra­di­tion­al route. How­ev­er, it’s also been an insane amount of work (almost as much as writ­ing the book itself). I’ve read quite a bit about how tax­ing the self-pub­lish­ing process is, and I’m here to tell you it’s all true. The deep­er I dive into this process, the more it feels like writ­ing my nov­el is tru­ly only half the battle.

Up to this point, the hard­est part of self-pub­lish­ing was fig­ur­ing out exact­ly what I need­ed from my team and appro­pri­ate­ly deter­min­ing and allo­cat­ing the bud­get for my self-pub­lished book. Not only was this tough, but it was also crit­i­cal as my bud­get deter­mines whether I’ll spend all my resources (mon­ey and time in this case) effec­tive­ly or not.

At last, with my crew com­plete and now hard at work, it’s time to fol­low up on my pre­vi­ous post on budgeting.

Revisiting the initial budget

While my first bud­get was quite con­ser­v­a­tive, I used price ranges for some ser­vices (like book edit­ing) to keep things some­what real­is­tic. After all, when you keep expec­ta­tions low, it’s like mon­ey in your pock­et when things work out in your favor. I’m look­ing to self-pub­lish a nov­el indis­tin­guish­able in qual­i­ty from one that’s tra­di­tion­al­ly pub­lished, and I can expect that to cost a pret­ty pen­ny. In devel­op­ing this bud­get, I feel like I’ll be burn­ing through the equiv­a­lent of an advance a pub­lish­er would give me…except the pub­lish­er is me.

Any­way, there’s no time to lick my wounds. With­out fur­ther ado, here was my ini­tial budget:

Ser­vice	Cost
Copy edit­ing	$2,750 – $5,500
Cov­er design	$350 – $800
Book descrip­tion writing	$350
Total	$3,900 – $6,300

I real­ize that bud­get­ing for my self-pub­lished book in the range of $3,900 – $6,300 may appear odd. It’s a very, very wide range, which might seem like cheat­ing. But, real­is­ti­cal­ly speak­ing, there’s no way in hell I can afford to pay $6,300 to self-pub­lish my book.

If that’s the price tag I would have to set­tle for, I would rather get myself stuck for a few years in the tra­di­tion­al pub­lish­ing cycle until some­body picks up my nov­el. Let me also clar­i­fy that while I have already decid­ed to self-pub­lish, this is a jour­ney, and noth­ing is set in stone. I might even get to the end of it and choose to not pub­lish my nov­el at all. If any­thing, that might be the biggest plot twist of this whole process (and per­haps an even more com­pelling one than the plot twist in my nov­el itself).

The revised budget

Thank­ful­ly, after some con­ster­na­tion over my ini­tial esti­mates, I’m glad to report that assem­bling my pub­lish­ing crew went a lot bet­ter than I expect­ed bud­get-wise. It only required patient and care­ful analy­sis of each option until I deter­mined the best one for the job.

The book cov­er design still went over my ini­tial esti­mate, but my mind was set on Ale­jan­dro Coluc­ci, and the more bud­get-friend­ly alter­na­tives sim­ply did­n’t seize my atten­tion the way his impres­sive art did. Speak­ing of which, I’d like to pro­vide a lit­tle dis­claimer before mov­ing on: Ale­jan­dro’s rate was­n’t pub­licly avail­able, which makes com­plete sense giv­en how the price of the cov­er art depends heav­i­ly on the com­plex­i­ty of what’s required. There­fore, out of respect for him and my read­ers, I’ll use an approx­i­ma­tion for the cov­er art design estimate.

Here’s the revised budget:

Ser­vice	Free­lancer	Cost
Copy edit­ing	Philip Athans	$2,750
Cov­er design	Ale­jan­dro Colucci	+$1,000
Book descrip­tion writing	Bryan Cohen	$297
Total		+$4,047

I have to admit, those fig­ures are look­ing a lot bet­ter than I ini­tial­ly thought! The revised bud­get is a tad over the low­er range of my esti­mate, but it’s not bad for what was such a loose range. Of course, $4,000 is still a decent chunk of change, but I’m work­ing with a stel­lar crew who could’ve eas­i­ly cost me a lot more than the upper range of my ini­tial budget.

As always, these fig­ures are still sub­ject to change as sit­u­a­tions out­side of my con­trol may arise (like some­one being unable to work, requir­ing a back­fill), or per­haps I’ll need to add more ser­vices along the way. If there’s one thing I can con­fi­dent­ly pre­dict, it’s that some­thing unpre­dictable is like­ly to hap­pen in this process.

Final thoughts

And that’s it for this update on bud­get­ing for my self-pub­lished book. While my ini­tial bud­get was pret­ty loose on the esti­mates, I’m thank­ful to be on firmer foot­ing now that my self-pub­lish­ing crew has start­ed work­ing. And although I’ll still end up shelling out a good num­ber of Ben­jamins, I’m sure it’ll all be worth it once I’m able to lay eyes on the fin­ished product.

I’m still fig­ur­ing out what my next post will be about—maybe my expe­ri­ence work­ing with these fine folks, which I sim­ply can­not look for­ward to enough over this journey.

Hope­ful­ly, this has been an inter­est­ing inside look into the self-pub­lish­ing process and all of its joys and per­ils. As always, feel free to leave your thoughts in the com­ments below; they’re very much appre­ci­at­ed! Have you ever had to deal with bud­get­ing for a self-pub­lished book? How was the expe­ri­ence for you?

Stay tuned for the next post in the series!

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