How to self-publish your book for under $650?

Photography by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash

Thinking about self-publishing your book can be overwhelming. Where do you start? Is it affordable? It can be a lot, but not to worry! It can actually be a pretty straight forward process, without too much stress, and best of all, you can keep the costs down.

There are a lot of benefits to going the traditional route and have your book published through an established publisher, but, especially in the last 5-10 years indie writers have seen how self-publishing also comes with its advantages! I will write another blog on pros and cons on these, but for now, let’s look at self-publishing and how much it’s all going to cost.

I self-published my middle grade novel Dangerfield and The Solar Empire in February 2021 and was able to keep costs down considerably. The one thing that helped me with this was taking a moment to determine if I could do something myself before hiring professionals at each step.

We all have different skills, and some of the things I hired someone for will be things that you could maybe do yourself, and perhaps some of the things I did myself would be more beneficial for you to seek help. So don’t use the below overview as must-do list, but personalize it so that it suits your needs and capabilities.

Once you have finished your first draft, you can proofread this yourself and start working on your second draft. For proofreading, I always print everything out, because I pick up different things when reading my story off of paper rather than my computer screen. Once you have your second draft finished and the ‘bones’ of your story are solid, you can either hire an editor to give you a developmental edit on your draft, or, you can ask people in your network to help you out with this. I asked three people close to me with experience in proofreading and writing to give me feedback, and it didn’t cost me anything. If you go this route, it would be useful to give your readers a set of questions you’d like them to answer that will further help you develop your story and characters.

With this feedback you can start working on your third draft. After you’ve finished, you can even send it back to your friends to see if they think you have incorporated their feedback in a way that serves your story, and to see if they think the story has improved. After this, it’s time to get your story copy edited. For this I shopped around and got a few reasonable quotes from editors I found on Reedsy, however, it was still out of my budget at the time and I decided to keep working on it myself to get it to the best possible place I could get it. I spent a lot of time fine tuning, scrappy, adding adjusting, until I knew there wasn’t anything else I could possibly do to make the text better on my own. In my case, I was generously blessed with the (free) editing services of a good friend, who is a professional copy editor. She absolutely increased the readability and flow of my story and I would highly recommend to have someone with experience do this for you.

Your book cover is very important! This is the first thing your reader sees, and will often determine whether someone will pick up your book to read or leave it. For my cover, I hired an illustrator on the freelance website Fiverr. After the illustration was finished, I hired a cover designer from the same website to do the lettering and mockups of the book for print and eBook. You can also go through a professional book cover company, but you will spend a lot more.

Then your book needs to be formatted. This is something you can hire someone for via Bookbaby for instance, or you can do this yourself. I formatted my book myself with the help of YouTube videos and the KDP manual. Keep in mind that different printing and distributors require different forms of formatting, which you can usually find on their websites. I thought this would be a pretty easy task, but it’s actually a very time consuming tedious job that requires a great attention to detail.

After this process you can go ahead and order your author’s copy of your book. I would definitely recommend doing this! When you have a hard copy in your hands, you will pick out a lot of new mistakes. You might end up having to order several rounds of author’s copies in case you make many last minute changes. For this stage, you can send a copy to your editor and have them look at it one final time as well.

For indie writers, even better than sales, at least in the beginning, are reviews. You can reach out to professional reviewers such as Kirkus or Readers’ Favorite to pay for a review. This can be costly, but it might be worth your while. A Kirkus review was out of my budget (their cheapest review costs $425 and takes 7-9 weeks), so I went with a Readers’ Favorite review. You can get a free review from this website, but it might take a very long time to receive it. I decided to pay for an express review, which promises to be delivered within two weeks. I actually received mine in just nine days. When you are awarded 5 stars, Readers’ Favorite will feature your book on their website and you can place their award sticker for the 5 stars on your book cover if you like. Besides this paid review, I sent thirty of my friends/family the PDF version of my book before it was released to read, and asked them to leave me a review on the day of the launch. Most of them managed to read the book and had a review prepared, which I was very impressed by. Unfortunately, in my case, seeing that most of my friends and family live scattered all over the world, a lot of the reviews ended up on local Amazon pages (such as Amazon UK, Amazon Australia etc.) and Amazon is not willing to combine the reviews all under Amazon.com. Therefore, I asked everyone to also upload their review on Goodreads.

It’s great for authors to have a website where readers can find your books and contact information. I designed a website with a website builder. Keep in mind that you also have to purchase your domain name, and both are annual costs.

You can choose to get ISBN numbers for your book, this is helpful when you choose to release it via different platforms. You can also get a free number through KDP and IngramSpark, it just means that several numbers are allocated to your book that way, which could be fine, but might be a bit confusing. I opted to get the free number through KDP to start with.

You know you wrote your book, and your name is on the work once it’s published, but to protect your work legally, you can copyright your book and register it through the copyright office. It’s an easy process and only takes about 10-minutes to complete. Here are some helpful links to help you in this process.

Copyright registration tutorial for novels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKsfyRYZszQ&list=WL

 Copyright application link: https://eco.copyright.gov/eService_enu/start.swe?SWECmd=Start&SWEHo=eco.copyright.gov

If you have a great camera on your phone, you might be able to get away with a cheap way of taking your author’s photo, but I would recommend hiring a photographer to get some good snaps that you can use for your website, and your book cover (if you choose to include a photo). Even if you don’t have a website, you’d need an author’s photo for your online KDP profile, Goodreads Profile, Social Media platforms etc., and it’s nice to use the same photo, or photos from the same shoot, so that you become a familiar face to your readers.

Logo design for your website and newsletter. This is something you obviously don’t need. For me it made sense because with the particular website design I have a logo looks better. I also planned on releasing some merchandise, and sending out newsletters, for which a logo would be useful.

Having a book trailer made for promotion on IG, YouTube, website, and any other platform you see fit. I had my book trailer made via someone I hired through Fiverr. I didn’t really know much about book trailers before releasing my book, but when I saw a lot of great ones, I thought it would be worth a try. I didn’t receive that many responses or views on my trailer, so I don’t know if I would choose to do this again for my next novel. I’ve seen some amazing book trailer though, that would cost a lot more to make, that include a lot of animation. Perhaps those (if placed at the right platforms) would have more impact.

Setting up a giveaway on IG. I did this mostly for fun, but you can gain some extra followers this way. I gained a handful of new followers, and was able to make someone across the globe happy with a free copy of my novel.

OVERVIEW COSTS DANGERFIELD AND THE SOLAR EMPIRE

What I would do differently for my next book:

I think a review from a fellow writer would go a lot further than paying a review service! I would spend the money I’m saving on ordering and sending around ARC copies for fellow writers to read and review the book before the release date. I would incorporate some excerpt from these reviews on the back cover. I would also do a giveaway on Goodreads. You can start this promotion before your release date.

I hope this was useful and helps you along on your journey to successfully self-publish your book!