Budgeting Your Self-Publishing Project, Part II
Design, Layout, Print, and Creating a P&L
Before I dive in to the thrilling conclusion to this budgeting exercise (continued from Tuesday’s Part I), I want to talk a little bit about P&Ls, or profit-and-loss statement. This is a document (more like a spreadsheet) in which you break out all your costs—all the budget line items we’ve been talking about—and compare them with your revenues. A P&L might also calculate a contribution margin, which is an expression of your book’s profitability as a percent (take your total revenue, then subtract your total costs, then divide the result by your total revenue).
It’s a great idea to have a budget for self-publishing your book. The budget guides your spending and gives you a big picture of the costs associated with bringing your book to market. The P&L, should you choose to make one, takes things a step further: It provides guidance on how to price your book and helps you understand how many copies of your book will need to sell in order to repay the associated costs and turn a profit.
Publishers use P&L statements as a tool to decide whether or not to publish a book. The publisher uses unit sales projections over time (I’m used to seeing three-year projections on a P&L) provided by their sales and marketing teams times the unit price less wholesaler discount to project revenue and then balance that against publishing costs and author royalties divided by the sales projection. In other words—how much money will we make on each unit sold after the costs of making it, and how many of those units do we have to sell to break even and/or meet our profitability threshold?
As a self-publishing author, you need not worry about calculating author royalties and can use a simpler version of a P&L than a publisher might use. As an illustration, and as my gift to you, I’ve created a simple P&L statement for a book in Google Sheets. You can open it, take a look, and make a copy for yourself if you’d like to try your hand at making a P&L. The cost projections in my sample P&L are based on the the budget line items as laid out in today’s and Tuesday’s articles. The revenue section is based on selling 1,000 copies of a book priced at $10.99 via Amazon Kindle with the 70% royalty option (meaning author gets 70% of the unit price and Amazon gets 30%).
Playing around with a P&L can help you get a realistic picture of how many copies you will need to sell, and at what unit price, to earn a profit on your book.
Without further ado, let’s dive in to the real costs associated with self-publishing a book.
Cover Design
Alongside editing, cover design is the area where the self-publishing author is likely to see the most value for money. You know how they say “don’t judge a book by its cover?” The book cover is literally there to help you judge whether you want to know more about the book. It exists to be judged. It begs to be judged. A well-designed cover attracts interest and helps your book stand out in the market. But many authors don’t have the skillset to design a good cover. If you haven’t already, check out Anatomy of a Book Cover for a primer on book cover design elements.
A book cover might be created from a template (cheaper) or designed from scratch (more expensive). Regarding art, a cover might use:
No art, design only—The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
A photograph—Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling
An illustration—Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao
The cost of your cover will vary depending on what you choose. Custom art or illustration like you see on the cover of Iron Widow is very expensive. A designed cover, or one that uses a photograph, is likely to be less expensive. The Editorial Freelancers Association 2024 rate chart notes that the mean flat fee for book cover design is right around $200 with the median at $50. This seems awfully low to me based on my experience with design professionals and I expect that these averages may skew low if many of the data were from templated covers.
Reedsy suggests that the cost for a professionally designed book cover is between $500 and $800 based on specs, which is more in line with what I would expect to pay for a simple cover.
BUDGET LINE ITEM: Cover Design
BUDGET: $500–$800
Text Layout
Text layout can mean a couple of different things, so I want to make sure I’m clear on the cost difference. If you’re self-publishing in an ebook format only—that is, a Kindle book or an EPUB for Nook, for example—you do not need to typeset your book. Typesetting is important for print books but not for books that will not print. The term typically used for layout out text for electronic publication is formatting. This means getting the book’s elements styled correctly, creating an EPUB and/or MOBI file for use on e-readers, and (possibly) performing QA of the file.
For this service, professionals charge between $0.50 and $0.75 per page (a page is most-often defined as 250 words). Or, expressed another way, $0.002 to $0.003 per word. For a 60,000-word book, that’s around $120 to $180 for e-book formatting.
BUDGET LINE ITEM: E-Book Formatting
BUDGET: $0.003/word
Typesetting refers to laying your book out for print; this is a more labor-intensive job and, therefore, more expensive. You can spend even more money on a custom interior book design—and you can spend a small fortune on a heavily illustrated interior, like for a cookbook—but for a straightforward interior, created in an existing template, with limited or no illustrations (eg, a novel), you can expect to pay $4.00 to $8.00 per page. As with proofreading (discussed Tuesday), typesetting is typically billed by the typeset page and not by the 250-word increment. If your book, after typesetting, ends up at 224 pages (including front matter, end matter, blanks, et cetera), you’re looking at $896 to $1,792 for typesetting. FYI—typesetting is also called composition, page composition, or page comp. These refer to the same thing.
BUDGET LINE ITEM: Typesetting
BUDGET: $6.00/typeset page
Printing
I’m going to touch on book printing as well, in the interest of being comprehensive, although I suspect most self-publishing authors will not have to budget for print. When a self-publisher goes the print-product route, they are most likely to use a service like IngramSpark or Amazon KDP that prints units on demand (eg, one unit sold equals one unit printed and shipped) and subtracts the print cost from the sale price before paying the author out.
However, there are some cases in which a self-publisher might wish to purchase print stock of their book—for instance, if the author were going to a convention or another event and intended to sell through copies to attendees. Or if the author wanted to seal 100 copies in a time capsule and bury it to be found by archeologists in 10,000 years. I don’t judge. You need copies of your book. I don’t care what for.
If you’re wondering how best to estimate your print costs, IngramSpark has you covered with their printing and shipping cost calculator—if you put in your book’s specs and the shipping information (country, state, and zip code—no need to provide your personal address), they’ll give you a cost estimate that includes printing and shipping your books—unit cost, shipping, tax, and total. I put in dummy specs for a 224-page book at 6x9 trim size, 100 copies, shipping to Manhattan, New York, and calculated an estimate of $4.33/unit before shipping or $5.46/unit with shipping and tax included. A longer book, or a book printed to a nonstandard trim size, would cost more per unit. A larger order (more units) would lower the unit cost (economy of scale). If you have a book with moderate specs and you plan to purchase 100 copies or fewer, $6.00 to $7.00 per unit is a conservative estimate on which to base your budget.
BUDGET LINE ITEM: Printing
BUDGET: $6.50/unit (shipping inclusive)
I hope this exercise has been helpful for anyone who is thinking about self-publishing a book and wants to get a good idea of how much they might spend on production costs, where best to allocate the funds they have to devote to the project, and how to measure profitability. For me it’s been a fun exercise in doing math. Get some mileage out of my P&L template so you don’t have to (do math).
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