Like most things in life there are many options for self publishing and the cost to self publish a business book varies widely. A key factor in the cost is the quality of the writing, design and printing you want. For the writing part it depends on how much you want to do/can do yourself with the help of AI tools or not.
There are three main choices that will determine the cost to self publish.
1. DIY – where take on all 6 aspects of self publishing yourself and learn as you go, or
2. Using any one of the hundreds of self publishing companies that are out there which essentially charge you to undertake all of these components, provided limited options and lock you in to their services in various ways…some are upfront about this, others are not.
3. Use a book coach – one that doesn’t just help you with your writing, but can guide you through the whole process, provide you with the options, cost implications of each and support you in the decisions you make.
In this article I am going to cover the 6 main components that impact on the cost to self publish a book IF you undertake either option 1 or 3.
1. Your time
It’s going to take you time to research and write your book. This is a real opportunity cost to you so make sure you know what this is. But let’s say researching and writing a high quality book (even using AI tools) is going to take you 3 months at 5 hours a week, that’s 60 hours.
Add in another 20 hours for revising, pulling together all the other content you need for your book and you’re looking at a minimum of 80 hours.
Using AI tools might speed up this process somewhat, but the thing with AI is that you have to check all the references and rework the output to ensure it’s in your tone and style. I can spot AI generated content a mile off.
Then there’s the time you need for the production and marketing of your book – I estimate anywhere between 2-5 hours per week on average over 12 months (104 – 260 hours over a year).
All up, that’s 184-340 hours.
Using AI. There are plenty of options out there if you want to use AI to write your book, and they all cost money if you’re going to extract the best value from them. OpenAI has just launched ChatGPT 5 and you’ll need a Plus or Pro subscription to access the new features. Other AI you might look at using is Claude, Perplexity, Japser, Grammarly and more. All cost something and most have different levels. Knowing which ones to use and what level of subscription is something you need to research.
2. Proofreading
The cost of this will vary depending on whether you use AI tools or a human. After 30 years of writing books I now use AI tools in the process of writing but not for proofreading, they’re simply still not good enough. So it’s a human proofreader for me and they will charge between $50-$70 per thousand words.
3. Cover and internal page design and layout
Again, the cost will vary greatly depending on the quality, style and approach you want to take. With AI tools everyone can technically become a book cover artist. I wouldn’t recommend it as it will take you hours if not days to learn how to extract the best out of most AI tools – and what is 5 hours/2 days of your time worth?
Using a human graphic designer for your cover artwork could cost anywhere between $50 and $500. Whatever human option you choose make sure you provide a clear brief and agree on the number of options they will provide and the cost of additional options and tweaking. This is where your ‘cheap’ design could end up costing way more
Internal page layout and design. Of course, if you use a self publishing company they will provide you with a range of options (from AI generated to a person). Read the fine print VERY CAREFULLY. Any additional work/changes/variations usually attract significant additional fees. And there are a number of good AI offers out there that vary in cost from a one-off fee through to subscription models.
A good graphic designer (who has done books before) might cost you anywhere between $1,500 – $5,000 for a 160-180 page book. Why the variation. If your book is just text, that’s pretty simple. If it has graphs, tables, charts, photos, this requires more time therefore more cost. And, once again, provide the designer with a clear brief, agree on the number of rounds of review/changes that are included and what the cost of additional rounds is, up front.
4. Printing
The cost of printing varies widely as ‘printing’ now also refers to eBooks and printed books. To upload an eBook will cost between $500-$850 depending if you’re doing it yourself or getting your designer/a self publishing company to do it. Effectively someone needs to change the format of the book artwork into one or more of the ePublishing formats. Not hard, but there is a cost. This is why ebooks are so popular, as they don’t cost much…that said, you can’t charge much for them either.
If you’re printing your book the per unit price varies depending on how many you print, the quality of the paper you use and if the internal pages are black + white or colour, whether it’s hard cover or soft cover and how many pages it is.
As a general guide if you’re printing under 500 book it’s going to cost you between $15 and $20 a book. Over 1,000 copies and your unit price will be closer to $6-$12 a book.
So, you’d better have a good handle on how you are going to market and sell your book, and through which channel, so you can make a decision about the quantity of print books you can sell.
5. Marketing
This is where costs can really get out of control, especially if you go full on in to paying for advertising whether that be on social media platforms, industry media, traditional media, influencers and more. AND, this is where a lot of people get ripped off by unscrupulous companies who promise all sorts of distribution, marketing, readers that never eventuate into book sales.
Then there’s people who will spruik how they can help you sell thousands of books on Amazon – for a fee.
In addition, you have to think about your book launch, publicity, securing media coverage…which you either hire a publicist to do or DIY.
Creating and posting social media content (text, video, tiles, articles, posts etc) over a 12-18 month period is an area where AI can help enormously. AI tools can help you craft different types of social media content in minutes from your existing book content and current news items. It’s also great for market segmentation, headlines and more. In fact it’s this area where I think AI really is worth the money – the middle or top subscription levels.
The key question then is are you going to do this or pay someone to do it for you? The DIY approach is do-able IF you have a clear strategy and plan, budget and build a content marketing plan that gets executed over time. Getting someone else to do it for you will cost anywhere between $250 a month to $3,000 per month depending on what you want delivered, the quality and the frequency.
One way or the other you could easily spend between $5,000 and $50,000 marketing your book. And you need to plan to market your book for at least 12 months if you are planning to sell more than the 250 copies which is the average most self published authors sell (usually because they don’t have a marketing plan or they stop executing on it a couple of months after their book launch).
6. Selling and fulfilment
With self publishing you can make your book available on a wide range of platforms. Amazon and Ingram Spark are probably the top two options and it means you don’t have to keep stock and undertake the packing and posting (I actually like doing this). There is a cost to this, but as it’s on a per book basis it’s pretty transparent.
Many of my clients decided to sell their book from their website first and then ‘launch’ it on Amazon as either a print or eBook.
Some clients go Amazon from the get-go, get the Best Seller status and drive all sales to there as they want the global reach and distribution. (Note: I am about to write an article about why ‘gaming’ the Amazon best seller status is probably something you don’t want to do).
If you choose to sell your print book from your own website, the costs you are up for are:the space in your spare room/garage, the cost of the packing and postage – although P+H is usually added to the RRP of the book so the purchaser pays this (or a portion of it), and your time.
eBooks are easy as they are digital…so no storage, postage or handling. The price point is much lower as is your return from each sale.
Selling directly from your website. Why might you do this and is it worth the effort? It depends.
You need to set up eCommerce on your website (not hard with plugins like WooCommerce, Stripe etc but there is a cost/fee for this), and you may need to spend some money on updating your website with your book information a shop and SEO. There are companies that you can outsource this to – of course they charge for this, so you make less, but more than with Amazon and others.
International sales are costly in terms of postage, which is one reason you might consider a print book (local) and eBook (international).
Selling direct means you keep all the $, gain the email of the purchaser (good if you want to build your database and do more than just sell a book), develop a relationship with the book purchaser.
In summary
Your self published book can cost you anywhere between $5,000 and $70,000 depending on the options you choose and how much you want to do or contract out. Most of our clients would invest between $20,000-$30,000 over a 12 month period. Both of these cost estimates don’t include the opportunity cost of researching and writing your book.