I’ve published my book! The costs and road to publication…

Firstly, I’ve finally published my fantasy book. Hurrah! It’s been a long time coming, but I’m excited to have finally pressed that button. I wrote most of this book during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in 2019 and since then it’s been through the usual editing processes. The pandemic has influenced the publication date as I had to delay my travel book, which was due to be published in early 2020 and I’d originally planned to have this book out for Christmas 2020! But at times like these, we have to just go with the flow.

So, I had this whole marketing plan for my fantasy book and then, well, life happened! I don’t know about you but some days it’s difficult enough to put pen to paper, never mind all the other skills you need to know/learn to self-publish. Many days I’ve stared at the PC, faffed about in Canva trying to make fancy images I can share on social media. Even though it often feels pointless in terms of sales for a self-published author and that’s not to sound negative, it’s just a fact. Book sales rarely even pay for the editing, cover, typesetting, not to mention the hours spent writing a novel of 60K + words. Why do we do it?

In the end I decided to press the button and get my fantasy book out there and see what happens. Rely on the writing community, friends, and family to help me spread the word. If you’re reading this; if you can help by sharing, I will forever be grateful. Better still, if you can tag a friend who might be interested it would be even better and IF you buy a copy then I bow down on the floor in gratitude ((Be careful there Peachy, you might not be able to get back up!)) I know, Brackets, I might need one of my dragons to rescue me!

My thanks go to many people, including Christine Goldschmidt for the wonderful cover. The Book Typesetters, Rachael, and Nat for the fantastic typesetting – I love the dragon paragraph dividers! Amazing. To Maria, Linda, Ric, Tracey, Alice, Karla, and my mum for giving me feedback, editing and proof reading – it’s been a long road but we got there! Thanks also go to everyone who have given me moral support… Thank you, thank you, thank you.

A little bit about the final price of the book/eBook. I really didn’t know what to do about the cost of the book. Everyone is so used to paying bargain prices nowadays, unless you’re well known, you’re lucky if people want to pay more than 99p for the book you’ve toiled on for years and spent a fortune getting ready to publish. But, we all like a bargain! With sales on KDP (The Amazon account used by authors) you have a minimum amount you can list the book for and this covers the cost of the book being printed; as well as their costs, and it soon adds up, if you, the author, want to make even a tiny profit… here are the costs broken down.

Paperback:
Cost of book – £8.99
(the minimum I can list for is £5 but I make zero profit on this)
Cost of printing: £3.00
Amazon Costs: £3.60
Author profit: £2.39

eBook:
Cost of eBook – £1.99
Amazon costs: £0.59
Delivery: £0.04
Author profit: £1.36

(I probably need to sell approx. 170 books before I start to make a profit)

So, when you take these figures into account, an author doesn’t make much money for all the work involved and as I said earlier, they rarely make a profit. Well, some do, but maybe they are more established and have a fan base built up over years of hard work. So, why do we do it? Because we bloody love writing and are compelled to write these stories – for me, I have no choice as my characters are very demanding!

Right, that’s it from me. I look forward to constantly refreshing my stats and imagine I will have sleepless nights waiting for the reviews to come in… remind me again why I write?

Thanks for reading, I’m off to work on book two…
Clair x