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Zadie
A lot of publishers want to be the next Zadie Smith, but the difficulty of getting a literary contract often pushes them to self-publish. Photograph: REX Photograph: REX
A lot of publishers want to be the next Zadie Smith, but the difficulty of getting a literary contract often pushes them to self-publish. Photograph: REX Photograph: REX

You can try to be the next Hemingway -- for $6,000

This article is more than 9 years old

Self-publishing has made it possible to get your writing out in the world. But it hasn’t made it cheap

The clock is ticking down: it’s only two months until National Novel Writing Month kicks off. Wannabe Stephen Kings and John Greens are sharpening their pencils, dusting off their ideas and booking vacation time for the month of November.

Literary agents already are bracing themselves for a deluge of mostly unpublishable manuscripts that they’ll start receiving weeks after that from authors dreaming of repeating the success of Sara Gruen, author of Water for Elephants.

But if agents and publishers turn up their noses at your deathless prose, these days you can bypass them entirely and publish independently. Indeed, Amazon reports that self-published books represent as much as a quarter of the top-selling list of titles on their Kindle e-book platform. Some authors are even opting to bypass the group of firms they refer to, somewhat disdainfully as “New York publishers”, in favor of going indie.

But if going solo gives you the chance to thumb your nose at the naysayers and hang on to more of your royalties, it comes with a big price tag. Instead of a publisher paying you thousands of dollars for the right to publish your Great American Novel – and footing the bill for printing and distributing it – you need to be prepared to fork over thousands of dollars to cover those costs yourself. And if you want it to be about more than just vanity – if you want your writing project to earn its keep – you’ll need to make that investment.

“If all you do is rely on the Internet to publish, then your book will simply get lost in the noise, or what will get found isn’t going to be very good quality,” says Stephen Robinson, a former journalist and project manager, and author of one self-published novel, Mahogany Slade. “A lot of great books still bomb. If you follow the rules, you still may not win the lottery, but at least you bought the ticket.”

ISBN: $125

Some costs are simply table stakes; you’ll need an ISBN, for instance, the number that identifies the book to any retailer or distributor. They cost $125 each (you buy them directly from Bowker.com; avoid resellers), but buying in bulk will save you a lot over the course of your career. “I bought 100 ISBNs and I’ll never have to worry about this again,” says Ashley MacLennan, a Winnipeg, Manitoba-based author, who self-publishes a series of young adult paranormal romances under her nom de plume, Sierra Dean.

Editing: $4,000

Most other expenses are about transforming your work of art into something that looks and feels as if it has just been handled by the same team that publishes the likes of Donna Tartt or John Grisham. You’re a professional, and your work should reflect it.

selfpublishing
Editing is a crucial expense: one you shouldn’t even think of ducking if you want to have your book read and appreciated. Photograph: Alamy Photograph: Alamy

The crucial expense – and the one you shouldn’t even think of ducking if you want to have your book read and appreciated – is editing. Not just proofreading, or even copy editing, but content editing, starting early in the process.

“It’s like building a house; you don’t want to go back and tear it down and start from scratch after you realize the foundations were badly designed,” says Lisa Renee Jones, who published her first novel in 2007 and who calculates self-publishing (in conjunction with working with mainstream publishers) has helped her earn as much in a month as she once did in a year from her writing.

Expect your editor to quote an hourly rate ($50 is a good figure to bear in mind) and give you an estimate of the number of pages he or she will tackle each hour. (Try the Editorial Freelancers Association).

Copyediting and proofreading is on top of that – and don’t think of skimping here, either. Jones says she has three separate readers for each of her books – and each of them catches errors that she and the others have missed. “One of them noticed that a character’s eye color had changed from a previous book,” she says, ruefully.

Overall, brace yourself for a bill of $3,500 to $4,000 for these services – or more, if you’re serious about what you’re doing, and depending on how much writing experience you’ve had.

Cover art: $750

Just because you decide to stick to an e-book doesn’t mean that you get to skimp when it comes to cover art. But the hourly costs are much lower, so the bill can be much smaller – $750 or so for a well-designed cover – something that is appropriate for the story you’re telling, will scale up and look good on a paperback and still grab eyeballs on a device when someone is scrolling through e-book titles, looking for something to read on a long airplane flight.

“Look at cover art you like, and see if that designer does freelance work: a lot of them do,” suggests MacLennan.

If you decide to make your book available as a paperback as well, you’re opening the door to new costs: formatting it and establishing a relationship with a print-on-demand publisher like CreateSpace, as well as the portion of sales you’ll lose to any third-party distributor.

And if you think you have written the final check simply because the book is now published, well, think again. If you want it to stand out in a market that is now awash in books and even, MacLennan and Jones agree, on the point of becoming saturated, this means promoting it – carefully.

Self-publishing is hard work
Self-publishing is hard work. Photograph: Alamy Photograph: Alamy

Reviews: $825

There are two ways that a self-published author can get their magnum opus into a reviewer’s hands. If you’ve already decided that you’re going to make a physical book available, using a service like CreateSpace or Lulu, you can simply order author’s copies (at a small percentage of the price a regular reader would pay, perhaps $5 for a $14 book) and mail them to the bloggers who have promised to review the novel.

It all gets a little more complicated if all you have to work with is an electronic file, however. An easy option is making your book available to interested reviewers and bloggers on NetGalley, which MacLennan warns will now set you back about $400.

The alternative can chew up a lot of time and energy, though, because you’ll have to make sure that your novel is available in whatever format the prospective reviewer prefers. Telling someone who reads on Kindle that you can’t deliver for that format will be the kiss of death – as will be delivering a garbled text, with sentence breaks, capitalization in strange and unusual spaces and other hallmarks of amateurishly-formatted e-books.

Options include paying for pre-publication reviews on sites like Kirkus, which can be as high as $425, or submitting your e-book for review by bloggers at NetGalley (another $400), in hopes that those reader reviews will spur sales.

“You can’t beat word of mouth by bloggers or people who have read the book,” says MacLennan. If you’re sending an indie novel to a blogger, though, “be sure to tell them that you’ve had it professionally edited – and don’t lie about it, because they’ll figure it out in the first five pages.”

Review copies: reserve $300

Mailing out hard copies of books – giveaways or review copies – might be a good way to drum up interest in your new title, but it’s not just about the cost of the book, as Stephen Robinson discovered. “By the time you add up the postage costs, that doubles the price,” he says. At $5 a galley and double that in postage, $300 buys you about 30 review copies.

Pile of books.
Mailing out hard copies of books – giveaways or review copies – might be a good way to drum up interest in your new title. Photograph: Rob Wilkinson/Alamy Photograph: Rob Wilkinson / Alamy/Alamy

Total: $6,000

So is it worth it? For all the hassle, the expense – and in spite of the fact that the market is getting more crowded, making it harder than ever for any single title to stand out from the crowd – Robinson remains convinced that indie authors will thrive.

The bitter battle between Amazon and Hachette over e-book pricing is just more evidence that the publishing world is in the midst of seismic change, he argues, and there is room for new business models to emerge. For now, the publishing elite may still look down their noses at the “indie” world, but he sees no reason why that shouldn’t change.

“Look what happened in the music world,” Robinson points out. “Belonging to an independent label had cachet – because it became associated with quality.” For those authors willing to invest in their books, the same may still be true of publishing.

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