What Does it Cost to Self-Publish a Book in 2024?

The question we get asked all the time is, ‘How much does it cost to self-publish a book?’. The answer depends very much on two factors; how you self-publish and the book itself. Both have an impact on your likely self-publishing costs. In this article, we explain some of the different routes to self-publication and give an idea of the cost of self-publishing.

Cost to self-publish

Self-publishing can have a wide range of price points: releasing a book on an online platform such as Amazon KDP can be free to publish initially – but only if you have done all the work to create, design and upload the book yourself (perfect if you want absolute control of the project or if your market is mostly online).

Other self-publishing options involve buying in production, design or marketing services to strengthen the areas where you lack certain publishing skills. This will all have a cost, but that cost will depend on the company, service or freelancer you are employing. As an example, you can buy various services from suppliers such as Indie-go (with prices usually based on word count (for example, an edit for a novel of 90 000 words would be around £700.00 excl. VAT) – but this option still means you are doing the bulk of the publishing work yourself.

Then some companies offer a range of set packages that include the costs to produce and print your book. The offers that these publishers give vary greatly in price range, but they can be a good option if you want or need everything offered by those packages or simply need to get their help in order to bring your project to life. However, they only work if you really understand exactly what you are getting for the price, so research is key.

Finally, there are full-service self-publishing companies, like Troubador, who are completely bespoke and can handle all parts of the process – design, print, marketing, sales and distribution – for you, which means you get a skilled and professional team of book production and marketing specialists working with you on your book, plus a flexible range of services that can suit your specific project. The cost to self-publish will therefore vary quite widely depending on what an author is looking for.

For example, you might want to self-publish a paperback novel with around 300 pages and no illustrations. The kind of novel you’d typically expect to find on any bookshop shelf. With all the production work to get the book ready for publication, a full-colour cover designed by one of our in-house design specialists, 300 copies printed upfront, and the set-up of enhanced metadata needed to get the book ready for distribution to bookshops might come to around £2500.

A hardback version of the same book, with a dust jacket, might be more like £3100 due to the additional cost of printing those copies. The same book but as a Print on Demand (PoD) title with no copies printed upfront (but with copies printed to order) could reduce your outlay to £1200. If you are not looking to print any copies of your book and are looking to go digital only, but want a high-quality ebook created and distributed to all the main retailers, but not a printed book, you might be looking at a price of around £500. While these are all ballpark figures, they illustrate how the decisions an author makes about what their book looks like can have a huge impact on the cost.

In all the above, most authors would also look at adding additional services – such as proofreading or copy editing, marketing services or cover enhancements for the front cover of their book. The Troubador team take great care in advising authors on the services they might benefit from depending on their objectives and always ensures that the author is the one making the decision about what they require, not the publisher.

You can learn more about our pricing here. All the prices given here are examples only, the actual cost would depend on the materials used, the work required in producing the book, the number of pages and the additional services opted for. While many of our authors opt for similar services, no two book projects are identical, but the benefit of bespoke is that we can help you shape your book to your budget.

Where do I start?

Our customer service team has many years of experience in advising authors on the best route to publication, and so to ensure the very best pricing on a book, we ask to see your manuscript. This way we can learn more about what you are looking to achieve with your publishing, understand your budget and curate the perfect range of options for your book. We also strongly suggest that you get quotations from different companies to compare so that you can understand what you will get for your money and decide what is right for your project.

When considering self-publishing, whether that be with Trouabdor or another supplier, be honest about the budget you have. We strongly recommend that authors do not borrow money or spend money they cannot afford on self-publishing – not all self-published authors recoup the money they have invested in their book through sales. Trade discounts and book set-up costs all come out of the selling price of the book, so unless you sell directly, the cover price on your book is not the financial return you will receive on a sale. Each of the routes and costs to self-publish discussed here have their own pros and cons – the best way forward is to understand exactly what you want to get out of the book publishing process and to do your research thoroughly to make sure you are making an informed decision about what is best for you.

What is the best route to publication for you?

If you are aiming for a book available to buy via bookshops, you need a product that is right for that market, with the correct distribution in place. If you want a book available online only, that will dictate a very different route and a different price point for publishing. Remember that you are funding the publication of your book, so it is essential to understand your budget, to know what you are getting for the money you are spending, and to be honest about what help you need in creating the very best book and getting that to the market.

So, when it comes to answering the big question, ‘What does it cost to self-publish?’ it depends very much on what you are publishing and how – understanding this will help you make the right choices for your self-publishing project. If you have any questions or simply want to chat with someone about your options, our customer services team is available for a chat or to produce a no-obligation quote for the self-publishing of your book.