The Real Cost of Being a Writer (part 2)

So, this week, let’s get straight to the financial cost.

I spent about £3000 on my first novel, The Inner Lands: Something Stirs.

This included:

• Cover design (for all three books – I like to plan ahead)
• Image licences (for the cover)
• A critique
• Proofreading
• Artwork (for website and promotion)
• A Kindle (for testing)
• Website domain name
• Publishing (a self-pub company to handle typesetting, ISBNs, copyright page, eBook/paperback upload and distribution).

In terms of profits, I’ve probably made less than £100 in sales. This is because I don’t have money for advertising and if you don’t advertise, nobody will find your book. This has nothing to do with the quality of the writing or how good your story is, it simply isn’t visible on platforms such as Amazon unless you specifically search for it. At the time of release, there were around 6 million books on Amazon alone.

It may seem crazy that I’m not spending every last penny on advertising, but at this stage in the journey it’s unlikely to be worth it. Once those few people you reach have read your book, there’s nothing more for them. When the full trilogy is finished and available, then it would be worth investing because if people enjoy the first book, they’re likely to read the next two.

Worth pointing out that I use “print on demand” for the paperback. This means that when somebody orders a copy it is printed and sent directly to them. This saves on authors having to buy a bulk stock of books and is better for the environment. I do pay for the printing costs – well, technically readers do – but I only make about £1 per book.

Like me, most writers I’ve spoken to keep the costs as low as possible for our readers. It’s not because we hate money, it just works both ways – we genuinely want you to read our work and we can’t ask you to pay an unreasonable amount for it. I actually make more on an eBook sale because there’s no printing involved, but a physical book is so much nicer.

I spent just over £1000 on my second novel, The Inner Lands: Dark Tidings (due 30th June 2020).

This included:

• Cover templates for Amazon and Ingram Spark (distributors)
• A critique
• Proofreading
• ISBN numbers
• Printer ink
• Physical proofs (final check of the paperback)
• Monthly Adobe Acrobat subscription

I spent a lot less money this time as I already had the main cover design, I didn’t invest in more artwork, and I performed the entire publishing process myself; meaning l learned how to typeset, create an eBook, buy and assign ISBNs, create print-ready files and complete all the distribution steps to upload and publish my final files.

I should stress, these are basic costs and don’t include things such as computer hardware, anti-virus software, heating and electricity (sitting still at a desk is cold work in England) and other unforeseeable costs.

So that’s the financial cost out of the way. Now, imagine how long this takes one person to manage in their spare time! I had a ton more experience when writing my second novel but it still required a full rewrite, two complete edits, a third edit (after printing and annotating the entire novel), checking a thousand potential proofread errors and a final two readthroughs prior to publishing.

I should mention that most authors employ a professional editor who would have done some of this work for them. If I was traditionally published, this would certainly be the case and the publishing process would then have been taken care of, too. A traditionally published author, however, only makes about 10% of the profit from any book sold. A self-published author makes more like 70% (ref https://www.creativindie.com/how-much-does-the-average-author-earn-publishing-their-book/) and has complete control over their story, with no agent or publisher steering the direction of their work.

Personally, I would like to be traditionally published one day but largely because I want to write for a living and my aim for The Inner Lands (and a subsequent Sci-Fi trilogy) is film conversion.

If you are a fellow writer, I’m sure you share my pain and I hope some of this was useful to you!

If you are a reader, perhaps this will give you a new perspective when deciding to spend money on a book. And if the book doesn’t end up being what you hoped it to be, you’ll know that it’s unlikely to be for a lack of effort.

Speaking for myself, I want to produce the best possible reading experience I can. I’ve spent thousands of hours attempting to achieve this but I am only human. I try to learn, grow and improve, and that’s all any of us can do.