My publishing cost breakdown
Here is where I will let you know what artists I’ve used. I will also let you know if I used any advertising, where I advertised, and how much it’s costing me. I will give you my honest feedback on the services rendered as it happens.
Facebook advertising– $5 (Early June) I advertised a poll I was doing on the different covers that I had designed to find out which one looked the best. In the end I decided to take their feedback on the cover and used it towards reworking the cover design.
$30 (Late June to early August) ad to get more views on my author page and hopefully more likes. (It certainly got me more likes, but the engagement on the page is still pretty low).
$5 (June 30th) boost on my pre-order post on my author page. I got a few click throughs, but no sales so in my opinion it wasn’t really worth it.
Twitter ads– (July 1st and 2nd) $18 Twitter ad through TweetYourBooks for a small pre-order push. Unfortunately, I didn’t receive any sales from this advertisement either.
Instagram ads– $5 for about 2 days of ads. Haven’t really noticed any results from it so far.
Fiver– I paid about $7 to have someone post about my novella on their blog. They put up a description and purchase link.
BMI books– $10 Standard promotion. That means it’s up on the website for 365 days.
KDP rocket– $97
It has a 30 day money back guarantee and is supposed to help you pick out marketable key words, so I’m going to give it a shot and see if it helps build more organic traffic.
Cover art– about $360 through Sukesha Ray
My opinion on services rendered– She did an amazing job on the cover. If you aren’t happy with the design the first time be honest with her. She’s patient and more than willing to work with you. She’s also been an excellent mentor and has helped me with marketing advice and suggestions for the convention I’m doing in August. I love her art style and the cover turned out eye catching and beautiful.
IMPORTANT– Make sure for any cover art that you get a contract, so you don’t end up in legal trouble later. You need for the artist to give you their copyrights to the artwork or at least have a contract saying you have the right to use the cover art for sales of A,B, and C. This also applies to any editing.
Best Seller launch blueprint package– $27
Feedback– I will give more information on how well this works out once I’ve launched, but so far it has offered some excellent suggestions that I hadn’t even thought of.
Marketing mentorship– Free through a FB group called women helping women entrepreneurs. They also have a premium membership with additional support for about 9 dollars a month. My mentor was excellent and offered help and support on coming up with a marketing plan and making sure the cover was a good fit for my audience. My mentor was Stephanie Dolce and she was really helpful.
Blurb- $40
Developmental editing– is $135.73
I’m currently having both of these services done through Charlotte Blowe Stanley (Aka N-D-Scribable services on their Facebook page). She’s done an amazing job on both services so far and has been a pleasure to work with. She’s also really well experienced in her field, she edited for a best selling novel, and she was very professional.
Feedback-Overall, she did an excellent job with developmental editing. She fixed a ton of plot holes and helped me really flesh out my characters and setting.
Substantial editing/proofreading– $12 per 1000 words (Overall cost for my 32k word manuscript was $385.
Feedback– I did this through Annie Morgan who I found through the recommendation of another author, and she did a good job on making the work flow nicer and caught some clarity errors where I’d gone through and changed something developmentally and the sentence or phrasing just didn’t make sense.
Formatting– $276.95 for print and e-book formatting, e-book cover formatting, and a beta reading copy.
$50 (Additional charge for a 3 business day rush fee) The normal speed is 5-7 business days.
This was much more expensive than I’d anticipated. I went through Ebooklaunch, but I also was recommended to words-2-kindle and their quote was also pretty reasonable. I will let you know how this turns out.
1 ISBN– $99 (I got a discount through Amazon).
Anime con booth– $100 (I’m going to Otakufest on August 31st)
Decorations/ odds and ends for the booth–
Bookmarks-$50.39 (with the cost of design services on Vistaprint)
Business cards– 200 free business cards through 4over4.com
$35– 500 more business cards on Vista Print with updated information.
$10-Re-design for business card.
Banner- $78.59- Custom pop-up banner for my anime con booth from Vista Print
$20– Banner design
Tablecloth– $13 for a blue ombre table cloth. If you want something nice or custom, order a couple months in advance. I ended up running into this problem because the cloth I wanted wouldn’t arrive until 1 month after the event I wanted it for.
Book stands– $28.03 with shipping. I went through a website called DisplayStands4You
