Book Money – straight talk

Today I got a cheque from Audreys bookstore, this wonderful bookstore on Jasper Avenue in Edmonton has been carrying my book Pardon my Camino and I am grateful and thrilled that they agreed to do this.  This is my first cheque from them and it was for $332.64 (I do owe GST on this!) 

Well, that was truly a thrill and the most money I have received in one go, in fact, my paperback sales at Audreys have been the most successful retail I have done for the book.

As I get excited about the few hundred I get from book sales, I keep in a separate part of my brain the cost to get the book up and published which is in the thousands. 

You can in theory write and self-publish a book almost for free. However, if you want to produce a book which can proudly bear your name, some hefty costs are awaiting you as an indie author.  A great chunk of money needs to go to an editor.

I wrote one of my first blogs about working with an editor.

When I had done my first draft, my second, further revisions and tweaks and felt it was pretty good, all my writing friends and acquaintances chorused the same words:  “You need a professional editor”.  I found one, and we agreed on a structural development edit, and after I had worked with those recommendations and made the changes, a copy edit.

I am now going to rip off the Band-Aid to reveal the cost of getting a book up to speed for self-publishing.  Why would I do such a thing?  Because on all the forums and chat sites and author advice groups, nobody seems to want to talk about the cost of the edit.  If you have a publisher, they look after that, how lovely. But really before you want to submit your book to an agent or publishing house, it does need to be edited.  They could do more editing, probably will for their needs. 

The draft I sent to the editor was 130,000 words, and the editing package came to $11,603.  Yes, eleven thousand plus Canadian dollars.   Now I know my very modest sales will not, unless some earth-shattering event occurs, (oh yes please!) will ever make that investment back.

Luckily my book is a dear project for me and I want to be happy and proud of it.  And the same applies to having a cover done by a professional book cover artist.  And I needed to get the text formatted, for an e-book and for paperback. Unless you are a comfortable coder this is important to meet the Amazon and Kobo needs.  Nothing worse than a wonky text. So we can add to the edit cost:

 Formatting: $262.50  (actually more as I had a first format to send to an agent/publisher)
Book cover: $165   (All my $ amounts are in Canadian dollars.)

So there is my book, beaten down to 90,000 words, with a professional edit and cover, and looking all nicely laid out and spiffy in e and paperback. And the expenses can keep going, such as a FaceBook ad, promotional material, and maybe freebies of the book (sorry, dear friends, very few of those, see above.)

However the thing is, you can put anything up on Amazon or Kobo, as long as it meets their community standards for decency etc., and the cover and formatting fit their format needs.  But now I know what a professional edit does for a book, I can pick out those that have not been thus treated.  Seems a bit unfair, there should be an edit seal of approval.  At least Audreys gave it a careful inspection before accepting it.

So there we are, the nasty little secret about self-publishing, and as regular publishing houses can do less and less for their authors unless you are a proven best-seller, you may have to absorb some of these costs anyway.

What we will do and pay to have our name on the spine and cover of a book?

A little footnote: while writing this blog, I thought, did I pay a fair amount for the edit? I track down the website for the Editorial Freelance Association and did the calculations for my word count and indeed, that was the cost, in fact, I got a discount by getting the two services (content and copy) in one contract.