how much did you pay to publish your book?

Sometimes people ask me how much I paid to have my book published, which always makes me wince, because the premise of the question means a bad understanding of publishing.

Short answer – you shouldn’t pay to have your book published. That’s called vanity publishing, which is distinct from indie publishing and traditional publishing. In indie publishing, you publish the book yourself. In traditional publishing, the publisher pays to publish your book and then pays you a royalty. (Unless they’re crooked.) In vanity publishing, though, you pay someone else to publish the book for you.

That said, I do spend some money. So full disclosure, here is how much I spent on CLOAK OF DRAGONS.

I spent $225 on the cover (as designed by the excellent Natasha Snow). Since it was published in April 2019, it’s sold about 2700 copies, of which I get about $2.50 to $2.70 per copy sold. All I spent was $225 for the cover.

I’ve done books more cheaply than that, too. I published SILENT ORDER: ECLIPSE HAND in October 2017, and I made the book entirely with free software to prove a point – the operating system was Ubuntu, word processor was LibreOffice, and so forth. I made the cover art myself, spending about $75 on stock photos before settling on a cover version I like. Since then I’ve sold about 3200 copies of the book, and got about $2 per copy.

(There are other costs like having a computer and an Internet connection and so forth, but most of that stuff I would have anyway since you need it to function in modern society.)

The point is I didn’t pay anyone to publish those books. Any money I spent was on production costs for publishing it myself. Since you can publish books yourself using 1.) free software, and 2.) an Internet connection, it doesn’t make sense to use a vanity publisher. And lots of people do use vanity publishers. This is despite the fact that vanity publishing tends to be very, very scammy. Like, they’ll charge you $3000 for a publishing “package” which consists of putting the book on Kindle and cranking out a paperback edition. Or $2000 for a marketing package that consists of a 30-second book video, a box of bookmarks, and a couple of posts of Twitter.

But lots of people do pay lots of money to vanity publishers, even if they wind up regretting it later. I think a lot of people want the “feeling” of Being Published, which you may not get from indie publishing, especially if you’re inexperienced.

An anecdote might illustrate the point. The other day I wound up watching some old SHARK TANK episodes. SHARK TANK is a show where various entrepreneurs make presentations to investors (the Sharks) and try to get them to invest in the business. I didn’t think I would like the show, but it’s actually fairly entertaining. I thought the Sharks would be cruel and exploitative, but while they ask blunt questions, the questions they ask are usually necessary and reasonable questions. (If you don’t know the difference between gross profit and net profit, you probably shouldn’t be trying to start a business.) What struck me was how many of the female entrepreneurs tried to convince the Sharks to invest by saying something like “as the passionate mother of two amazing kids, I am ready to take on the challenge of this business.” Now, while parenting is indeed one of the most noble tasks a person can do, it doesn’t have any relevance to whether or not the business idea would make money, and being a good parent doesn’t always translate to competence in other fields. For that matter, some of the nastiest people I’ve ever met were passionate mothers who fully supported whatever their nascent little sociopath wanted to do.

But! The emotional appeal works, doesn’t it? A plucky working mother with a big dream! It’s a well-crafted emotional appeal and probably works a lot. I think vanity publishing relies a lot on those emotional arguments. You can be a Published Author! You can see your book on a shelf! Your editor will work with you to craft a masterpiece! Marketing professionals will promote your book to the world! So the writer forks over $3000 or whatever, and in exchange they get a badly formatted Kindle file, a misprinted paperback, and a box of bookmarks. The writer could have done that himself for much, much cheaper.

As with so many areas in life, caveat emptor.

So, to sum up, don’t use a publisher that charges fees. You can do it yourself, or find someone who will do it for you for much cheaper on a one-time fee basis. I was looking at the website of a vanity publisher the other day, and for what they charge to publish one book, I spent to buy the cover images for two dozen books over the course of two years.

-JM