Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

From my reading online, it didn’t look like anyone else had taken on this important subject area. Tens of thousands of new authors were kicking aside the gatekeepers and going straight into book production once they had finished their manuscripts. This is probably why many of the early self-published books in the print on demand era were poorly published, and embarrassing, when you look back at them from today’s perspective.

This represented a great opportunity, because designing and producing books had been my life for many years. Although book typography and indie publishing was very much a niche field, I was excited to rejoin the industry....

From William Faulkner to E.L. James this infographic has the answers.

If you’ve ever wondered how long it took to craft some of history’s most famous books, you’ll want to check out this rad infographic from the kind folks at Printerinks. Tolkien takes top slowpoke honors for taking 16 years to write the Lord of the Rings while the quickest author on the list is John Boyne who wrote The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in only 2.5 days! Check out the entire chart below

With the growing popularity of self-publishing, there is one recurring question I get from almost every aspiring author: “How much should I budget?” This is a really hard question to answer because the term “self-publishing” encompasses a wide range of very different possibilities.

For example, let’s say you’ve written a first draft of your novel and just uploaded it to Amazon via Kindle Direct Publishing. Technically, you’re “self-publishing.” And your only monetary cost is the formatting to get the required .mobi file, which can be done for free via several online tools.

Now, if you want to have a chance of selling that book, you need to replicate at least some of the steps of traditional publishing and ensure a certain level of quality and professionalism. This means having your book properly edited, typeset and proofread, and hiring a designer to create an eye-catching cover. Depending on your genre and your writing ability, these can cost more or less.

It’s impossible to say, “Self-publishing your book with cost you $X.” However, it is possible to find average costs for the different steps that go into producing a book: editing, design and typesetting. And this is what the data and infographic below focus on....

The average prices and ballpark ranges displayed in the infographic have been calculated using raw, unmodified data from over 2,000 quotes exchanged on the Reedsy platform. Not all of these quotes have been accepted, obviously.

Editing quotes have been broken down by type of editing (editorial assessment, developmental editing, copy-editing, proofreading) and by word count. We then applied a linear regression on the thousands of data points to determine a “price per word count” for these different services.

For cover design, we considered both quotes for a simple ebook cover (front only) and for a paperback cover (front, spine and back). The way most of our book cover designers work is that they charge a mark-up to do the paperback cover, but some do both for the same price. We therefore didn’t make the distinction in this infographic.

For interior design, all quotes have been considered, from simple ebook formatting on a straightforward novel, to the complex design and typesetting of cookbooks and coffee table books. This explains the strong variation in pricing....