Budgets are an important first step in any project, and a book launch is just that, a project. Your budget will give you an idea of how much you need to make to recover your expenses, including paying yourself for your time, before you start to make a profit. 

There are a few important things to budget for, and while this isn’t an all-inclusive list as every book is a little different, it will get you started on planning and thinking ahead for what you will need to cover and pay for until you start to see sales.

Budget for Your Time

Budgeting for your time is incredibly important. Your time is important, and you need to account for that. But how do you do that? There are a few things to keep in mind:

  1. Your writing time. Everyone writes at a different speed. You need to figure out  how fast you can write your book – or if you’re not sure, your best guess. You will also need to consider how long it will take to edit your book as well.
  2.  How much should you pay yourself? This is a much more personal question. If you are just starting your writing career, then you may want to look at yourself as an entry-level employee and shoot for around $15 an hour. If you are looking to replace your day-job with a full-time writing job, then look at how much you currently make per hour and go with that. This is how much you want to make an hour for your time, and while you should be reasonable, you can make this amount whatever your goals are.

Cover Design

We all say not to judge a book by its cover, and then we all promptly judge every book by its cover before we buy it. The cover is your book’s first impression, and you need to make a good one. It’s important to hire a good cover designer that will do your book justice and give you the first impression that fits your genre, age category, and important story elements. If you are talented enough to do this yourself, then make sure you account for your time doing so here.

Editing

There’s not much worse than finding a great story riddled with plot holes and grammatical errors. Hire a good editor! Hire two or three good editors! The more eyes on your project, the more errors and issues will be found that you can address before hitting the magical publish button.

There are three important types of editing that you should account for: substantive/content editing to address storyline consistency, timeline issues, and flow; copy/line editing that looks at style, meaning, grammar, and syntax. Some people will do a round of line edits followed by a line of copy edits, and some will choose to do them all at once – that’s your decision to make. Proofreading is the final stage. It’s the one last look to see if anything slipped through the cracks or changed throughout the process that needs to be addressed in the areas of spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

Formatting

There are two popular types of formatting, and while both produce nice, professional looking books, they do have their pros and cons. Hiring someone that uses a program like Vellum (or doing it yourself – remember to budget for your time) is a faster way to format your book, but you lose out on some of the really special visual elements as they come with preloaded options that cannot all be changed. Someone who does custom formatting in programs like Sigil, inDesign, and Affinity Publisher, can give you a lot of stylistic freedom to present your book exactly how you envision it.

Using something like Vellum is a great way to save some money on formatting. You need to decide if you want to have a more standard layout or something more unique – and budget accordingly. Custom formatting is going to be more expensive.

Promotional Graphics

Sometimes your cover artist can create a few promotional and advertising graphics for your release, and it never hurts to ask as they may offer a package for items like this that will be less expensive than hiring them out separately. If they do not, then you will want to budget for someone to make some images for social media platforms and newsletters that you can use.

Alternatively, you can do this yourself if you have some artistic flare in programs like Canva or BookBrush. But don’t sell these images short. In many cases these are the first images of your book a new reader will see as they scroll through their social media, so you want it to look professional and appealing. If you do this yourself, then again, make sure you budget for your time.

Advertising

There are tons of places to advertise your book – from Facebook and Amazon to newsletters and sidebars of high traffic sites. You will want to consider where your readers are and try to target them. You will want to decide how long you want to run Amazon and Facebook ads and how much you want your daily or total spend to be. If you choose to use website and newsletter ads, you will need to research what each place charges and make sure they are showing your book to readers that enjoy stories similar to yours.

Marketing

Marketing can cover a lot. Some authors choose to hire out a publicity/marketing company or hire an assistant to help organize and promote their books. This can cover early reviews, cover reveals, interviews, guest posts, and the list is almost endless. Make sure you budget enough money to either cover the time it will take to properly get your book out in front of people or find out how much it would cost to have someone help you do it.

Be Flexible

Budgets can be flexible! If you find out you over or underestimated an expense by a significant amount, then make sure you adjust your budget so you can look back and use similar figures for your next book. Your budget does not have to be an exact match of your actual expenses, but it should reasonably close.

I’ll be digging deeper into each of these topics of the next few weeks, so make sure you let me know below if you want to be notified of new posts!