Self-Publishing on a Shoestring Budget
- susanmansbridge101
- Mar 20, 2023
- 6 min read
In an ideal world, we writers would be able to employ an editor or two, a cover designer, a marketing guru and a general PA to coordinate author events, appearances and deal with correspondence and fan mail.
Unfortunately, I don’t live in such a world.
I am so grateful that my husband is happy for me to write after working out that we could afford to pay bills and buy food on one wage. But it also means I have no spare money to pay for anything else! Some of you reading, might have some money, but are not sure where to spend it to be most productive.
A friend told me about a talk she recently heard suggesting that you needed to have between three and five thousand dollars to publish a book. She was very disheartened as, like me, she was working from a budget of £0. I gladly went through my process with her, and I thought I would share my cost-cutting tips with you.
First, be the best writer you can. There are lots of free talks and summits you can attend online, often with replays which fit into your daily routine. Some are merely there to promote their products or courses, but you can pick up some wonderful tips and ideas about the craft. No matter what your budget, you should always strive to write better and better stories.
You need to get your manuscript read by someone impartial who will give you good feedback. There are people out there who will beta read for you for a price. However, there are many aspiring authors who would be happy to scratch your back if you scratch theirs. Free summits are a great way of networking and find people who will support you and journey with you. My first beta readers were my sister, my niece and a really good friend. Since then, I have connected with people online and have a writer’s circle group that meets once a month and am in a discord group with members from Canada, US, Australia and Wales. They have looked at a lot of my writing via Google docs and given me some really excellent feedback. I have also had the pleasure of reading some truly excellent stories myself, so it’s a win-win.
Read through your work on different media to catch those plot holes or pesky mistakes. I have a kindle and I also read aloud to my husband, both of which are very different from staring at a computer screen.
Word has evolved now, and will help point out spelling, punctuation and grammar issues. That is always the last process I go through to make it as clean as possible. I am shocked at how sloppy people can be when self-publishing their novels. Typos, glaring grammar mistakes, sloppy research – there is no excuse for any of it. Just because I have no money, doesn’t give me licence to put out a badly written novel.
I did invest in a lifetime membership of Pro Writing Aid when it was on offer, which serves as a copy editor. It is much more than a tool for spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Well worth saving up for or asking for as a gift if people want to contribute towards the cost.
So, you have your novel, you’ve found some beta readers and checked it through for errors. You are ready to publish.
You need a cover.
I was fortunate to know a young girl at college who was a talented artist – something that was SO not in my skill set. I asked her to paint a concept that I had in my mind as an idea for a front cover. Various phases were shared, each being tweaked until I was happy with it. She eventually did the front covers for my first four books. I gave her £40 for each one, with a proviso that should I start making serious money from them, I would pay her more. She was extremely happy, as she hadn’t expected much payment at all. By all means, look for an artist or graphic designer friend to help you if you can.
The alternative is to sign up to the free versions of design sites such as Bookbrush or Canva. You are limited to the functions and pictures you can use, but there is enough there for you to create a decent book cover as well as ads for social media campaigns.
A couple of words of advice. Make sure the book can clearly be seen in a thumbnail size. This is the size you see when scrolling through sites like Amazon, so you want the cover to be clear. If you make the cover too busy, or the writing too fancy, people won’t be able to see it and may scroll right past.
When uploading, you may be told that you need to enhance the image. There are free tools online to upscale and increase the DPI of your cover, so don’t think that you can’t use it.
If you want maps, there are free versions of sites like Inkarnate that you can play with to create fantasy maps. I have lost hours fiddling with trees and mountains – it is very addictive!
Now you have a front cover and a manuscript. Let’s get publishing!
I chose Amazon as my publisher. It was relatively easy to upload a manuscript and the process of tweaking it wasn’t terribly arduous. I asked them to assign me a free ISBN number, which limits that publication to an amazon site, but you can buy a batch if you prefer. If you are thinking of also publishing via Ingramsparks for instance, you will definitely need your own ISBN. An individual number costs £91*, but if this is something you want to invest in, you can get a batch of ten numbers for around £170*.
For e-books, you only need the manuscript and front cover. If you want to check how it will look in epub form, you can download a free kindle previewer and run through it first to make sure it looks the way you want it to before uploading. Amazon allows you to set the price, so you can decide how much profit you want to make. This is really easy to alter later if you decide you want to offer it at a lower price as a buying incentive for a short while or increase it as general prices rise.
If you plan to publish elsewhere, even if that may be a long way in the future, do not sign up with kindle select. This prevents you from offering your book on other publishing sites.
For paperbacks, the process is a little more complicated. You can upload a whole cover (front, back and spine) of your own design, or you can just use your front and make the rest with their cover creator tool. You can order a proof copy, which costs the price of printing and postage, so you can see how the final product looks, and make adjustments if necessary. They do have a previewer, however, so you can look at it online without parting with your precious pennies.
After pressing that publish button, you can order author copies of your book at cost for use at book signings and author talks or selling to friends and family. You are allowed to buy quite a few and it means you keep all the profits instead of sharing them with Amazon.
You can spend loads of money marketing your book, and companies will try and tell you that it is a good investment. However, social media doesn’t sell books. It might get your name out there, and I suggest you have a presence in your medium of choice, (I have a Facebook author page and a twitter account) but use it as an information sharing tool rather than look to sell via their advertising.
Instead, concentrate on setting up a website – there are free or low-cost choices out there. I did pay for my domain name, but it wasn’t horrendously expensive. Set up a mailing list for newsletters. I use Mailerlite as it is free for under 1,000 subscribers. If you are fortunate enough to reach those heady heights, check regularly for people who do not engage and maybe scrub them from your list as this may bring you back down to the free level again.
Make sure any images you use are either your own or free. You don’t want to use someone else’s work if you don’t pay for the copyright. I paid for the use of images on Scopio when there was a really good discount offered. Otherwise, there are site like adobe.com that offer royalty free stock images.
So, there you are. Self-publishing on a shoestring budget.
If anyone has found other great free resources, or money-saving tips, do please add them in the comments.
*Prices shown listed during March 2023
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