You spent months pouring your heart and soul into your book. Now, it’s time to format it, find the perfect cover design and launch your story into the world. The costs of paying developmental editors, proofreaders, cover designers and interior formatting professionals can add up.
Finding budget-friendly options can leave more funds for advertising or buying covers for future releases. Depending on where you publish your book, your title may appear next to traditionally published titles and have to compete with writers who have massive budgets.
How can an author create a professional layout and cover without overspending? The Alliance of Independent Authors surveyed 2,000 self-published writers. Researchers found that 43.8% of respondents made at least $20,000 yearly.
Given the potential fees involved in self-publishing, it isn’t surprising that the median profit margin is fairly low compared to other careers. Saving money becomes a necessity as indie authors grow their following.
Book design involves the finished look of the front cover, back cover, spine and interior pages. To lower expenses, you must prioritize cost-effective choices for each element. Here are five cost-saving strategies to help self-publishers create a book inexpensively and survive on a beginning writer’s income.
1. Keep the Interior Simple
While costly programs exist that can beautify your book’s interior, you can also use whatever word-processing software you already own. Many self-published writers create their books using Microsoft Word.
If you plan to publish on Amazon, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) offers templates to ensure your margins and setup are correct for paperback and hardcover editions.
For Kindle, take the time to put in hard page breaks where needed and check the preview copy on KDP after uploading. You’ll invest a lot of time learning the proper formatting and system, but you’ll also reduce costs by doing it yourself.
Add a small line or black-and-white drawing as your scene divider, and keep chapter headings as part of the text. You can make the chapter title all capital letters, bold or a larger font size.
2. Team up With Writing Friends for Bulk Design Discounts and Knowledge
Team up with a group of other authors to get the best pricing on book covers and formatting from professional designers. For example, a cover artist may offer a discount when they know they have a promised number of book covers to create for the group.
If everyone writes in the same genre, a multiauthor project allows you to learn from the others and how they format their book’s interior, create cover art and design other features.
Even if the group wants to design elements themselves, you can gather tips on what type of covers sell, where to find stock cover photos and how to fix any issues like a title blending into the background.
3. Choose a Smaller Trim Size
Different genres have typical trim sizes for published paperback books. Trim sizes for romance and mystery novels are mass market size at 4.25 by 7 inches, while nonfiction books are 5.5 by 8 inches or 6 by 9 inches. Children’s book sizes vary widely. Pay attention to the bestsellers in your genre to figure out the common dimensions. Something as simple as scaling down your trim size can save you money on printing and postage.
For example, scaling an 8.5-by-11-inch handbook down to 5.5 by 8.5 inches saves 30% on postage for mailed books. Since the United States Postal Service charges for oversized packages, reducing the size slightly makes shipping cheaper. Money saved on postage adds up over the book’s lifetime.
4. Seek Design Students and Recent Graduates
College students studying graphic design need examples for their portfolios. If there’s a local university or community college near you, reach out to see if any students would like to do the artwork for a book cover or layout the interior of your book for the experience. If it is in your budget, you can offer to pay them.
Recent college graduates may also want to get into design work but lack experience. They have the skills to design a beautiful cover, but they need someone to give them a chance. Many will work with authors inexpensively in exchange for permission to use the cover as part of their portfolio of samples.
5. Study Excellent Designs and Learn
An ebook cover can cost nothing to $500 or more. Independent authors release millions of books each year. Spend time looking at the ones on bestseller lists and note any similarities. If you write in a genre, pay particular attention to the style, colors and patterns across tomes in the same category.
Ask questions like:
- Do people appear on the cover?
- Is the cover a photograph or illustration?
- Where does the title appear?
- Is the author’s name bigger or smaller than the book’s name?
- How much information did the author include on the back cover? What size is the text on the spine?
Studying bestselling book cover art gives you an idea of what your peers are doing with their releases. Learn from what others have done, not to copy but to create something unique that matches the genre’s mood.
Readers may not realize why they instantly recognize a book’s category, but designers know it is about a compilation of elements that shout where the story belongs.
Maintain Creative Control
A perk of self-publishing is controlling how your book looks. Anyone working on your product will report directly to you, and you can reduce costs without losing quality. Taking the time to be wise about where you spend your money results in a finished product that is as impressive as one from a major publishing house for a fraction of the cost.
