My self-publishing journey with Powerless, and how much it cost

hello and welcome back to my channel if you're new here my name is Jackie I am the author of the upcoming book powerless which like exists in a real physical form now and it is coming out in one month on the 13th of June so I thought this was a good time to run through the process I followed to self-publish this book as well as how much it cost I do feel um a bit uncomfortable about going on video with all of this because I did spend a lot more money than what most Indie authors spend I also took a lot more time than what most Indie authors take so um I will start this with the caveat that this was my experience there is no need for you to take as long as I did there is no need for you to spend as much as I did and I'll go through each step and outline what I think was worth it and what I wouldn't spend on next time this is probably going to be a very long video so if you prefer to read this sort of content I do have a blog post where I go into all of the same information I'm covering here and I'll pop a link to that in the description below the blog post is unsurprisingly on my website where you can get the first three chapters of powerless for free so if you are interested in young adult sci-fi fantasy if you think superheroes clashing with the Russian mafia sounds cool go check it out now the first step to self-publishing a book is obviously to write the book I am not going to go into that process in this video because I covered it in my videos back in nanowrimo 2019 so if you want to see like the writing process in real time feel free to go back there I also have videos where I try different plotting methods to outline this book and later in 2020 I have a few on how I was revising it before I sent it to Beta readers so I wrote powerless at the end of 2019 I spent October outlining it with a few different methods November and December I wrote it the first draft was I think 68 000 words or 64 000 words I think 68 and then I let it sit for a few months because I knew I wouldn't be able to revise it until I had fresh eyes looking at it I think I picked it up again in about April 2020 when I read through it was pleasantly surprised to discover that I liked it and decided to revise it before sending it out to Beta readers now at this stage in the process I had three beta readers who looked at it there was one who was a fellow writer and authortuber there was one who was an author and professional editor and there was another who was not a writer but she was a PhD candidate in neuroscience and because there was a bit of like fake science in the book I thought it would be good to get someone who could give feedback as a reader but who could also cross-check some of the sciency stuff the beta readers all came back to me after about two or three weeks they all left comments throughout the book itself so I merged all three versions of the book so I could see the comments together they also sent me some separate feedback either in an email or a separate document about the things they liked the things they thought could have been stronger and so on the feedback at this stage was really good so I was quite lucky to be in the position where I didn't need to significantly overhaul the book it was more adding to what was already there I found the beta reader process to be very helpful it gave me a lot of confidence to move forward with this book it gave me confidence to move forward with querying it so I would highly recommend it if you don't know anyone who can beta read I still think it's very important to get feedback even before you start working with an editor on things like copy edits and proofreading so an alternative for this step is getting a manuscript critique now I actually did manuscript critiques as well as beta readers and there were a couple of reasons for this the first critique I got was actually at the same time as my Beta reads and the reason I did this was because I was considering working with this editor on the book and the critique was a good way to try her Services because I hadn't worked with her before so this was around mid-2020 same time as the beta reads and this was the first part of the process that had a real cost which I will just check so my first critique was about 900 Australian it was actually priced in US Dollars however in this video I'm going to give all everything I spend in Australian dollars just because I'm Australian that's the currency I work in I also did have expenses in a number of different currencies so some of it was in pounds Euros US Dollars Australian dollars so giving the currency I paid for each of the things that I paid for I don't think is that helpful because it doesn't give you the overall figure so everything has been converted to Australian dollars for the purposes of this video if you'd like to convert that you can go to xe.com at the time of filming one US dollar is worth about a dollar fifty Australian so when you convert it to what US dollars I think you get like 60 cents I don't I don't know I'm not a maths person I'm a writer do the conversion when I get to the grand total I will tell you what the conversion is to US dollars because I do know that off the top of my head anyway the first critique was a 50 page critique it took two weeks I think can cost about nine hundred dollars Australian I decided not to go ahead with the editor after this just because I didn't think her feedback was great and I also didn't like her communication that style that much the next critique I had actually wasn't until almost a year later so it was April 2021 and this was with a friend of mine who coincidentally happened to be doing a certification to become a book coach and one of the assignments she had to do was a critique or an editorial letter of an 80 000 word manuscript and at this point after my revisions powerless was up to 78 000 words so it was perfect fit so this critique was very lucky it was free it took three weeks and she wrote me a 24-page editorial letter which had a lot of great feedback she was really complimentary about the stuff I'd done well and had some great suggestions about things I could improve which I then incorporated into my revisions at this point there's a big break between me doing anything related to publishing the book because my original plan was to be traditionally published and April 2021 is when I first started querying so I queried from like April 2021 until the end of the year didn't have any interest which was a little bit said and then and then at the beginning of 2022 I decided to start entering competitions for unpublished manuscripts because I thought maybe that would be a way to get the attention of a traditional publisher or agent so there's a big gap in anything relating to producing powerless however one of the competitions I entered had an option where you could get a critique for an extra fee so that was a critique for the first 50 pages which I decided to take on it was a five-page critique I got it to one it would have been late 2022 I'm gonna say like maybe September october-ish and the cost for that which included the competition entry fee was 188 Australian then towards the end of 2022 is when I decided to self-publish basically in August one of the competitions I actually won and as I mentioned in an earlier video that sort of gave me the validation I was looking for from traditional publishing because what I wanted most from traditional publishing was the the feedback that this was good enough that this was good enough to go to print and I won that competition I was shortlisted in another one I was accepted into a competitive writing Workshop using an extract from powerless so I started getting all of this feedback without getting the traditional publishing acceptance so late 2022 was when I began to seriously think about self-publishing again and the first step I took was reaching out to a company called New York book editors to get my book edited the reason I reached out to New York book editors was because I'd been familiar with this company for a few years I'd come across them in my grammar Factory days when I had my own Publishing Company and I knew they only hired editors with traditional publishing backgrounds so this was sort of like okay I can pay for that affirmation I can get an editor from a traditional publishing house or one who has worked at a traditional Publishing House to tell me whether or not this is good enough it's basically what I was looking for so I reached out and sent through a sample of the book and the way it works is they review your pages and tell you which service they think you need so when I reached out I said the comprehensive edit I need everything I have no idea how decent this book is and they read my pages and got back to me saying that they thought like an editorial letter or manuscript critique would be the best option so I got yet another manuscript critique it took seven weeks and what I got was an 11 page critique letter as well as the full book with some comments throughout and this one was actually really expensive it was four thousand seven hundred and ten dollars Australian which um which was just a lot of money especially for what I got and that's not to say that the editor didn't do a good job like he did have good feedback he did give me that confidence boost I was looking for afterwards we could have like a recap call and he spent two hours on the phone with me as I went through like all of the comments he left that I had questions on so he's very generous with his time ultimately I felt like the feedback and this was consistent through all of the critiques I felt like the feedback I got through manuscript critiques was feedback that I was getting from beta readers and since I'm lucky enough to have people who are both willing to Beta read and good at giving feedback in my life the manuscript critique process was an unnecessary expense for me and it ended up being like an unnecessary expense that added up to what almost six thousand dollars so it was a significant chunk of what I spent on publishing do I regret it I don't because that last one like I did get the validation I was hoping for I did have an editor with a traditional publishing background who said yes this is good enough to print if you don't get any bytes from Agents or editors I think you should self-publish I think it's a great story you can take or leave my feedback it's already in good shape that validation was really nice however I don't think I'd need it for a future book because now that I have this feedback I've sort of got powerless as a yardstick for what is acceptable to go to print and what isn't and I feel like I can judge my own work a bit better now that I know what the standard is so in future I would not do the manuscript critique stage I will save six thousand dollars and I would just focus on beta readers instead what I might do differently with beta readers is have multiple rounds so I'll have one at an earlier draft and then after I do revisions I might have another round with a couple of different readers to get feedback on how everything's coming together once I've done the revisions so this brings us to November 2022 at which point I had decided I was going to self-publish powerless and I needed to start looking at services to actually create the book now that the content was good these Services include editing cover design internal layout design so for editing there are a number of different types of edits you can get and it's important to understand what those are so you know what you're paying for and so no one's disappointed the way I always described it when I was at grammar Factory was to imagine like an inverted triangle where at the top of the pyramid you're looking at the broader aspects of a book and as you get down you get more and more detailed so at the top level you have things like developmental edits and structural edits these are things that look at the overall structure of a book for a fiction book this might be character development plot World building and so on all of the macro things that you need to get right then when you get down to the bottom you're looking at the nitty-gritty details so punctuation typos grammatical error spelling errors and so on so in my case because I'd done the beta reading process revisions and manuscript critiques I'd already dealt with all of that macro stuff so I was mainly looking for support with the language when it came to my editing and not because I don't know grammar no I'm not a good writer I mean I hope I'm a good writer you can all tell me when you've read the book but because it is impossible to review your own work you get too close to it and you stop seeing things that are there having a qualified professional look through things can really help so the first round of edits was copy editing slash line editing in many publishing houses these are two different steps and they're sort of in the middle of the pyramid so line editing tends to look like paragraph structure sentence structure and so on whereas copy editing is getting more into spelling grammar punctuation that sort of stuff my editor combines them both in her copy editing service which is very lucky for me and that first round of edits took two weeks and I had over four and a half thousand changes recommended in the word document a lot of these were very small like I had switched from Australian English which I write into U.S English for publishing so the dashes I was using was wrong so every time I had a dash in the book it needed to be updated and the spacing around it had to be removed so a lot of little nitpicky things like that that I wouldn't have found for the copy edit my editor charged fifteen hundred dollars and I think it was worth every penny and I would recommend every self-publishing author to do this stage once the edits were done I then sent the content to my internal layout designer this is the person who does the pages of the book sometimes it can be the same person who does the cover however they are very different skill sets so I'd usually recommend finding someone who specializes in cover design for the cover and then someone who specializes in page layout and type setting for the pages I found my internal layout designer on readsy and she charged 900 for three versions of the book so that was the paperback which is this one here the hardcover and the ebook she was great to work with I really just wanted a book that looked professional that when people opened it it looked like a real book and she just went above and beyond like she suggested this DNA ornamentation for the chapter titles which looks amazing for scene break she found a little molecule icon because Hannah's a scientist there are strong science themes in the book and she even found different fonts to differentiate between the flashback scenes and the present day scenes in the book so I was really really happy with that process when it comes to cost it was an extra 900 it is something that I would pay again though just because even though this is something that a lot of self-publishing authors tend to learn to do themselves I felt that my time was better spent writing other books than it was learning how to be an internal layout designer maybe if I didn't have a job as well so I work four days a week in a corporate job maybe then I would have tried to do it myself but between revising Palace and preparing for the launch writing powerless to writing two other books or brainstorming and starting to write them I didn't really have the attention left to learn this other skill and I felt it was better to leave it with professionals and if I did it myself I would have always worried that I'd gotten something wrong and that there would be something really jarring that I'd missed that all of my readers would pick up on so this was just one less thing for me to worry about after this I went back to my editor for the proofread now the proofread is the final final grammar language punctuation formatting check you can do it before you do the internal layout design however I wanted to do it once everything was set out just in case there were any issues when the content was imported from word into InDesign which is the program many internal layout designers used to design books and because I was using the same editor for copy editing and proofreading I wanted the book to look different to her so it was like she was looking at it with fresh eyes now normally I would recommend a different editor for each stage of the editing process however the editor I worked with is someone I've worked with in the past she was one of the editors on my team at grammar Factory and I just I knew I just knew she did really good work she had excellent attention to detail she happened to be available at perfect times when it came to my own publishing process so I was very happy for her to do both steps and I believe the proofread was another 800 or 900 800 then we get to cover design now normally I would want to do cover design earlier in the process like as soon as the content is done you start working on the cover and the reason for that is because you can't Market your book without a cover now there are debates when it comes to how early you should be marketing your book especially as an indie author and in hindsight maybe I didn't need everything as early as I thought I did and it might have been better to wait until like the last month before the launch and just do everything then however it is good to have that for planning and even things like designing your website like I only have the one book on my website so I don't really have my own brand as an author yet so I knew the website was going to look like the cover and and telling you what the cover looked like I couldn't have a website where people could start signing up and joining my email list so ideally I would have started the cover in December and finished it by February what ended up happening was there was a designer in my previous job who before I left had said he'd love to help me with my future projects so I reached out to him and he said he wanted to help with this this was good because like he did create this awesome design with the hand with the gun and the beaker and I am very happy with how the book looks however the process did take much longer than expected and that was for two main reasons one was he had a lot of personal stuff going on he had a death in the family he lost a job he got a new job job so those things probably added about two months to the process just where he would go offline and I couldn't reach him understandably but also a little bit frustrating when it comes to my own timelines the other thing though is that he isn't an experienced book cover designer and that became very clear when we started working together so he had this great concept but it was really hard to find typography that would go with it and I still wonder like what might have been suggested if I had a designer who was used to working in this format another thing was he designed the cover in RGB instead of CMYK now RGB is the color Spectrum you use for Designing things for digital whereas CMYK is what you do for print and he said like oh well you're going to do lots of digital marketing that's why I did it that way but I sort of went well it's a print product like we should design for the product and the marketing supports the product not the other way around and that meant when I got the first copies of the book The Colors were a lot more muted and muddier than they are on the screen and it was hard to communicate that because he's not that experienced in print design and also when I take photos of the book it looks a lot brighter than it does in real life so he's based in Hungary I'm in Australia I ended up having to send books from here to there so he could see what they looked like and That Was Then a two-week process so a lot of little things like that that meant the book took more time than it needed to and then once he finally got it we decided to make some tweaks to the brightness and the title but that was like between when I got my books and when he was able to look at it again that was a month so there are a lot of fresh frustrating things like that that I don't think would have happened if I'd been working with someone who was more experienced in this medium having said that he did not charge me anything for my cover very very generously he said he would do it for free so I didn't end up paying for this very important part of the process I do have some context for how much covers do cost though because I did used to work in non-fiction publishing but going rate for a good custom cover was about a thousand dollars Australian in my case I originally wanted to have an Illustrated cover so the pricing is a little bit different to one that uses stock images the quotes I got ranged from three thousand dollars U.S to ten thousand dollars U.S so in Australian dollars I'm guessing that's about four and a half Grand to fifteen thousand dollars so that is a significant area where I saved when it comes to this book after that I had my internal layout files ready I had my cover files ready and it was time to distribute it so distribution is how your book gets from you to everywhere you can buy it so that might be be traditional bookstores for most Indie authors it's websites like Amazon and the online version of bookstores like the Barnes and Noble website rather than the Barnes Noble bricks and water store there are a couple of ways to go about getting your book out there one is to create accounts with each of the retailers where you want it to be listed and then upload your files to them another approach is to use a distributor in my case I did both so for the ebook I uploaded it directly to Amazon because Amazon is the biggest website out there when it comes to selling books by uploading it directly to Amazon My Hope was that I could better track how the book was performing and that has been the case so far I mean with Amazon I can already see the pre-orders coming in whereas with my distributor I can't the distributor I used for everywhere else is called ingramspark and they are basically a central point where you upload your files both print and ebook and then they feed it out all of the retailers so if you happen to buy a paperback or hardcover version of my book from anywhere it's actually coming from ingramspark who is then sending it out to those retailers if you order an ebook from anywhere that isn't Amazon same thing it's coming from ingramspark this is easy because it means I need to upload it only once but I know from past experience the reporting isn't great it's also really hard to know what the timings are at each of the retailers because you're not working with them directly so for Amazon if I make a change to the books listing or the files those updates will be visible on the platform sometimes instantaneously but usually within a couple of days when I make the same updates to ingramspark it could take a couple of months before it's available on the different websites so that can be a little bit frustrating but I think having the ebook on Amazon and ingramspark for everywhere else is a good balance between the amount of work involved in pay off because Amazon is the biggest site out there when it comes to how much it costs I think it was 49 U.S for each version of the book on ingramspark the e-book and paperback could happen in one listing so 100 us for everything so let's say like a hundred and sixty-ish dollars Australian for the listings since I uploaded my book since I've uploaded my book they've actually started offering listings for free so it means there is no fee to upload your files I'm assuming they'll just take a larger cut of the sale price once the book is available but I'm not quite sure what the difference will be yet and then the final step is marketing now I'm not going to get too much into that in this video because obviously my book hasn't launched yet I haven't finished spending money there once the book does launch I might change my strategy and spend more in certain areas than I was planning and less than others depending on how things go at a very high level the things that I'm doing are content marketing so self-generated content like this like Instagram posts like my email newsletter influencer reach out so reach out to a bunch of bookfluences to see if they'd be willing to feature powerless in their content review websites so that's sites like netgalley where you can make your book available for reviewers to read and review as well as sites like Publishers Weekly and kirkus reviews that publish reviews of books and then advertising so advertising on Amazon BookBub Instagram Goodreads when it comes to the cost for all of these activities I'm expecting to spend about ten thousand dollars Australian which is a lot and that's for a couple of reasons one is that I still would like to be traditionally published in the future and I know that there's a chance any agent I weary might look at the sales history of powerless so if I can get that to be higher than it would have been otherwise that'll work in my favor the other thing is that powerless is the beginning of my author career so any investment I make now will hopefully lead to more readers now who will read other things in future but this is all up in the air at the moment I don't know how any of it will go so we need to wait and see and then there's one final area that I spent money on which isn't technically like related to publishing powerless but they are expenses related to powerless so I think it's best to include them for the sake of transparency which was writing competitions or book competitions so I mentioned earlier that when I wasn't having much luck with querying I entered Palace in a bunch of competitions for unpublished books and that was in the hope of getting the attention of a traditional agent or publisher now that didn't happen but I did win a competition I was shortlisted in another so it was good to do from a confidence boosting perspective when it comes to the cost of these I haven't actually broken down in the blog post I might put it on the screen but I spent 2 800 Australian dollars altogether that is for competition entry fees but it's also for the killer Nashville conference now the killer Nashville Claymore award in the ya category is the one that I won and I happened to find out that I was a finalist like right when I had quit my job in Switzerland and the conference was the day after I was due to finish my job so it just felt like it was a sign I also felt like going to this conference would be just a nice transition from my really stressful time in crypto to more consciously and actively being a writer so that 2800 it includes all the competition entry fees as well as like flights from Switzerland to Nashville accommodation in Nashville and the cost of the conference so the grand total of everything I spent on powerless was 21 000 Australian dollars and that works out to about 14 000 U.S it is a lot of money compared to what a lot of Indie authors spend and there are definitely things I wouldn't spend on next time so like I said I wouldn't do the manuscript critiques next time which will save me about six grandish and I also wouldn't do the competitions and conferences next time I think if I was going to another country anyway then I might put a conference in there but I wouldn't fly like to Nashville again just to fly to Nashville so that would actually save me almost nine thousand dollars which brings the total down significantly so we'd go from what 21 000 down to twelve thousand having said that I also did get a free cover so that is something I would need to consider when it comes to my next book and if I wanted an Illustrated cover based on the quotes I got that's probably going to be a few grand now did I need to spend this much definitely not as an indie author there are many things I could have done to make this cheaper I could have learned to do my internal layout maybe I could have done one last round of editing I could have gotten like a template cover instead of something that was custom designed and all of these would have saved a lot however like I said earlier I didn't want to learn these new skills myself I wanted to spend my free time learning how to write and writing other books and hopefully even better books so for that reason it was worth it for me to spend as much as I did the other thing to keep in mind is that I do have a corporate job so it's not like I went into debt to publish this book if I was writing full time and didn't have that income then I probably would have tried to cut a lot more from this process I would not have given myself such a big marketing budget I probably would have tried to learn to do the internal layout myself but I do have an income that can help offset this I also have savings that can help offset this so one of my plans for years now has been to take time off to just travel and write in fact that was my plan for 2020 and then we had a pandemic so no travel no writing so I had money saved to take six months off in 2020 and I've been working for the past three years since then so I've continued building up those savings since then so that meant I had this money set aside that could go towards the book if you don't have this money set aside and you are an indie author I do not recommend spending this much money I think starting your career as an author or starting any type of business where the goal is to make a profit and to sustainably fund yourself I think if you're starting in a place of debt that makes things so much harder because you've got so much more ground to cover you need to sell so many more books in order to just break even now that is the case for me with powerless but again I do have another income so this was more about in some cases getting validation and literally paying for that validation and in other cases trying to give my book the best shot it could and I could put more money into that to help make that happen whether it works or not remains to be seen But fingers crossed anyway I hope you enjoyed this video like I said there is a blog post version so if you want to get even more detail if you want to see more of the financial breakdown head over to jacquelinepretty.com where you can also get the first three chapters of powerless which will be out on the 13th of June which is very very exciting anyway sign up for the first three chapters if you like them please pre-order the book it's 2.99 on Amazon so very affordable and I will see you next time bye