Hi, everyone. We're glad you're here. This is the Three Lesbians and a Pen podcast. Get ready to have your world rocked. As we dive into the wild and sometimes wacky world of self publishing. We are three fabulous bestselling authors. I'm your host, Kimberly Todd with my best friends.

K. C. Luck

and Jamey Moody. 

Join us as we discuss the joys of writing, challenges of self publishing, and anything else that tickles our fancy. 

Hey there, and welcome to episode 12 of the Three Lesbians and a Pen podcast. I'm Kimberly Todd and I'm here with my fabulous friends, KC Luck and Jamey Moody. Today, we're talking about how much does it cost to publish a book? But before we start, what's everyone been up to?

KC?

It was a busy week, actually. I was very excited to put my sixth book in my Darkness series, is now available on Audible. So I was able to process that, listen to the rest of it, get it all up there, and amazingly it's up on Audible already. 

Wow, awesome. 

Yay.

Yes, Violet Dixon did the narration again.

She's done all the books and it's excellent sounding. So I hope if you're a fan of the Darkness series, you will go get it.

Awesome. That's Cool. Let's see. I was dog sitting this week with my sister's dog, and so if you hear dogs in the background, it's, Jamey and I'm trying for it not to be so fingers crossed. The other thing I did this week is I, got more into my work in progress and I'm having a great time learning, these two new, MCs and I'm finding that I quite like them and it's been fun writing them. Does that happen to y'all? You have an idea and everything and then you kind of get to know them a little better once you start writing.

Yep.

Okay, cool. Then I'm not the only weird one. Yeah. I'm getting to know them and I really like them.

I'm going to interrupt again. I forgot to mention that I'm also working on my super secret project. I started writing it. I'm on my third chapter of the super secret project, which

It's back.

It's back, which I found out by finally reading the emails about it that it's not actually come out until May 8th, but it's due in January.

So

Okay. So you got to get it done. Oh, and I forgot to add. Meant to be Christmas is out there live.

Yeah.

And it had a great start. It's got a really nice reviews and I've been pleasantly surprised because since it's a holiday book, you don't know at first since it was released in October, if there'll be that much interest yet.

But it's done really well. So I've been really happy.

And KC, yours is coming out soon too, right? Your holiday...

Yeah, I'm on the bandwagon with about every other, sapphic author it sounds like who has written a Christmas novel this year. It's incredible list and I was able to write a novella that's a Christmas theme holiday layover and I'm hoping that it stands out a little bit from the crowd because it's a little shorter and it's only $2. 99. So we'll see.

Yeah.

Cool. What about you, Kimberly? What were you up to?

Today I crammed in a lot of writing because I was a slacker the last few days because I was visiting mom and we basically did everything you could possibly do in four days, to winterize the house. And so that went well and it was great to see my mom and that's it.

Let me just add that Kimberly, had a hammer and she was a true lesbian all weekend fixing things. Let me just ask one question. Did you wear flannel? Come on. Kimberly. Did you wear? 

Not yet. The mystery.

Such a femme. Hammer, but still a femme. Yeah. 

We're so proud though. You were lesbian it up this 

I think you guys are going to kill me when I tell you I do not own anything flannel.

Oh my god! Not even sheets?

I don't, I swear.

What the...

I know.

I know what I’m sending

That's right.

Good 

I can see the influx of flannel coming to my doorstep now.

That's right.

I can't believe it so I'm so hurt 

I'm not sure I'm a lesbian now, there might be something wrong.

Exactly. We're revoking your license.

Dang girl. 

Okay, well, back to things here. So Jamey, do we have any reader feedback this week?

Cheryl emailed us and she is still enjoying the podcast. She couldn't believe that three wonderful talented writers like us get imposter syndrome. But it is real. As for the question of the week, if she read one of our books and liked it and felt a connection to the story, then she'd go out and buy the rest of our books. I thought that was pretty nice. She said, she's already looking forward to our Christmas releases coming out and, she told us to have a great week.

And then we heard from Jules. She has a follow up question for us this week. She said, how do we go about finding an editor? Do we ask other author friends, check inside covers, Google, Yelp, or what? I would have to say for me, I think I got through both my editors through, other authors and then the editor that I've been with now forever. And, we are friends, author friends, and she also edits. And so that's how I got mine. How about y'all? How did y'all get yours?

So I actually got mine through Fiverr. It's kind of scary to admit. Not everybody uses Fiverr because there's kind of a bad reputation. But yeah, when I first started out, I went and found an editor through Fiverr. And 

that editor did not do the best job. So I went and looked again on Fiverr and found a second editor who cost more, but still did not do a great job. And the third time was a charm. I went back to Fiverr for the third time and found the most amazing editor who was just getting started out in editing and gave me a great deal. Did a fantastic job.

She's my copy editor and has been for the last 20 books.

Wow. Sticking with it there. Aren't you?

I'm a cheapskate.

What about you? Kimberly?

I think I told you guys before I had one editor who was a friend of mine from work, and then another editor, that I wish I could have kept, she worked for Simon Schuster for years, but she could only do the one book and luckily I found my editor who I love now and I actually got her from the I Read Indies list. So that was great and she's amazing and that's where we get our editors from. 

I think Jules also commented on your post on Instagram, Kimberly, you want to fill us in?

Oh yeah, when we asked the question how much would a person pay for a book, Jules said that for an author that she already knows and loves, she would pay full price. Whether, that's $9. 99 for an ebook or $20 to $25 for a paperback. And then for an unknown author, she'd rather try, borrowing from a library or trying to find if they have their book on KU. So thanks Jules for writing in. And so for today, again, we're going to talk about how much does it cost to publish your book and KC, do you want to start us off? 

So when you actually publish a book, there's a lot to it. And we talked about that, but there's also a lot of parts to being an author. And it does add up. So we're going to go through quite a list. I don't want you to panic when you hear all the different numbers and start to do the math in your head because you don't have to do all of it at once.

And you can find cheaper options for each of the different items. Don't necessarily, bargain against quality, but you can find cheaper options to do a lot of this stuff. And so cover designers. I'll start with cover designers and I actually do a lot of the cover design myself but the more complicated ones I've had which you would probably recognize from the Ruby series and Also, one of the Darkness series ones was very complicated.

And so I actually hired a cover designer named Mae Donnie And she charged me, I think it was right around $400 for each cover. So, totally worth it, because it was beyond my graphic design skills, but otherwise I'd do them myself. 

I do some of my own covers. I did the one for Meant to be Christmas. I enjoy doing them, but I'm with, KC, I don't always have the skills, that I need to do those. So I've paid, I think when I recovered my first series, I paid $350 for all three of the covers. And then I think the most that I've paid for a cover so far would be $280.

Yeah. And I have no design skills when it comes to making a cover. So I have, a friend of mine who works in, advertising and she does the covers for me as a wonderful friend that she is. And I usually pay for the stock photography. So that can range depending on the rights, and the image that we want to use.

It can range anywhere from, $40 to $500. So I paid $500. I think only on one of the covers and then $250 or around there if you want it depends on the rights that you want to get obviously as well.

We talk about copyright rights, yeah, definitely. Want to make sure you get those lined up and pay for them. We talked about editors a little bit already, but how much do they cost? I got lucky with my editor. She has increased her prices as she's become more popular and gotten more clients, I've been kind of a favorite, so I get a good deal, 

Yay. 

But yeah, I'm under the $500 threshold. So I'm actually very, very fortunate. I know a lot of people who pay more.

My first editor, I went out and got a super duper editor, that had edited other, people's debut novels and it cost me $1,500. And I was shocked at the time, but let me tell you, that was really good money I spent because she not only edited the book, but she taught me about writing the book, because like I said, it was my debut.

And, so she helped me a lot after that, the next two or three, I paid $550 each for those. They were just a flat fee. And then I got my current editor and she, charges me by the hour, however long it takes her to actually do it. And so it runs, I'd say around. $400, something like that. And it's kind of funny cause she's the cheapest, but she's the best.

Other than that first one, like I said, that was because I was new and I needed her in other words.

Yep. And I had the same exact thing. Actually, it's funny that you say that Jamey because my first book was also $1,500. And they really did help me. I mean, I got better as I went, obviously, like most writers do, but that first book is kind of scary and you don't know what you're doing and any help and guidance that you can get and pay for in my mind is invaluable because you need it. So I paid $1,500 for my first book. And now, because my books are so long, I get charged by the word, which I like that. so my price varies. depending on each book, but most of my books are long.

If you guys read my books, you know that. So they average around $800, a book, which I think is fair. Cause I like to do a few rounds. So that's for a few rounds.

Okay. 

I think we were going to talk about proofreading costs. But, I'll just tell you up front that I do not pay for a proofreader So y'all take over. I know KC does, don't you?

Yeah. Well, sort of. So I do have a proofreader. I have had some proofreaders, work on books in the past. Some I've actually had a proofreader to go back and read some of my old ones to catch errors on some of those very first ones before I had the good editor, but most of the time though, my proofreader is my mom, as we mentioned before, and she does not charge me.

And I'm very, very fortunate for that because I know some proofreaders can charge a lot.

That's so sweet of her.

And I've had a couple of proofreaders in the past, and some of them did okay job and some of them I just didn't think were what I was looking for, but I did pay up to $280. But now I rely on my editor and a couple of other people that are close to me.

And then, talking about logos and branding.

Let me say on logos and branding, that's not something that you have to have for your first book.

Right.

I decided to do logo and branding, after I'd written a few and knew that maybe there was a place for me. That, that's going to be one of those things that you don't have to do at the beginning.

Editor? Yes. Proofreader? Probably. Cover? Yes. but logo not necessarily. But having said that, I tried to design my own logo. Didn't go too well. or it didn't say what I wanted it to. And now the one that I have now, I think it cost me around $150, which is also what the logo costs for, Three Lesbians in a Pen, our pod logo.

And, they do a really great job. And it's a cool logo. You did a really good job. Your logos look 

really good. 

I'm the one sipping the tea on the, and spilling the tea. Just in case you wondered who was who on it, that's me. I'm sipping the tea.

Yeah I don't think they thought it was me. Pretty sure that, okay. Let's talk about layouts. So laying out your book or formatting your book, you can pay for that, if you want to have it a service do it. There are places on the internet, you can find, you can find them on Fiverr. You can find them a lot of places and they will charge you, anywhere from a hundred dollars to up and you have to keep in mind that they will also charge you for revisions. So you have to keep track of how many times you're going to have to have a revision done when you get your formatting. As Jamey had said, I format my own books using Vellum.

So if you want to make a one time purchase and purchase a software, you can use it on a Mac, which is what it's designed for, or you can use it on a PC through the Mac cloud and save a lot of money doing that yourself. If you have multiple books.

I started with Vellum at the very beginning and that's what I've always done.

Yeah. Me too. And I just bought the full, shebang so you can do ebook and print. I think it's $249.

Oh, yeah, I'll looked those up. It's $199 for ebook, and if you do ebook and print, it's $249.

And that's for a lifetime, and they do all the updates and everything. You don't have to, it's not a subscription, and you don't have to buy anything else. That's a one time fee, and it's awesome.

Yeah. I was going to say, and like we were talking about in prior episodes, it is invaluable. It is one of the best, programs that I've ever used for doing something like this. Really easy, especially if you're trying to learn a bunch of new things as a new author. It's one of the things that will be really helpful to you.

You can do it in Word. You can actually format it in Word. There are websites that give you step by step by step, how to do it. Set up your gutters, set up your margins. I have done that before, once, and it was horrible. It took so long. I finally just hired someone to format it. It was just unbelievable.

Yeah, I'm gonna say spend the money on Vellum.

It will save you a lot of time, money and headache. 

And it's easy to learn. It's very user friendly. 

I wouldn't tell you that if it wasn't easy.

What about web hosting sites? 

We all have websites and how much do you pay for yours, Jamey?

I think it's around $150 a year. It seems like sometimes they'll run a special and if I'll pay for two or three years, it's a little bit less than that. But I think generally it's around $150 a year.

I host mine through Bluehost and mine is, $260 a year.

I use iPage for the hosting and Weebly is my interface and I pay around $150 to $200 a year. Along with, the website, you're gonna have to pay for a domain name and my domain name cost has changed over the years that I've had it, but 

it's about $20 a year.

Yeah, I think mine's $29 or something like that.

Yeah, mine's $17 through iPage, You can get it free the first year a lot of places. 

How about mailing lists? 

We're all now on MailerLite. Is that correct?

Woo! 

Yeah. Let me say I switched over from MailChimp because I was paying around $60 to $70 a month on MailChimp and I switched over to MailerLite and now I'm at like $30 a month. And they have free versions you know, until you get up to a certain amount of subscribers. So, it'll be free for a while if you're just starting out.

But, MailerLite has been, super easy to learn. I waited because I was like, oh, I'm going to have to learn something new. But it wasn't bad at all.

MailerLite costs me, $39 a month right now, based on the number of subscribers. When I first started out, it was free. So keep that in mind. But it's worth it. You need to have a mailing list. That is something you need to start at the beginning.

Yeah.

And make sure that you do it monthly and be consistent because people are going to be looking for it.

Yep, absolutely. Next week we're gonna talk about advertising, but advertising is a cost you have to keep in mind when you're an author There are plenty of ways to spend money on advertising ads and swag and all that stuff which we'll talk about next week. But it can add up. 

I spent about $50 a year. But when I first started out and didn't know how to do ads, I spent $1,200 one year. And that was a lot for me because I was just like, I don't have that kind of money to spend every year. So now I keep the cost way, way down.

Okay, I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say there KC because I do use ads every month. And mine are around I'd say in between two and three hundred dollars a month and they're mostly on Amazon ads.

Yeah, and the same for me. I spend about $200 a month on specifically on Amazon ads.

So thank you for that, So you're telling us we're wasting money. Are you?

I don't know.

Man, I tell you, sometimes I wonder that, and I'm so, tempted to turn them off and see what happens, but then I get scared. I'm like, oh, I better run that So...

We've talked about vellum I have Publisher Rocket. Mm hmm. I think all of us may have that It's a it's $199 for lifetime access now when I got it, it was $99, but they've added a lot of new features. It's very handy to help you choose keywords, for your book,

ad terms that you want to use, when you're building ads that KC doesn't use, but, Kimberly and I do. It helps you choose the right categories too. It's very useful. It's a useful tool.

Yeah, and you can check out your competition or if you want to try to see if you're writing a new book, something completely different, you can go see what books are doing really well in a certain genre. And, pull some data from that that helps you kind of target your new book when you launch.

Yeah, it can be really useful, for sure. I don't use it as much as I probably should, but I know it's out there as a tool. If I want to go look up how, everyone else is doing, it's nice.

Yeah, I use it for book releases for sure.

 Which, takes us to BookFunnel. I think we all have BookFunnel, don't we? Mine is a hundred and sixty a year. I use that to distribute ARC copies to my ARC team. What else does book funnel do y'all?

The group promos is a big thing that you can, join in and you can either join sales or join something to build your newsletter list.

Yeah, 

So that would be something at the beginning. You might want to consider.

Definitely would put it on the must have list, for sure. 

What else are we spending money

There's Grammarly. I use it to, spell check my newsletters and things like that. I don't put my whole book through Grammarly because I'm paranoid. I don't want to upload my book into that thing, but I know some people do. Yeah. 

 I do it.

Oh, you do?

Yeah. I know it costs about, I think $140 a year.

So what does it do for you?

Actually it does a good job, actually I use it mostly for like Facebook and stuff like that because I have it turned on for the internet. So when I'm typing Facebook it'll put. You know, little lines under there. Like you may want to reword this and not sound like an idiot.

That's what I use it for, too, in my newsletter.

I really use it more for that than I do for my actual writing. I don't like it suggestions sometimes when I'm actually doing the actual fiction writing, so I will turn it off often, but, yeah, it's pretty good tool for, I actually have it. It's even works when I do messaging and texting. 

Yeah. 

It's very, helpful.

And it's been getting better. Have you noticed the suggestions that it's telling you is better? You're like, Ooh, that does sound better than my crappy sentence. 

Thank you very much. 

Yeah. In there. Be careful. Yeah. But yeah, it is pretty smart. It's getting smart all the time. It's amazing. The software. And then there's also very similar to that as Pro Writing Aid, which, you can also buy. I looked it up. That's $120 annually or $399 for a lifetime plan, which is kind of cool, cause you know, Grammarly adds up every year and yeah.

So I haven't used that one though, but I hear it's similar, very

similar. Yeah, Yeah. 

neither.

I've heard a lot of people that like it though. And then speaking of softwares, we have our BookBrush slash Canva slash Photoshop. any of those different designing tools are out there. They vary in price. Canva Pro is what I have is $120 a year. 

I use, BookBrush. It's like $122 a year. I really like it too. You can make covers, first off, from it, but you can also make promos when, you want to tell people about your books, put it in social media, or do a book release, so I really like it.

Yeah. And I use BookBrush as well. And mine is a $184 a year, but I got the platinum because I wanted the extra templates and things that they give you. Sometimes I haven't used a lot of them, but I just like knowing that they're there. So sometimes if you just need to make a social media ad really quick, it has a completely already done ad and you just slap your book in like it could be a coffee cup with a table or something in the book laying there and it'll put your book mock ups.

That's it. 

Mm

But does it have a free version because Canva has a free version. It's very limited, but you could use it to start out with and not have to pay for a subscription.

I don't know. Brookbrush might. They've got a cheaper version. I know that because I'm like in the middle tier.

Yeah, I don't know that answer actually.

So then go with Canva if you want to start for free.

Yeah, that's probably a good way to go. And then also just the basics. You have to have a computer, of course. Those have come down a lot. I don't know about you guys, but, I bought my laptop for a lot more than $300, which I could probably buy the same exact model for now on Amazon.

So yeah, so the windows versions of laptops are really low. And I also priced it against a relatively middle of the road or lower end Air Book. And it was $800. So I was really surprised with both of those. I would have thought the numbers would be a lot higher for the actual hardware.

Yeah.

Yeah, I got a MacBook when I first started, mainly because I wanted to be able to run Vellum on it. I started with the MacBook and I am semi-retired now and bought me a desktop top computer for home.

And, I really enjoyed it and I don't use the Mac as much unless I'm getting ready to format a book to release it. And I think I got a deal on my MacBook because I knew a guy that worked for Apple. So I think I got it for around $700 bucks.

Yeah. And I just, I've always used Macs because I've worked in advertising for years. It was just easier. And so whatever a MacBook is now, you know, they're like 1500 bucks or something. Or you can spend thousands more, but...

Oh, yeah, but you can get it for seven or eight hundred still I think for what you know for what you need

Yeah. You could buy a refurbished one too, from Apple. 

I think that's what mine was I think that's what mine was.

Then there's things like accounting, paying for someone to be your accountant to figure a thing out. You have that, swag adds up, conferences add up, but all the last ones on the list I noticed are not things you must have to start out. I was doing a quick tally of the things you would probably want to spend money on if you were starting out fresh.

And I came up with about, let's see. I can do my math here. You could probably get away with spending around $1,200, maybe?

That's with cover, editor, newsletter, that kind

of stuff. 

And using free items or designers from Fiverr, like KC was saying.

Yep. So you could probably get away with about $1,200 to start a book and have it quality enough to publish.

Yeah, that's not bad.

Yeah. So there you go. That is how much it costs to publish your first book. And next week, we are going to be talking about advertising.

Which is going to include lots of different things, not just ads. 

True.

 KC, do we have a question of the week?

We do. All right. So here's our question of the week. We're really curious to find out, do you even notice these Amazon ads that my, pod pals are spending so much money on?

Very funny. 

You better say yes, people.

Please. You click them, please.

Yes. And do you click on them? If you see them, if you even recognize that they're ads and do you click on them? 

Maybe I won't be spending as much money after all, but, or maybe I'll be spending more because I'll know they work.

There you go. That's true. And if you want to, you can just send me a text with your answer. I have not received very many. I don't want to sound like Jamey with, you know, the crying over spilled milk with the nobody. Nobody emails me, but I, nobody ever texts me and I'm the text person. So please send me a text.

There's no crying in podcasting. I wasn't crying. I just said, would you please email me? As you can see, I'm the friendly one. So, please email me contact@threelesbiansandapen. com spelled out. Can you hear Leo crying in the background? 

 Leo's cheering you on. 

OMG! Leelee.

And with that, I think we'll end the podcast for this week. Thank you everyone for listening.

Thank you.

Yeah, thanks for listening. Bye. 

Thanks for listening. If you'd like to reach out to us, you can contact us by email at contact@threelesbiansandapen.com with the number three spelled out or on Instagram, Facebook and X at Three Lesbians and a Pen using the number three. And finally on our website, at threelesbiansandapen.com, we look forward to hearing from you, see you next week.