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 What's Your New Novel Worth

Have you ever stopped to think about how much your book is worth? When you contemplate that question, you probably think about all the services you purchased before and after publication, including book editing, proofreading, formatting, cover design and layout services. While these are all good numbers to know, and they do factor into the cost of your book, don’t forget about yourself. Even if you did all of those things yourself and had no out-of-pocket expenses, your book still has a price on it. Let’s take an in-depth look.

1. Writing the Book

The first thing you need to think about is the value of your time. What’s your time worth? What are you giving up to write your book? Was it a weekend getaway? Did you put more stress on your partner because you couldn’t help out with cooking or cleaning? Did you turn down family get-togethers to finish your book? All of these things have a cost. Of course, rather than give each of the events you missed a price, it’s easier to give yourself an hourly wage.

Let’s say you worked 20 hours a week for 16 weeks on your book and you decided that your personal hourly rate was $20. In this scenario, you spent 320 hours on your book. At $20, your total cost for writing the book is $6,400.

2. Editing the Book

You can edit your book yourself. If you did that, multiply the hours you spent editing by your hourly rate. For myself, I usually spend about 10 hours of editing per round of editing, and I typically do it 3 times. Once on the computer. Once via text to speech and once via Grammerly. This is an additional $600. If you paid someone, then your cost is the price you paid your professional editor plus the time you spent making sure the editor's changes were correct. Those numbers may be more than $600.

3. Final Edit and Proofreading

Once you’re finished editing the book, it’s always a good idea to give it one more read-through. This is where you find mistakes that you introduced during editing, and even editing during this round can introduce mistakes. It just is what it is, so be careful. I caught one after I published AVIA IV. Eventually, I’ll fix it in the ebook version, but I found a comma instead of a period. It was the direct result of my deleting a dialogue sentence and forgetting to change that punctuation. Is it annoying? Yep. Is it critical? No, because I found it before I published the print book version. With that being said, it usually takes me about 6 hours to do that final edit and proofread. That’s another $120.

4. Formatting Your Book

If you paid someone to do this, then your cost is the cost that you paid plus the time you spent making sure the layout was correct. When I do this, it usually takes me 6 to 8 hours. This includes page and paragraph formatting. Making sure the chapter headers are correct and the page numbers are in the book and insert any special details, like fancy lines or images. This is another $160.

5. Cover Design

As you’ve probably guessed by now, I do all my custom cover work. They can take me anywhere from 10 to 40 hours to create. If you paid someone, then it’s the cost you paid your cover designer. My personal cost is upwards of $800, and if it’s an AVIA cover, then you better believe it’s worth $800. Those take forever. Here’s the caveat. You can now use AI to make your cover images. This is much faster. However, if you use Amazon to publish your book, they want to know if you used any AI. Use an AI cover image at your own risk. No one knows that’s going to happen in the future to authors who used AI in any part in their books or on their covers.

6. Making the Audio Book

Making an audio book can be expensive. On average, it’ll cost about $2,500, but it can be as high as $20,000, depending on the length of the book and the number of individuals involved in its production. It works about to between $200 and $300 per finished hour of the audiobook. My audiobooks can be as short as an hour or as long as 16 hours. On average, they’re about 6 hours. So that’s a cost of $1,200 to $1,800. It’s important to note that I do my own audiobooks, so I don’t pay anyone. It’s just my time that I’m spending on the production.

7. Uploading to Your Desired Publishing Platform

No matter what you choose as a publishing platform, you’re going to upload your novel document and your covers into the site. This takes me about an hour, if it doesn’t get rejected due to ridiculous errors, like the text going over the space or a non-flattened cover. That’s another $20.

Total Cost of Publishing the Book

The total worth of one of my average-length books, which range from 30,000 to 50,000 words is $9,300. Your book’s total worth may be different, depending on the professional services you use and/or the length of time it takes you to write and draft your novel.

Why Is Knowing Your Book’s Worth Important?

It’s important to know your book’s worth so that you know when you break even. It’s also important for pricing your book. For example: If your book costs $9,300, and you set your book’s price at $2.99 for the ebook, you’d need to sell 4,514 ebooks to break even. That’s because a $2.99 book only nets $2.06 in royalties. If you wanted to earn back your worth in fewer books, you’d raise the price. Just remember not to raise that price so high that your buyers find it off-putting.

The other reason to keep this in mind is when you encounter someone who is randomly plying their book services to you. They may be offering social media advertising, book covers, book trailers, email lists. Whatever it is, and they want paid for it. Basically, they want that $2 just earned off that one book sale yesterday. Keep in mind that that $2 goes toward your reimbursement. Your books still owe you another $8,098, so be careful when being randomly solicited by people offering author services. You do have costs to cover even if you didn’t pay any actual cash upfront.