A famous quotation goes something like “Everyone has a book in them.” and, although the quote goes on to say, “…and in most cases that’s where it should stay.” we at Blue Poppy Publishing think that there are still a lot of great books, both fiction and non-fiction that could and should be published.
Cost of Self-Publishing
Anything from nothing to a few thousand pounds is usual.
You can publish a book for zero cost, but you should be careful. A great deal depends on what your hopes and aspirations are for your book, but even if you only want to print off a few copies for close friends and family, you should at least take the time to ensure your book has been properly edited, even if that just means re-reading what you have written and trying to correct obvious spelling mistakes. You will also need to format the book and create a cover. If you are good at these things already, or are willing to learn, you may be able to do them yourself, although there is an art to book cover design that arguably extends beyond what can realistically be taught.
If you have ambitions to be a professional or semi-professional writer, then you really do need to spend some money to make sure your book is up to scratch. But how much should you spend and who can you trust in a minefield of companies who are out to take your money?
We have certain trusted editors, illustrators, cover designers, and printers whom we have used on previous occasions and I will provide their details. We also offer formatting and cover design and preparation in-house, although I make no claim to being a top cover designer I don’t charge much.
Yes, but how much?
How long is a piece of string? Well here goes.
Basic editing costs, as a rough rule of thumb, £10 – £20 per 1,000 words.
If your book needs a structural edit and major rewriting then it will be more because that is a separate stage. For more on editing see here.
Formatting is something you can do yourself, but if you don’t want to learn how, we can format a typical digital manuscript in ‘Word’ for about £100 (for a straightforward novel). Things like illustrations and indexing can push the cost up.
For cover design, again, most people can do this themselves, but if you can’t or don’t want to, you can spend anything from £10 for a plain one-colour cover with the title and author name, to several thousand pounds on a fancy production from a famous cover designer. We would suggest you don’t spend more than about £500 though. You need to consider how you are going to make your money back.
Printing; of course you don’t have to do a print run at all. You can use a Print on Demand (PoD) service, such as Ingram Spark and or Amazon KDP. We like to do a print run if we can though because the unit cost per book works out cheaper; sometimes a lot cheaper. The quality is also higher and we can have nice little extras like foil embossing or Spot UV for example.
UK book parameters.
How big should your book be? What type of paper? Which font should you use? These are all questions that plague new self-publishing authors. The problem is there is no single correct answer to any of these type of questions, but there are at least a few possible guidelines you might want to follow. The cost will typically be between a quarter and a half of the retail price. This depends hugely on how many copies you have printed at a time and where you go. I tend to have runs of about 300 and expect to pay a third of the RRP per copy. Of course, I set the RRP but it HAS to be competitive, so a typical novel will be around £10-£12 at time of writing (2024) which means I am paying about £1,000 for a run of 300 books. Inflation will affect all these figures if I don’t update this page. 🙂
Size matters
One option is to take a ruler into a bookshop and measure books similar to the one you have written. I did that. I felt stupid.
Novels
If you are talking about a novel, there is one best size for UK distribution. It’s 198mm x 129mm. Other sizes can be used, but this is the size of most paperbacks you can buy in bookshops and it is important to conform to the norms when you are on the periphery to start with. Someone like Liz Shakespeare who has a well established reputation as a local bestseller can go for a different size and be sure that bookshops will stock her, but you can’t.
While on the subject of novels, there is a lot of dispute about how many words constitutes a novel. NaNoWriMo accepts 50,000 words as a full length novel and I’m going to accept that, although a great many novels are from 85-100k words these days. I think that fewer than 50k is a novella, and 10k is a short story. But the most important thing is to tell your story. However many words that takes is the correct number. You only have to conform to a word count if you are pitching to agents.
Non-fiction
There are a range of sizes in non-fiction which can include the standard novel size, mentioned above. This is ideal for memoirs and narrative non-fiction for example. Other sizes, such as A4, A5, 9″ x 6″, 10″ x 8″ etc. are also common. A lot will depend on things like how and where you expect people to read the book. A coffee table book will want a large format, whereas a pocket guide to cheese will need to be, well, pocket sized. Who you choose to do your printing may also be a factor in your choice. This would be a whole blog post in itself.
Children’s Books
With younger children’s books (3-7+ years) all bets are off. They can be all sorts of sizes. That said, a square format 8″ x 8″ is a good starting point. 8″ x 10″ in either landscape or portrait can also work, as can A4 or A5.
Novels for older children (6+ years) will usually fall into the same category as novels for adults. Rules for children’s non-fiction are equally reflected in those for adults.
Paper quality
If you use a PoD publisher like KDP then you don’t get much choice. (you get more with IngramSpark) You can’t usually print hardback editions either. You can now! If you use a printer you have far more parameters. It’s a minefield of options for different purposes, but the first and biggest choice you have to make is whether to use white paper or cream (or beige or whatever they call it). The choice is relatively simple.
- Novel? Cream
- Non-fiction? White
- Kids’ picture book? White
The paper will typically be between 70gsm and 100gsm and honestly there are too many qualities to choose from. The weight alone is not the only factor either. Different printers offer different ranges that don’t always have an obvious equivalence. It is probably best here to ask the printer to send you some swatches and give you their recommendation. It may not always be worth a few pence extra per book for a slightly nicer paper, since readers don’t really seem to mind.
For younger children’s books I tend to prefer a heavier paper. Little hands are more likely to tear pages by accident. The heaviest I have used is 150gsm with a 350gsm cover. But that’s maybe too much. Again, asking the printer is usually a good idea. They are the experts.
Fonts
This begins to fall under formatting, which is a whole separate subject in itself. As a very rough guide, print books for regular readers should use a “serif” font. I use Garamond I have switched to Minion Pro (because it has a far greater range of weights and widths and has a stronger look that pleases my eye) for adults and young adult books or Century Schoolbook for children’s books, although others, such as Times New Roman, Georgia, or Palatino are just as good. Note that different fonts look larger or smaller than each other for a given size. Of these Garamond is the smallest, which is why I usually use it at 12pt. Century schoolbook is the largest of those shown here, and I tend to use 12pt for older children (8-12) and 14 point for younger readers (6-10).
For very young children, beginner readers, I prefer to use a simple sans serif font with ‘single story’ A, and G etc. however, following the golden rule of never using ‘Comic Sans’ I searched for alternatives.
Please don’t imagine there are any hard and fast rules for children’s books, but I like to try and give them a fighting chance of reading for themselves by using a familiar and fairly regular font which resembles how they are first taught to write. That said, many of the best selling picture book use a serif font so, whatever people say, there’s no one correct answer. To the above list I have added Cormorant Infant, and several others besides. I tend to list the typeface used in each book on the copyright and credits page.
If you want to get creative, do it in the headings.
Fonts for reading are clean and simple. It is never a good idea to use any fancy font for the main body text. If you want to use a fancy font on the cover, or in the chapter headings go for it. But even then, don’t go too crazy. Keep it relevant to the genre.