How to Self-Publish on a Budget: Craft a Detailed Book Publishing Plan

1. Introduction To Affordable Self-Publishing: Self publishing a book has a lot of moving parts. After the hard work of writing the book. You've got the edit, developmental line and copy edits. The interior design, the front and back materials like author pages and copyrights. The legality of publishing, the cover design, distribution, author platform, social media, advanced reader copy, soliciting reviews, post launch marketing. It's a lot and it can cost a lot of money unless we get a little creative about it. Hi, I'm Hannah. I've been a 100% self employed self publishing author since 2018 under multiple pin names and genres. In college, I studied both creative writing and marketing and I've stayed active in both of these fields. As an author and as a marketing consultant, I create Youtube videos and other educational content under this name about writing, editing, and publishing your own book. If you're an Indie author or you're planning to be, you've probably seen some of the numbers of how much it can cost to self publish a book. And it's true if you're going all out, it can cost several thousand dollar. And that is frankly, completely unreasonable for most people. So today we're talking about how you can self publish your book affordably if you've never done it before and you're just testing the waters. Or if you're doing something like rapid release, where you're publishing lots of books in a short amount of time. Or if spending $8,000 to publish a book just sounds ridiculous, then this class should be for you. As we move through these lessons, you'll see that the self publishing experience is completely customizable. You can essentially choose a number and then publish a book for that amount. So it can basically cost whatever you'd like it to. I'm going to give you specific strategies for affordable book production. Alternatives for the edit, interior formatting, cover design, publishing, distribution, and marketing of your books. You'll invest a little more time and effort with these methods rather than investing more money. But in the end, you should come out with a reasonably quality book and we're going to do it for under $100 Whenever you're ready, click onto the next video, because we're going to go over our homework assignment for this class. 2. Homework: Your Publishing Plan: Throughout this course, we're going to cover every aspect of producing and publishing a book all on your own. So I want you to make a game plan that you can update as your plans and goals change or as you learn new information. This class is structured as the start of your self publishing journey. So we will get you a basic plan laid out, but as you move through these steps, you're going to learn a lot and you're going to discover your own process. So you might want to make changes to it. Think of this plan as a living, breathing, evolving thing that you're going to keep with you throughout your career. In the description of this class, you will find a Google sheet with checklists, resources, and a template for you to create your own publishing plan. I recommend keeping that sheet open as we move through these lessons to fill it out and take notes as we go. But by the end of this course, you should have a plan laid out with a clear idea of where to start on your self publishing journey. So when you have your template figured out and you're ready to get going, click over to the next video, because we are talking about step one editing. 3. Editing: After your book is written, which only costs time and effort and dignity and blood. The first step that will cost money is an editor. Traditionally, editing a full manuscript can cost thousands of dollars. You've got your developmental editor, this is who's going to help with story structure and character arcs, plot holes like those bigger picture things. Then line editors are going to go line by line and fix things like flow, voice, syntax, verbiage, those types of things. And a copy editor is going to go in and find those teeny tiny errors like typos and formatting issues. Those are the three basic edits. But you might have more depending on your project like a sensitivity reader or a fact checker. Even if you find an editor who bundles all of these services, you're still paying for each individual edit. If you have a manuscript that's 100,000 words and you hire an editor at the standard of one to $0.03 per word. Then editing your full book is going to cost about $6,000 which is a lot of dollar. So what else can we do? No option is going to completely emulate the work that a professional editor can do, but we can get kind of close. So I've broken the strategy down into four phases that can get you as good of an edit as we can get without investing thousands of dollars. So phase one is prep. We can do a little work ahead of time that's going to make this much easier. Item number one is letting that guy rest. If you give yourself some space between the writing part and the editing part, you'll be able to see it with much keener eyes. Because when we've been in the weeds of working on a project for so long, we're just too close to it to be able to see some of those bigger problems. So put it down for a couple of weeks before you start revising. Another tip, you're a writer, you're imaginative, is to pretend that you are editing for a friend. Pretend that this is the first time you've ever read this book. If you can, that will help too. The next step of preparing for your edit is to create a style guide. A style guide is exactly what it sounds like. You're going to make a document that specifies things about your writing style. It could be grammar, it could be punctuation, it could be spelling, especially if you're making up words. This becomes very relevant for genres like fantasy because you are making a lot of things up. You're creating a world, so there's probably names, words, maybe even an entire language you made up. And that's a lot to track and you want to make sure it's consistent throughout the book. So this style guide just acts as a reference point while you're doing yourself. Edit, maybe even for future books in the series. And you can pass it along to your beta readers so that they can check for those inconsistencies as well. There are just lots of variations within the same language, like US versus UK. English versus Canadian versus Australian. Even within the same system of grammar rules, you have things that are kind of up to preference, like the Oxford Comma. You can kind of customize the grammar that you want to use, but you do want to use it consistently. So having a style guide can keep you organized and get your beta readers in on the loop of what you're trying to do a little bit more. It also gives you something to do in that waiting period between writing and editing. If you're still in the writing process, it's a good idea to start your style guide. Now while you're still in the midst of creating those things for yourself, phase two is the self edit. If you check your Google sheet with your homework and go to the editing tab, you will find a checklist of items for you to use to self edit your manuscript. These might not all be relevant for your project, so you might delete a few items and you probably also have things that you'll want to add. So go ahead and go through that list and customize it for yourself. But then you'll do yourself edit with that checklist for a pretty thorough job. One more sit for the self edit portion is to read it out loud. This can help you to hear awkward phrasing, repetitive words, and problems like that. That might be a little too subtle to notice if you're just reading in your head. Phase three is utilizing your community. Find some help. Do several rounds with several beta readers, with curated questions. You could swap critique with other writers, you might even swap edits with other writers. A lot of writers are also editors, but it is so hard to edit your own book. So if you've got two people who are both writers and editors, you might just swap that service with each other. You could swap some other skill too. Say one of you is a copy editor and one of you does book cover design. You can do that for each other, saving you both money. Another option could be utilizing your library and other local resources. A lot of libraries will have a service where they proof read, or give you feedback on your writing, so you might try that out. And phase four is software, so you might use something like the Hemming way app grammar or pro writing aid and they'll check your manuscript for awkward phrasing, grammar mistakes. Anything that may have slipped through that no one caught yet. If you use any other kind of writing software, I recommend checking to see if they have some kind of grammar check already installed. Like novel pad for example, is for planning and drafting your novel. But they also have a pro writing aid integration. So you might already have access to something for free. Check that out before you make any purchases. So those four steps should get your manuscript way cleaner than most self published books. And the only monetary cost might be the fourth phase, depending on what software you go with. I'll estimate this step at the cost of the Hemming Way app. So your price for editing goes from $6,000 to $20 And a lot of work and talking to people, stay safe out there. Now for your homework, just check out the editing tab in the Google sheet and you'll find that checklist I mentioned. So you might go ahead and start adding and removing items there. Check out the list of resources included and then get started on your style guide in the provided section. 4. Interior Formatting: The second category of spending is your interior design. The last time I had my interior formatting done professionally, it was a base of $325 for the book and paperback. The alternative I suggest is DIY. Because I do my own now, it was not that hard to learn. It's kind of fun and I like the way that it turned out. If you want to see a professional versus DIY interior formatting, I paid to have little birds done, but I did starlight myself. I think this is the easiest part of book production to do yourself. So here are a few concepts that you should familiarize yourself with before you attempt to do it yourself. Number one is typography. So you want to choose something clear and readable for your body text. Son sera Fonts are typically better for readability, especially in books. So some common fonts to use are aerial and calibri. Make sure that the size is readable, at least in your physical formats, because on the book your readers can set that themselves. Number two is consistent formatting. Consistency is super duper key. There are lots of creative things to do with interior design, but try to keep the elements like spacing margins and kerning consistent throughout. If you're doing something kooky, you have my full support. I love weird stuff, but make sure that you're intentional and consistent with it, otherwise it will just seem like a mistake. You also want to make sure that it's not so out there that it's distracting from the story itself. Number three, trim sizes, page margins, and bleed. These three are very related to each other, so I'm going to put them in one category. The trim size is your printed books width and height. A common one for books in the US is six x nine, but it can vary a lot based on your genre, the books content, your age demographic. So do some research to find out which dimensions would be appropriate for your book. Your page margin is the space around your book's content. So you want to set these where you can safely print it out without your words being cut off in the manufacturing process. Similarly, bleed refers to a page item like an image or a graphic, where you want it to go all the way to the end of a page. So if you want an image to reach the end of your page, you'll want to extend a little past the edge where the page will be trimmed In production, these three things can also be determined by the format and the chosen publishing platform. So check for each platform specifics before you design your book. It'll save you a lot of time. You can find more detailed checklists for both the book and the physical book. Interior formatting and the interior format tab of your homework document. One very important thing to keep in mind is that you should test all your versions on different devices. So Kendall Mobile Desktop as well as ordering proof copies of the physical book. Because a lot of times things can go wrong in printing, whether it's on your side or their side. So it's good to just fully look through your book before you officially send it to print. While you're looking at it, go ahead and check for reading experience. So improving reading experience could be breaking up long paragraphs properly, utilizing your white space, checking the contrast on images and headings, and basically take in the whole composition and make sure that it's comfortable to look at. If your book is non fiction, like something instructional, check the graphs to make sure that they're understandable. Check the order of steps. Make sure that you've organized things in a logical way. As for software for the interior format, you've got a few options if you use Adobe End Design or Microsoft Word. I recommended Des Richards Skillshare classes on how to format a book Interior. With those programs, there are other resources like Press books, Reds's book editor, Vellum, and Affinity Publisher that can make formatting much easier. So if you end up creating lots of books, it might be worth it at some point to include that in your budget around. Find which software you'd like to use and then you'll be able to find tutorials for it. So this method brings the cost of your interior design from $325 to free, or close to free, depending on the software you choose. It's also worth noting that if you are paying to have a cover designed, they will often bundle your interior formatting with that. So that might be even more affordable. Depending on your budget and your skills and your timeline. It's going to cost extra money, but it might make sense for you, so go ahead and check that out in the interior format tab of your homework. Look at those checklists as well as the resources provided. And again, edit this template as needed to create your ideal publishing plan. 5. Cover Design: If you're putting money anywhere, the cover is not a bad place because it's your book's first impression and it is your biggest marketing element. We have several options for cover design that you can consider depending on where you want to fall on that cost spectrum. Most expensively, you can hire a traditional designer to do it for you. But that will run you on average, about $800 to get your book and paperback covers done. There's a link in the cover design tab of your homework with a list of designers for Indie authors. When you go with a professional designer, a lot of what you're paying for is knowledge of your genre, of current trends, and of other marketing strategies. To design a cover that not only represents your story and maybe you as an author, but also appeals to your target demographic. So hiring an experienced and knowledgeable designer who focuses on either your genre or your target demographic could give you a much stronger piece of art and marketing. The more expensive end a traditional designer can cost a few thousand dollar. So let's talk about some more affordable options. The next option is a pre made cover. So this is a good solution for a quality design that isn't quite so tailored to your book, but is still professionally done. This is a cover that a designer creates more for a genre rather than for a specific book or author. You can find libraries on different sites that are targeted for your genre. So you can find a bunch of romance covers or a bunch of sci fi and fantasy covers. There are thousands of sites with these pre made libraries that you can check out. Book covers, own coverment and the book designer are a few to get you started. Now this class is about keeping it on the cheap. You might find a decent cover, 20 to $60 but at that point the quality is going to be about homemade. This is the price cut that you will probably notice the most. So if you have the means, you might want to put a little money here. Otherwise, let's talk about DIY. Designing your own cover can be tricky, but not impossible. So here are some tips and elements to keep in mind. Number one, do your research. Trends and genre expectations are quite important for your cover as a marketing tool. So see what's happening in your genre right now. Look at books that are up for pre order because those are going to be the most recent covers. You might browse examples from those $1,000 book cover designers in your genre to see what they're making. While you're writing or editing your book, you might want to keep a list of things like significant imagery, iconic elements, things that you can physically represent in a cover that will align with your book thematically. That can give you a lot of good ideas as far as cover content. Number two tools. So there are lots of tools that you can use to design your cover, like Adoban design, Photoshop Git covers, Canva Book brush. Some people use Microsoft Word, which like good for y'all. I can't center a graph half the time. There are tons of Youtube videos and skillshare classes, all about different elements of cover design. So consume some content and learn what you can pick your software onto. The next number three is the typography. Again, your text must be legible. You want your title to be most noticeable. And the next is your author name. Basically, the more well known you are, the bigger your author name will be or the more prominent it will be. If your name is not a selling point yet, you don't need it to be so prominent. It should still be readable when you're looking at the cover. But the title, you want to be visible from further away. So book title, author name. And then smaller or less noticeable, you might have a review snippet or some kind of accolade or subtitle. That is the order with which your audience should be reading things. So you want to design it as such. Title, author, name, et cetera. Number four is imagery, so you can use some high resolution, royalty free stock images. Unsplash pexels and Pixaba have quite a selection. You can start there. You will also probably use multiple images, so having a tool with some gradient kind of capabilities would be helpful. Number five, consistency with genre and themes. The fonts, images, colors, shapes, and the overall composition should complement your genre and the books themes. So let's look at a couple of books to talk about how they're adhering to their themes. This John Green cover, his name is as big as the title. That's because John Green was about to become a household known thing, which he did. We can see that instead of making the review snippets tiny, they just made the color of it a little bit darker than the background. So even though some of the letters are the same size or bigger than the ones in the title and the author name, they're still much less noticeable. So that's what I mean about prominence. You want to balance it in a way where the reader's eyes goes from title to author name to whatever else is on the cover. And the longer we look, we see some more thematic elements like the Chalk, it's giving youth, it's giving school. This is a YA novel. Chalk is also impermanent. It's there, it's striking, and then it fades and washes away. Not unlike terminall teenagers. So this cover is well balanced, iconic capitalizes on John Green's fame and has ties into the themes of the book without being too heavy handed. The cover for this is How You Lose the Time War is a little unique and quirky. For a unique and quirky book, the birds represent the characters red and blue. We might have some of this glitching to represent either their movement through time or maybe the distorted way with which they view each other. For most, they're facing opposite ways, but their feet are touching because they are on opposite sides of this time war. And they really don't even interact with each other in person until towards the end of the book. But through written correspondence, they are holding hands at all times. Don't get it twisted. You can see we have smaller author names. The general public does not know who these people are, so their names are not going to be big selling points. It's cute that we have the inverse of red and blue, but the colors of the text are much less saturated than the birds. Which is good because it's. Let's have a focal point. We get a clear reading of the title with this black on a robin egg. It's a long title, but they fit it in without it looking cramped. And it has a high enough contrast with the black and the light blue to be red As a thumbnail number six is color palette. Your colors should be intentionally chosen to go with one another. Of course, the fault ner stars gives us that stark black and white, which is actually kind of unusual for graphic design. You usually want to avoid exact white and exact black, but they either did that or it's close. One thing that makes that look good is the chalk number one. It's representing physical chalk. That is what chalk and chalkboards look like. But also these letters are not solid, so it's not as jarring as it would be if this was like a closed, solid font with the black and white, we have this kind of dreamy sky blue. Because these are clouds, again, that's lending to the youthfulness of the book. The colors and shapes work really well with the book thematically. We could even infer something about the way that they've set up this black and white. It could be Yen and Yang, it could be life within death, death within life. But it looks striking, it's very readable. And it gives us that feel of chalkboard In later versions, like in the paperback, we get that strip of yellow on the side to match the New York Times best seller badge. Blue and yellow go great together. They're both primary colors, which both makes them look nice and also invokes that feeling of youth. For time war we have that similar sky colored background. It's nice for contrast, it goes with the idea of birds. And the red and blue look nice together. They're jewel toned, but they're also kind of opposites. Hot and cold, water and fire. Red and blue are the names of the characters, probably for a similar reason. They go together, but they are opposed. Number seven is negative space. Negative space, or white space is the area around the elements of your book. Some covers rely more heavily on negative space, like the life changing magic of tidying up. This is a pretty clear simple cover, which is great for the subject matter. It gives us a feeling of order and simplicity and kind of this softness with the color and the way it's sponged. A lot of books in this genre are kind of harder hitting, Like it's a tough love situation, this one does not have that vibe, and I think the cover conveys that really well. The cover of the hate you give also gives us a ton of white space, probably for a more literal reason, the image of this young black woman living in a white world, the sign she's holding kind of bleeds into the background. It's almost like she's getting lost in it, but peeking over it. She has this like intensity in her eyes. The stark contrast of the letters as well as the character makes her stand out. It feels like she's disrupting a kind of established order which obviously goes thematically. So negative space can convey things like loneliness, sterility order, or like the hate. You give a sharp contrast with the subject. Or it could be a more peaceful vibe. Like Marie Condo's book, The Color Choice, the symmetry and the overall composition is going to dictate which direction a heavy negative space cover is going to go emotionally. But negative space or white space is important in almost any design. It's just the space that doesn't have text or significant imagery in it. Like this is not literally white, but it's blank space. So not utilizing white space can make your cover feel heavy and claustrophobic, and too crowded. It can also make it less legible, so if you have a very busy cover with lots of stuff going on as a thumbnail, you're probably not going to be able to read the title. You can get creative with it, but you want your cover to be readable. Number eight is branding consideration outside of representing your book, your cover might also represent you as an author. You'll see many authors opt for designs that are similar to their other books, even if they're not within the same series. Readers really recognize covers that are similar to other books that they've liked. Some authors will take advantage of this by crafting covers similar to other authors, successful books in the same genre. This is how trends start, and number nine, I've kind of been touching on this throughout the lesson, but your thumbnails, a very important thing to remember for your cover design is that it needs to be legible as a small image. Will a tiny version of your cover grab attention? Will it stand out? Is it legible? And of course, you don't have to make every single piece of text readable. As a thumbnail, like we talked about with the fault in our stars, we can read the important things which are the title and the name. We can't see the rest of this until we click on the picture. The composition should be clear enough for people to read the title, maybe get a vibe from the thumbnail and have their interest Peaked number ten is test covers. Try out a few different vibes. Usually, if you get a design done by a professional, they will give you two to three covers that are wildly different. So that you can pick the one that's leaning more in the direction of what you want. And then from there they'll further personalize it. So you can do that. Your, you might try a minimalist cover, you might try a really eye catching one. You might do cartoon illustrations. You might do real models to represent your characters. So try some different designs with different themes. Send it out to people and get some opinions. It could be helpful to send it to people who have read your book, so that they can kind of judge how well it represents it. And you could also send it to people who have not read your book to ask them what they're getting from it. So if we're doing it ourselves, the price ranges from three to maybe $9 or whatever Canva is charging for their premium version. You can design a cover on Canva without having the premium version, but if you do want access to all of the tools and elements, let's say you're spending nine bucks. So our budget for cover design goes from $800-2 thousand down to potentially free get into the cover design tab of your homework and fill out that brainstorming section. Then come back here because up next we're talking about publication and distribution. 6. Indie Publishing & Distribution: For the actual publishing and distribution of your book. There are a few key factors to consider. So let's talk platforms, ISBNs and copyrights. Just like everything else, there are lots of options for publishing platforms. But if we're going the cheapest, Amazon, KDP is probably your best bet. Through KDP, you can publish book paperback, hardback, and audiobooks sort of. Amazon has another service, ACX, for audiobooks. The drawbacks of using KDP are that it's Amazon and Amazon is the devil. And that you cannot list your physical copies for pre order, but it's free publishing and distribution are $0 You just receive a royalty of each sale rather than putting any money down. The ISBN is your International Standard Book Number. It is this number above the barcode on the back of your book. They are required, but if you go through KDP, they will include a free ISBN for your book. If you want to publish in paperback or hardback, you will need an additional ISBN. This will run you 29, 50 or less per number. If you do what I recommend and buy a bundle of ten or more, the larger the bulk order, the cheaper per ISPN. So if you know that you're going to publish a lot of books, it might be worth putting that money up now instead of buying them separately. But if we're trying to keep this book free or as cheap as possible, then it might make sense to only offer it as an ebook because then you can use KDP's included ISPN for free. Another expense here could be a copyright. Whether or not you purchase one is completely up to you. There's kind of some debate about whether it's worth it or not. There are a few little things you can do to protect yourself and your work without a copyright. Like keeping thorough documentation and saving all of your draft. I'm not necessarily recommending that you skip the copyright step, but if we're trying to keep costs as low as possible, this one is debatably skippable. So if we go through a paid publisher like Ingram Spark, we're paying $40 for the initial upload plus 40 additional dollar for any edit you have to make because Ingram Spark is deeply uncool. If you buy one ISBN rather than the bundle, you'll pay 125 per and a copyright will run you around $45 So the traditional method for this section of self publishing would land you around $250 While the fingers crossed copyright ebook limited with KDP and their included ISPN is free. For your homework, go ahead and check out that publishing tab. You can find some resources that I linked to learn more about legal protections for authors and the publishing process. Then you can evaluate your options and choose which route you'd like to go with. 7. Free Marketing Ideas: If you're in the online writing space, you have been bombarded with information about right to market rapid release Facebook ads and all of these other marketing strategies to sell your book. There are so many different ways to market. Depending on your genre, your platform, your goals, your publishing schedule, your preference, the amount of time that you have available to dedicate to marketing. Marketing is also an entirely customizable situation. So in this lesson, we're going to go over strategies to market your book with no money and potentially with no platform. I'm not going to emphasize on how to build the basics of your author platform. Like a website, your newsletter, maybe some social media profiles. There are lots of resources on how to build these elements, so I will link some in the marketing tab of your homework sheet. But we're going to go forward with this lesson assuming that you have already laid that groundwork. If you don't have those things set up yet, you're still good to watch the rest of this video. It might get you thinking on marketing strategies that might affect the way that you build those things out. So let's keep Roland, you could spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on marketing with ads, giveaways, other things. The high end of marketing strategies can cost upward of $3,000 The average spend for marketing a book is around $1,000 My personal marketing strategy relies heavily on my online platform. I have about 40,000 subscribers on Youtube. I have my newsletter, a blog, I write blog posts for other websites, I stream on Twitch. All of these things combined are my platform and all of those places that I have an audience will translate to some number of book sales. Now for other Pin names I use entirely different platforms. It depends on the genre and how much time I want to dedicate to those. This is the name where I have the most followers, but this is not my most profitable name. No matter the size of your platform, you can utilize it to get sales. You can host small giveaways to promote your book. And entry is sharing this to your story or tag to friends. You can create social media challenges, Hash tags, games and other kind of participatory events that get people interacting with your content and maybe sharing it to their friends. There's really no limit to the creativity you can apply to marketing. And it doesn't have to cost money. For example, every time I drop an audio book, I host a trivia night on my Twitch Channel themed to that book. So all the questions have something to do with the book. A couple weeks before the event, I will list the book for sale for $0.99 or for free, and promote that to my audience. So that works to get some new readers. It gets people knowing about the event. Even current readers who already have the book might reread it in preparation for the trivia night, and that's a chance for exposure because they're outside. Someone sees them holding the book and asks about it. They might find a quote they like and post about it on social media. I get a little boost in sales from having that discount period, which is good for the algorithm. Might get a few new reviews. Then I give away free copies of the audio book to the top five winners of the trivia night. And then a grand prize for first place, like signed copies of all of my books. This also gives me a boost because now there are five people who are going to listen to the audio book that might get me some reviews up. So this strategy builds up my book in a lot of different ways while also being something fun that I can do to connect with my readers. But let's say you have no platform. Maybe you never intend to build one. What do you do? Number one, use your social circle. Sell books to your friends and family. Have them leave reviews. Having reviews up is huge. Get people that you know to leave one. There are some places to be careful about this, particularly with Amazon, because Amazon is kind of picky about book reviews. So if it seems like they know the author personally, it's probably getting removed. If you have a shipping address in common with their Amazon account, it's probably not getting posted in the first place. So maybe give your friends a heads up that they should phrase it in a way that makes it seem like they don't know you. Number two is back linking at the end of your ebooks. Ebooks are a great opportunity if someone reads all the way through to get to that back matter, they probably want to read more from you so you can link to the next book in the series. Any other books by you. You can get people to join your newsletter or link your socials. You can ask for reviews and even include a link that will bring them right to a review page. This is very simple to do. It's free and it's effective. Another free marketing strategy, no matter the size of your platform, is collaborating with other creators and writers. If you have a Youtube channel, you make a Youtube video together. You might do a co stream on Instagram. You might share spots in your newsletter where they do a little spotlight on you. You do a little spotlight on them. This is more effective if you are in a similar genre or niche, but you're exchanging exposure for exposure for free. You're tapping into their audience, which is people who like to read your books if they're reading that person's books in the same genre. And yeah, if you have a tiny platform, your collaborators will probably also have tiny platforms, but it's not zero. You can also reach out to people with maybe slightly bigger platforms than you and pitch a project. So if the project seems interesting, you might be able to get some people with larger audiences even if they're the exact same size as you. This can be beneficial. Number four is presale giveaways. Presale giveaways are a great way to get more pre orders, which boosts some different stats, stirs up some excitement for your release, and it generally is a good excuse to create sharable content to get you and your brand. And your book in front of other people is a detailed guide that I wrote about running a presale giveaway that will be linked in your homework Number five is Arcs. This is another low cost marketing effort. So that's sending out advanced reader copies. You can do this for general members of your audience. You can specifically target bloggers and reviewers of your genre, or maybe some acquaintances you have with larger platforms. But you send them a copy of your book early, they read it. They leave some reviews because people are generally more inclined to buy any kind of product if it has reviews versus if it has none. And my last tip is just to submit your book to newsletters and publication calendars. You can find these by searching for review sites for your genre in niche. It's often free and accessible, and you don't need a platform to do it. That brings our marketing costs from, let's say, $1,000 on average, to $30 if you'd like to buy some giveaway items. But that also is not necessary for success. You can use things that you already own, like your books or other authors books. Check out the last tab in your homework to see the lists I've made you for possible marketing strategies. I've put a lot on there, so don't feel like you have to do every single one. Determine which ones might work for you and your audience. You can experiment. Feel free to try a lot of them out. If they work, they work, if they don't, they don't. Early career is a great time to kind of test out the waters and try a lot of different things. So yeah, check out that list, pick some to start with, and develop your best marketing strategy. 8. Conclusion: Moving Forward: And there you have it. We brought our book production costs from an average $8,975 to an average 58.5 dollar. I hope that I was able to convey how customizable this is. You can literally pick a number and publish your book for that amount. You just need to invest a little more time and get creative. Thank you so much for watching this class all the way through. I hope it was helpful. If you finish your homework, you will have a detailed plan to create and market your book for under $100 I really recommend that you fill that out and keep track of your process as you go. It saves a ton of time and effort and thinking in the long run. Write everything down. Come back to this class anytime you need to. I highly encourage that you continue pursuing education in writing and publishing. Whether that's here on skill share or anywhere else. There are so many free resources you just have to look around. Okay. That's all of my advice for now. Don't forget to check out my other skill share classes and my Youtube videos at Hanne Kidder. Sta luck. Thanks for watching. Goodbye.