Hey there,
So last week I got together with Patricia Marshall, of Luminare Press, to talk about what most first-time authors avoid: What will publishing your book actually cost?
Patricia has been in this business for over 15 years. She’s seen hundreds of authors navigate these decisions, and she’s refreshingly straight about the numbers, the realities, and what actually sells books.
So if you’ve ever wondered whether you need to spend $3,000 or $20,000 or somewhere in between—or what the difference even is—this conversation is for you.
If You Only Remember 6 Things:
📚 What you’ll actually spend — Self-publishing packages can range from $3,000 (no editing) to $20,000+ (with editing and marketing). Developmental editing alone can cost $6,000-$8,000 for a 50,000-word book.
✍️ Nobody publishes alone — Even great manuscripts need professional eyes. Moving from a Word document to a product (yes, your book is a product) requires cover designers, editors, and project management.
💰 Three buckets of investment — Writing/editing, book production (design/layout), and marketing. Most new authors underestimate or skip the editing or marketing bucket entirely. 😳
📖 The numbers no one tells you — The average first-time author sells 200 books (or less). Selling 500-1,000 copies means you’re doing really well.
🔑 ROI isn’t from royalties — At roughly $4 per book in royalties, you won’t make your money back on book sales. The real value comes from speaking engagements, new clients, and doors the book opens.
🏅 Match your investment to goals — A legacy book for family needs a different investment than a thought leadership book. Know your outcome before you spend. (Which ties directly back to ROI.)
Now let’s get into it…
The Three Publishing Paths
We started with the fundamentals: What are your options as an author?
Jen: So the first thing we should start with is the basics, right? Like, what are the three paths to publishing? What are your options as an author?
Patricia: Sure. So the first thing most people think about is traditional publishing. That’s when you’re going to find an agent, and the agent is going to sell your book to a publisher. When that happens, usually, you’ll get an advance against your future royalties. It’s not money they’re paying you to publish the book. It’s an advance against your royalties. (💰Future book sales.)
And from that point on, the publisher takes creative control of your book. They’ll be designing your cover, doing the editing, and the interior layout. They may or may not do some marketing. That’s really gone away in the industry. Nobody’s going to send you on a huge book tour or anything.
But one of the key things about traditional publishing is that they also control your intellectual property. So you are selling them the rights to your book in exchange for the royalties.
Jen: Right. And the time spent just working on the deal, the proposal, and finding an agent is a lot. And then the marketing of it—which is why Substack is so great—you also need an audience that’s ready for your book. And if you’re a new author, that’s a real challenge.
Patricia: Yes, absolutely. So traditional publishing is great if you can do it, but the industry is really necked down, and it’s challenging to get a traditional publishing deal. I always tell my authors, if you can do it, great. Go get one, but you’re going to spend a couple of years doing it.
👉 Here’s why this matters:
This brings us to self-publishing, and Patricia made something really clear right away:
Patricia: Here are two of the biggest misconceptions authors have about self-publishing. The first one is that it should be free. For some reason, this idea is still floating around. It is not free to publish a book. You can put up an e-book relatively easily, but to publish a good book that’s competitive in the market or even good-looking, it’s going to cost money.
The other misconception is that you have to do everything on your own. I really encourage authors, when they’re considering self-publishing, to understand that they’re taking on the role of a publisher. And there’s a lot to publishing a book.
Jen: I liked how you explained it to me earlier— the author needs to think like a contractor who’s hiring all the different people needed to come up with a really nice product. The cover designer, the interior layout, all those things. They become a project manager who hires and oversees the whole thing.
Patricia: Right. And that is what I call true self-publishing. When you’re acting as a contractor, you’re hiring everybody to do these bits and pieces. And of course, before you do that, you have to understand what all the bits and pieces are.
Authors are book people, and they’re smart in general. Usually, they’ll think, “How hard could it be to make a book?” But publishing and writing are two separate disciplines. Some people devote their lives to writing, some people devote their lives to publishing, and you don’t pick up one or the other in an afternoon.
This is where assisted self-publishing comes in—companies like mine, Luminare Press, offer all the services under one roof. It’s going to be more expensive, but it’s probably going to be more efficient. And you really only have to vet one provider.
The third path is hybrid publishing, which we’ll get to in a minute. But first, I wanted to dig into the numbers.
So What Does It Actually Cost?
Jen: Let’s talk about Luminare Press. How do you guide an author who has decided this is the path they want to go? What does that look like for someone? And what are the costs?
Patricia: Well, the first thing we do with our authors is talk about their goals and outcomes. We talk about what they want and need, and then we build the package we think will get them to that goal or outcome.
We have publishing packages that run from $3,000 to $10,000.
$3,000 is no editing. It’s book design, all your metadata, and guiding you through the process.
$10,000 includes editing and some marketing.
But it really depends on what the author needs. We always encourage editing. I don’t think there’s an author out there who doesn’t need an edit.
Jen: Can you give me some examples of goals and outcomes from different authors? Like, what’s the range?
Patricia: Some people just want to publish a book for family and friends. They’re not interested in selling it. Or they might be interested in selling it, but they really don’t want to spend the time or the money to market the book. And that is fine. That’s really reasonable.
And if their goal is to sell the book, many authors will tell me, “Well, I just want to make my money back.”
That’s a tough one.
That’s a tough one because I have to tell people—we work with a lot of poets, and it’s like, it’s hard to make your money back on a book of poetry. The world is not waiting for another book of poetry.
Jen: I think it should be.
Patricia: Me too, me too. But it’s hard to make your money back. So we have those hard conversations at the beginning about what it would take to actually reach those goals, both in terms of what they have to put in and how much money they’ll have to spend.
💡 This is important:
This is the honest conversation most people don’t have before they start spending money. If you’re thinking you’re going to spend $3,000 on book production and distribution, but you really want to hit certain goals, you’re going to have to spend more.
Some authors come to Patricia saying they want their book made into a movie, or they want to hit the bestseller list. Those goals require either a lot of time or a lot more money.
Which brings us to one of those hidden costs Patricia mentioned…
Nobody Writes Alone: The Editing Breakdown
💡 One of the things that kept coming up in our conversation: writing is solitary, but publishing is not.
Patricia: You know, writing is a solitary activity, but a book that’s written alone in a silo is not ready to publish. It is just not.
Understanding that when you write “the end” and close your laptop—that’s not when you just go publish.
That’s when you go find some other people to look at your book, preferably professionals. You can work with beta readers, you can work in a writing group, you can work with friends, or you can have your family read it. But you need somebody outside your circle giving you an overview of it.
👉 Here’s why this matters:
And here’s where it gets confusing for first-time authors: What kind of editing do you actually need?
Patricia breaks editing down into three types:
Developmental editing is the most expensive. For a 50,000-word book, it could be $6,000 to $8,000.
Jen: And how does a developmental edit help get the book to a really good place?
Patricia: That’s a great question. That’s somebody who’s looking at the big picture issues of your book. They’re looking at the character development. They’re looking at the story arc. They’re looking at the order in which things happen.
You know what it’s like when we pick up a really good book and we can’t stop turning the pages. They’re going to make sure that that book is sort of in that category. And in that sense, it doesn’t matter whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.
Jen: Like a memoir, nonfiction, does it make a difference?
Patricia: No. Business book, same thing. The developmental editor is reading it with your audience in mind. So if you’ve written a thought leader book or a business book, an editor is going to be saying, okay, who is the audience for this? How can we make this material accessible to them so they can read it?
Then there’s copy editing—and Patricia feels strongly about this one.
Patricia: I think every book out there needs a copy edit. I don’t care if you’re an English teacher or your mother was an English teacher. Mine was.
Copy editing is looking at the grammar, punctuation, spelling, syntax—all those things that make the reader understand that you were willing to put the time into making a professional book.
I started this business because my mother self-published her first book when she was 89 years old. She was very proper and very well educated. But she was like, “Well, I don’t think the reader will mind if there are some misspellings and a comma is out of place.”
And I was a magazine editor at the time. And I was like, “Mom, the reader might not. The reader might forgive you, but nobody in the industry will take your book seriously.”
If it’s not well edited, no one in the industry—no bookseller, no blogger, no one inviting you onto podcasts—you are going to have a hard time gaining traction with a book that is not well edited.
There’s also line editing, which sits somewhere between developmental and copy editing, depending on what your manuscript needs.
All those things have a price tag. Which is why understanding your goals matters so much.
💡 This is important: That story shows that when you move from a manuscript to a book, you move from a Word document to a product. And products have to meet professional standards.
Hybrid Publishing: When Does It Make Sense?
Hybrid publishing is going to be more expensive than self-publishing or assisted self-publishing. But you retain your intellectual property rights, and you’re working with a team from beginning to end.
Patricia broke down when hybrid makes sense—and when it doesn’t.
Patricia: Hybrid does not bear out well for fiction. You’re not going to get a return on investment with hybrid. But it works very well for business or thought-leadership books. And sometimes memoir, if it’s a good business memoir or somebody has a life-changing story.
Jen: I recently read that Emma Gannon, who has a really popular Substack called The Hyphen, is going to try the hybrid route for the first time. She’s so good at marketing by this stage that I’m guessing she’s done most of the marketing for her last few books. She’s got a massive newsletter audience. She’s great with podcasts. She knows how to do all that stuff. She might as well just keep all the money.
Patricia: I heard the same thing on a podcast the other day with a guy who’d written a book that sold very well with a traditional publisher. And he said, “Yeah, I’m just not going back to the traditional publisher because I’ve kind of made my name already. And I can go hybrid and do just as well or do better, actually. I’ll spend more money up front, but I will make more money in the end.”
💰 Most people who are going to get an ROI with hybrid are getting it on things other than book royalties.
Jen: That’s an excellent point. They’re getting speaking engagements or attracting a higher-caliber client base. There are other ways that you can make money using a book.
This was something I saw over and over when I worked at Scribe Media. One of the first things we would do with authors who were primarily entrepreneurs at the top of their field. We would coach them out of the mindset that they were going to make money off book sales or that they needed to be on a bestseller list.
Because in reality, it’s not about selling a lot of books. You won’t make money that way.
But the doors that a book can open for you when you position it well and you think about the outcomes—and the people you can reach when you’re really clear and intentional about who your reader is—can change your life.
The Marketing Reality (And Why Most First-Time Authors Sell Under 200 Books 😳)
💡 This is important:
Patricia thinks about the publishing process in three buckets where you put money:
Bucket 1: Writing and editing
Bucket 2: Book production (design, layout, proofreading)
Bucket 3: Marketing
Patricia: I gave a talk years ago, and at the end of it, I said, “Most self-published authors will not sell more than 200 books.” And a woman in the audience was like, “You shouldn’t tell us that. That’s discouraging.”
And I’m like, I have to tell you that. Because you have to understand what you’re embarking on—if you’re spending money on it.
Jen: You know, those are the numbers that I’ve heard from multiple people in the last three years. If you sell 500 to 1,000 books, especially your first book, you’re doing really well.
Patricia: Absolutely. And we’ll stand up and cheer for that. But you can see at roughly $4 royalty per book, that’s not necessarily going to get you an ROI.
📌 Let that sink in for a minute:
If you sell 1,000 books at $4 per book in royalties, that’s $4,000. If you spent $10,000 to publish your book, you’re still $6,000 in the hole.
This is why marketing matters so much—and why most authors who succeed are willing to invest either time or money into it.
Patricia told me about one of her authors who has sold around 10,000 copies of her book…
Patricia: I’ve been working with an author who has written three books centered around medics from World War II. She goes out and gives talks. She goes to veterans groups. She does a lot to sell those books.
She’s reaching veterans groups, people who have been medics in wars since then. She really wants people to understand this period of history and what these people went through.
And she wrote some of it for her family, too. So she kind of has a nice package rolled together—this legacy for her family, but she’s also doing well with the books.
👉That’s targeted marketing. That’s knowing your audience and being willing to go where they are.
Most authors Patricia works with are fairly introverted. And they say things like, “Well, I don’t mind if somebody will just go out and market it.”
But it doesn’t quite work that way. If you want to sell books, you have to invest either time or money in marketing.
So What Do You Do When Your Manuscript is Done?
👉 Here’s why this matters:
Authors usually come to me once their manuscript is finished, and they’re ready to start building an audience. That’s a little late in the process, but I’ve learned to live with it. 🙄
The bigger question is: How much money are you going to spend to turn your beautiful manuscript into a book?
Patricia: Generally, we start with a phone call and talk about what your manuscript looks like, where you’re at, and what your goals are. We can do a quick in-house analysis. Sally, our managing editor, and I look at the manuscripts and say, “Okay, here’s what we think this manuscript needs if this is your outcome.”
Usually, people who ask for that are people who are thinking they want to sell the book. So a lot of times, that will come back with a recommendation of a developmental edit.
We also offer longer manuscript evaluations for around $1,500. An editor will read the whole book and we’ll give you a detailed analysis—six to ten pages—talking about character development, story arc, all of it.
Those manuscript evaluations can be very helpful if you want to go back and work on it on your own. Or they could move you into the idea of a developmental edit or copy edit.
The key is: don’t skip the step of getting professional eyes on your work. Even if you’ve worked with a book coach or a writing group, the move from manuscript to product requires people who’ve spent their lives creating books.
This is the conversation I wish every first-time author could have before they start spending money. Real numbers, real expectations, and what actually moves books.
I’m so glad Patricia and I finally had this conversation. It’s the kind of honest talk about numbers and expectations that most people don’t have before they start spending money on publishing.
Want to talk to Patricia about your manuscript?
Book a free consultation with Patricia at Luminare Press.
Ready to start building your audience?
Reply to this email or book a discovery call with me.
If this helped clarify which path makes sense for your goals (or if I just introduced you to the idea of having a clear outcome from your book), I’d love to hear from you.
Thanks for reading,
Thank you to everyone who tuned in for the live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.
