What You Should Expect to Spend to Create an Amazon #1 Best-Seller
What You Should Expect to Spend to Create an Amazon #1 Best-Seller
Plus a roadmap to sell 2500+ books and nearly make all your advertising revenue back by book royalties.
Hey Mini Book Masters,
Many people want to write and publish their own book, but some are overwhelmed at the costs associated with it.
One self published author I recently spoke with told me he spent $6,000 in costs between editing, formatting, covers, etc. on his book.
I just threw up in my mouth.
Another friend was quoted $18,000 to publish his book…
This is crazy… I’ve launched books with $0 on the publishing side and had it become a bestseller.
But that isn’t realistic either.
So what should you expect and how is there such a WIDE range of costs?
Today I’ll break it down for you.
The Mini Book Creation Model (I’ve called it the P4 but that is just a dumb name, Mini Book Creation Model is what it’s now called) breaks down the process of going from idea to best seller into 4 stages.
Prepping
Penning
Publishing
Promoting
I’ll breakdown the costs of individual things inside each of these so you know what to expect.
I’ll also offer my recommendations and tell you EXACTLY what I do and have spend on these in the past.
STAGE 1: Prepping
The only major cost with prepping your book is a book cover.
I’m huge on determining your title, subtitle, and having a book cover so you know your promise to the reader.
It also makes early stages of book promotion MUCH EASIER.
Costs: $0 - $1500
I’ve used 99 Designs on several book covers and spent around $400 per cover. 99 Designs is a design competition and only the winner gets paid.
So you get dozens or hundreds of designs (most crap) to choose from.
I’ve never used a cover “as is.” I always end up tweaking it anyways.
I believe you can make your own book cover for $0 using Canva or Bookbrush.
I have an entire process I outline in “How to Create Your Own Amazon Best-Selling Book Cover.”
A cover has only 3 key ingredients that you need to get right, the title, subtitle, and genre/graphics. I discuss those 3 ingredients in details in “3 Ingredients of a Perfect Mini Book Cover”.
RECOMMENDATION: First-time authors create your own book cover.
If you have a large audience already built and are generating $100,000+ from your business then you may consider hiring a designer.
COSTS = $0 - $2000
STAGE 2: Penning
The writing process has zero costs associated with it for most authors, except if you included editing in the penning process… which unfortunately I do.
Editing is the most costly part of the book creation process if you hire professional editors.
There are 3 primary types of editing (there are actually more than that, but mother of Teresa, let’s keep this simple),
Developmental Editing
Line/Copy Editing
Proof Reading
Developmental Editing
Developmental editing is where someone reads your book and helps you make it make sense.
I feel this is unnecessary if you follow the Mini Book Straight Jacket Model of writing I encourage authors to follow.
My own editor said, “If people write the way you teach them, I don’t need to help them with developmental editing.”
So there, booyow!
No costs for developmental editing. You can imagine it would be hugely important for a sci-fi novel to have a development editor to make sure all the characters seem the same throughout, the story makes sense, and there are no obvious plot holes.
Line Editing
Line editing is where an editor goes in and tries to help each sentence sound as good as possible.
Also, they look to make sure your thoughts flow smoothly from one line to the next. They are editing line by line.
Depending on how you write this may be where you see the most help with your book.
I hired an editor for $1500 to edit my Simple Online Business Model but I did NOT hire anyone to help with the Mini Book Model and it’s sold really well with little effort from me and only a few complaints but it wasn’t something a line edit would have caught.
I’ve worked out a deal with my editor that if anyone who goes through my coaching programs wants an edit of their mini book they can get it for $1,000. He has hire packages where he does more than a simple line edit, but I think that is all you’ll need.
For many of you… you don’t need that. You and someone critical read it and highlight any sentence that doesn’t make sense and redo it.
Get ChatGPT to help you make it more cohesive or reword it line by line yourself.
Proofreading
No one likes being embarrassed when they get caught saying “your next” instead of “you’re next” or an obvious misspelling in the introduction.
Guilty as charged many times over.
This is where a proofreader comes in.
But listen… ChatGPT does a phenomenal job catching these things. You tell it to do a basic spelling and grammar check and give it one chapter at a time… it’ll rock your world in seconds.
Now, just like with a human editor, you have to proofread your proofreader.
So use ChatGPT and you and your friends and family read through and highlight any mistakes you notice.
Don’t spend a dime on this, unless you are making oodles of money and it’s a drop in the bucket.
Editing Recommendations
If you need anything, hire a line editor and you’ll spend $500-$2500 for a 10,000 word mini book.
But I’d encourage you to try and do it all yourself.
If you need an editor let me know and I’ll introduce you to my editor. I’ve used some off Fiverr and Reedsy and had OK results, but it didn’t make my book perfect and I still had to do a lot of editing myself.
When I hired Niels, my last editor, for $1500, my book was nearly perfect and I did a proofreading and was confident to release it into the world.
I WILL NOT DO THIS FOR EVERY BOOK, but that book was a flagship book for me.
Costs: $0- $2500
STAGE 3: Publishing
There is only one thing I’d recommend you spend even $1 on associated with publishing.
Atticus is an all-in-one book writing software. You can input your existing manuscript into it or write your manuscript inside it. Select a formatting theme and bingo your book is ready for print and digital formatting completely done.
The best part, it only costs $147 that you pay for the software once and never again.
Outside of that you should not have to pay anything to export your manuscript, upload it to Amazon or the other digital book stores, etc.
Paying a formatter for your mini book just doesn’t make sense anymore.
If you follow my mini book straitjacket model you’ll already have H2 and H3 headings for your chapters and Atticus will be sure to format the rest for you automatically.
Exporting from Atticus is as simple as clicking one button for print book and one for digital.
I’ve over a dozen books with Atticus and I am thrilled.
COST: $147
STAGE 4: Promoting
Promoting your book is where you should focus the majority of your resources.
I mean your time, energy, relationships, and money, but especially money. Now you don’t have to spend a ton of money to get your book to become a best-seller. I’ll walk you through what I had to do to get the Simple Online Business Model to become a best-seller with a fancy Amazon “Best-Seller” badge.
I didn’t have a huge email list (only 300 people) and I didn’t do a long pre-order or book launch of any kind.
I was practicing something I call the LAZY Book Launch Method which I’ll break down at a future date.
Software
(I am an affiliate of the software below ONLY because I use it and believe in it. Meaning I get some $$$ if you use the link below and purchase the software.)
First, you’ll need to purchase a software or hire someone to get some information for you.
The software is called Publisher Rocket.
Publisher Rocket does all the research into Amazon categories, keywords, competition etc.
You can use it to find out which categories you can easily become a best-seller with. It will tell you how many sales you need to have to reach #1 in a category. This is mission critical to becoming a best-seller.
One category you may need 300 sales in a day to become #1 and another 13 sales is enough.
The cost of Publisher Rocket is $199 one time.
Now that feels expensive at first, but if you plan on doing multiple books, well worth it.
For my coaching clients I do the category and keyword research so you get a best-seller report and recommendations. If you are interested in getting my top tier coaching package I have 1 more spot that at $500.
Advertising
Unless you have a huge email list you will spend money or time promoting your book to get it to a best-seller status.
I sold about 15 copies of my book from my email out to my list. That was enough to get to #1 in a category for the launch day of my book. I wanted to achieve getting the orange Best-Seller banner on Amazon which only happens after sustaining strong sales and maintaining the #1 spot for a period of time. (Currently I’m at 26 Days as #1 best-seller in my category with the Simple Onlye Business Model)
I received the Amazon Best-Seller Badge after 11 days at #1.
Here is what I spent.
$25 a day x 11 days = $275
A paltry sum to become an “official” Amazon Best-seller. Now you don’t you to get the orange banner to be able to claim you are an Amazon Best-seller. As long as you are #1 in a category and get a screenshot of you at #1 in a category for 1 hour of 1 day you can claim you are an Amazon Best-seller.
I just wanted to prove that Simple Online Business Model was a definitive best-seller using only my LAZY Book Launch Model.
COSTS:
Software - $199
Ads - $275
TOTAL = $474
Total Costs You Can Expect to Pay to Get Your Book to Be a Best-Seller
Assuming you have to buy both Atticus and Publisher Rocket because this is your first book (or you didn’t use them before) here are the minimum costs you should expect to reach the Amazon orange best-seller badge.
Prepping = $0
Penning = $0
Publishing = $147
Promotion = $474
TOTAL = $621
What You Could Do With $6000 Promoting Your Book
Because I have to point this out, I’ve included this section.
My friend spent $6000 on creating his book (which is an awesome and beautiful book!) I want to play out what we could spend that $6000 on. ($5,654 after we purchase the softwares)
If we spent the rest of our money advertising $25 a day, this is what the numbers would look like.
226 days at #1 in your category (not guaranteed but extremely likely)
2,486 sales DIRECTLY attributed to those ads (no word of mouth, referral, boosts from rankings etc.)
250 reviews for your book (my experience is 1/100 reviews per book sale/giveaway)
$4,972 in royalties (book is priced at $2.99)
TOTAL COST = $1,028
What if you sold a high end $2000 coaching package based on that book and your book was bringing in leads for it?
You’d be profitable in no time.
OK, thats the roadmap I’m trying to paint for you.
I have NEVER spent that much money on a book, but now that I have the data that is the path I’m working towards.
Those numbers are based on my recent ad costs, conversions, etc. So obviously it could change for you.
Just showing you what is possible.
Don’t spend money CREATING your book. Spend money spreading the message of your book. Spend money on MARKETING your book.
The type of ads I’m talking about running take less than 5 minutes a day to maintain.
Cheers to your next best-seller.