If you finally decided to self publish your own ebook, congratulations!

Self publishing is an amazing side hustle to generate monthly passive income. However, you’re probably wondering about the cost to self publish your own ebook.

Don’t worry, the cost of self publishing is INSANELY low.

It requires almost no money to get your book out there. I started my erotica publishing business with less than $50.

Here are the biggest costs of self publishing and how you can reduce these costs:

1. Editor

No matter what kind of book you write you’ll have to edit it. Some people like to use an editor, while I typically like to edit my own books.

I find that it is typically hard to get a good editor to work with that won’t charge you an arm and a leg. Sure, there may be some grammar or spelling errors in my work, but I haven’t heard a lot of complaints about that via emails or reviews.

If you look on Fiverr, you’ll notice that editing gigs are not cheap. You’ll be paying about $5 per 500 – 1,000 words.

So if you have a 10,000 book, could be paying between $25 and $50.

2. Book cover design

A lot of people hire an artist to do their book cover. Generally, I like to design my own book cover.

It doesn’t take too much skill to make a decent cover that looks professional. These days there are a ton of software specifically designed for this.

When I first started out, I used Photoshop. I got a subscription for $9.99 a month. I went on YouTube and learned some basic photo editing skills over 3 – 4 hours.

However, after more than a year of publishing erotica on Amazon, I have become a big fan of PicMonkey.

PicMonkey is a great software to design covers. Everything is intuitive and easy to learn. Plus, I think my book covers look twice as good using PicMonkey’s software.

Not only that, but PicMonkey is a lot cheaper as well. It currently costs $3.99 a month to subscribe to the service (if paid annually). PicMonkey is worth every single penny.

If you don’t want to design your cover, you can hire someone to do it on Fiverr. I know a lot of authors that do that.

It will cost between $5 and $20 to get a good cover done on Fiverr.

3. Stock photos

If you are going to design your own covers you are going to need stock photos. My favorite website to get stock photos is DepositPhotos.

They have over 65 million photos so you’ll be able to pick out something good.

Most stock photo sites have subscription plans. DepositPhotos ran a promotion where they offered 100 photos for $100, which turns out to be $1 per photo.

In general, you should expect to pay between $0.50 and $2 for quality stock photos.

Also, be on the lookout for a DepositPhotos deal from Appsumo. They typically offer 100 photos for $30 or $40, which is a GREAT deal.

Last time they offered the $30 deal I bought three of them. Now I have enough stock photos for 2+ years!

4. Promotions, marketing & advertising

Now, promotional and marketing expenses can vary. Some authors like to pay for to be featured in popular newsletters, websites, and sponsored blog posts.

Those costs can vary widely from $10 to over $500.

Other authors like to pay for advertising on Amazon. If you pay for advertising, your ebook may appear as a “sponsored” or “featured” product in search results.

The cost is usually $0.25 – $0.50 per-click (i.e. you pay when someone clicks on your Amazon ad).

In general, I do not spend on promotions, marketing, or any advertising at all. However, that’s because I’m selling erotica on Amazon.

Selling erotica is amazing because you do not need to do any promotions or marketing. And advertising is absolutely pointless as I explained in this prior blog post.

5. Writing software

If you’re just starting out, you can get away with using Microsoft Word (which should be free). However, if you want to be serious about making money writing and selling ebooks on Amazon, I would highly recommend Scrivener.

Check out my post here on Scrivener (it increased my sales by 25%!)

Scrivener is great because it formats everything perfectly in an ebook. This means you save A TON of time from having to change little errors.

Plus, the software costs less than $50 and it is a one-time fee. Scrivener was the first product I purchased when I started my erotica publishing business and it was my BEST investment to date.

6. Platform costs?

So, a few beginning authors have actually asked me about this. Does it cost money to publish your ebooks on Amazon or Nook or any of the other popular self publishing platforms?

The answer is NO! There is no fee at all to upload your book. You can upload as many books as you want for free.

The way these self publishing platforms make money is by earning a percentage of your book sales. But other than that, there are no fees to associated with publishing your books on these platforms.

7. Royalties

The great thing about self publishing is that you earn the majority royalty. If you were to publish through a traditional publishing house, you would likely earn a royalty of 15% or less (unless you are a very popular author).

When you’re publishing ebooks online, the royalties are much better.

In general, you will earn a 60% – 80% royalty on all ebook sales on the most popular self publishing platforms.

On Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) you can earn up to a 70% royalty (on ebook sales), which means Amazon will earn 30% of all sales.

Also note, Amazon does all you to self publish paperback books as well. They charge for printing costs, but you still earn a 60% royalty.

Final thoughts

As you can see, the costs of self publishing are super low. You can easily publish your own ebook for less than $10!

Since I design my own covers and edit my own book, it only costs me about $2 to publish my own ebook (plus any royalties I pay to Amazon).

Given the low costs of self publishing, you can make A TON of money if your books scale up.

P.S. check out my post on how I made $1,738 last month self publishing on Amazon!