Episode 055 - The Costs of Self-publishing a Book with Michael La Ronn
December 1, 2020
Michael La Ronn discusses the costs involved in independently publishing a book. Michael talks about the two most costly aspects—editing and cover design—and tips for how to accomplish these on a budget. We discuss potential pitfalls—for example, the fact that if your cover designer inappropriately uses copyrighted material, you as the author are the one who will get the cease-and-desist letter. And we discuss how to ensure the professionals you are considering doing business with are reputable, and how to ensure your interaction is successful for both parties.
Michael La Ronn is the author of over 40 science fiction & fantasy books including the ANDROID X series, the MODERN NECROMANCY series, and the GALAXY MAVERICKS series. He writes from the great plains of Iowa and has perfected the art of balancing writing with a full-time job and family, law school, writing 5-7 books per year.
"I've published over 50 books and I've paid for professional covers for all of them. I would have saved a tremendous amount of money if I could have learned to do a lot of that myself." --Michael La Ronn
Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon!
Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast, today my guest is Michael La Ronn. Hey, Michael, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Michael: Hey, Matty. I'm fantastic. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:08] Matty: It is my pleasure. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you ... Michael La Ronn is the author of over 40 science fiction & fantasy books including the Android X series, Modern Necromancy series, and the Galaxy Mavericks series. He writes from the great plains of Iowa and has perfected the art of balancing writing with a full-time job and family, law school, writing 5-7 books per year.
[00:00:33] And the topic we're going to be talking about is how much does it cost to self-publish a book? And this is something I invited Michael on the podcast to talk about because he has a very useful video on his YouTube channel addressing this very topic. So we're going to expand on the material that Michael covered in that video, and I'll link to that video in the show notes. We've been on a little bit of a kick lately of focusing on the finances of indy publishing. In Episode 52, we had Nicholas Erik talking about FIVE KEYS TO BUILDING A RESILIENT INDY BUSINESS, so this will be a nice follow on to that.
[00:01:09] But before we dive into the details of how much does it cost to self-publish a book, your bio says that you've perfected the art of balancing writing with your full-time job and family and law school, and I'm wondering if we look at the finance side, do you have a theory that you apply to balance the finances across all those aspects of your life?
[00:01:29] Michael: Oh, I'm so glad, that's such a great question. No one's ever asked me that before. I think I've done a video on this, but it kind of got buried, a lot of people weren't terribly interested in it. The finance part has been a challenge and it's when people email me and say, Hey, I want to be a writer, what do I do? And I always have to be careful with the advice that I give, because I can write fast, I can publish five to seven books a year, but that's because I've made a lot of sacrifices on the finance side to be able to do that.
[00:01:59] So for example, when I first started publishing, I stopped all other hobbies. So I used to be a musician. I sold all the instruments I own for pennies on the dollar. I stopped playing video games. I'm very singularly focused on this, so that any extra income goes strictly toward the writing, and my wife and I, we had to sit down around 2013, 2014 when I started doing this, and we knew that this was something that was going to be very important and something that I could grow over time. And so my wife and I do a budget every month and we figure out what we can spend toward the writing, what we can cut in other areas of our lives, so that I can be able to afford this. ...
[00:00:06] Michael: Hey, Matty. I'm fantastic. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:08] Matty: It is my pleasure. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you ... Michael La Ronn is the author of over 40 science fiction & fantasy books including the Android X series, Modern Necromancy series, and the Galaxy Mavericks series. He writes from the great plains of Iowa and has perfected the art of balancing writing with a full-time job and family, law school, writing 5-7 books per year.
[00:00:33] And the topic we're going to be talking about is how much does it cost to self-publish a book? And this is something I invited Michael on the podcast to talk about because he has a very useful video on his YouTube channel addressing this very topic. So we're going to expand on the material that Michael covered in that video, and I'll link to that video in the show notes. We've been on a little bit of a kick lately of focusing on the finances of indy publishing. In Episode 52, we had Nicholas Erik talking about FIVE KEYS TO BUILDING A RESILIENT INDY BUSINESS, so this will be a nice follow on to that.
[00:01:09] But before we dive into the details of how much does it cost to self-publish a book, your bio says that you've perfected the art of balancing writing with your full-time job and family and law school, and I'm wondering if we look at the finance side, do you have a theory that you apply to balance the finances across all those aspects of your life?
[00:01:29] Michael: Oh, I'm so glad, that's such a great question. No one's ever asked me that before. I think I've done a video on this, but it kind of got buried, a lot of people weren't terribly interested in it. The finance part has been a challenge and it's when people email me and say, Hey, I want to be a writer, what do I do? And I always have to be careful with the advice that I give, because I can write fast, I can publish five to seven books a year, but that's because I've made a lot of sacrifices on the finance side to be able to do that.
[00:01:59] So for example, when I first started publishing, I stopped all other hobbies. So I used to be a musician. I sold all the instruments I own for pennies on the dollar. I stopped playing video games. I'm very singularly focused on this, so that any extra income goes strictly toward the writing, and my wife and I, we had to sit down around 2013, 2014 when I started doing this, and we knew that this was something that was going to be very important and something that I could grow over time. And so my wife and I do a budget every month and we figure out what we can spend toward the writing, what we can cut in other areas of our lives, so that I can be able to afford this. ...
click here to read more
[00:02:41] Because it's not cheap to publish a book. And for me, I would say that the way I've been able to balance it, to get to your question kind of a long way around, is to have that buy-in with your spouse, if you have a spouse or significant other, because you're going to have expenses that come in every month, you're going to have things that come out of the blue that you have to buy, that you didn't think you were going to have to buy, and you're going to need the help of your spouse or significant other, and you're going to need the help of an accountant. So that's a long answer to how I've learned to balance everything.
[00:03:11] Matty: That's interesting that one of Nick's two pieces of advice in the episode that I mentioned was get an accountant, and you can listen to a lot of podcasts and read a lot about indy publishing and not hear the recommendation to get an accountant, so I think it's valuable to hear that you have the same recommendation that he did.
[00:03:29] Michael: Yeah. And it's something I didn't do until this past year. I've had someone that's done my taxes, but I haven't had anyone that has done my bookkeeping and it was something I probably should have invested in early on, but didn't, and so I'm at a point with my business now where I'm running a profit, and so I pretty much have to, in order to avoid getting taxed to the max. So the sooner you can do it the better.
[00:03:52] Matty: And if someone is looking for someone to help them with that, do you have any advice about, is it important that they find someone who is familiar with indy author business models or any advice on that front?
[00:04:07] Michael: Oh, that's such a great question too, because the accountant that I used to have, bless her heart, she was great because here in the United States we've got Schedule C filing, so she was able to do that for me and also do my personal taxes. But as my business started ramping up, I started calling her with these weird out of the box questions like, Hey, I've got 20 revenue streams, what's the best way to handle this? or, Hey, I'm about to sign a deal that's going to get some money coming in, how do I handle this? or, Hey, I'm going to be doing some consultancy work, but the company is in the United Kingdom and they're paying me every month, how do I handle that?
[00:04:44] And so she just kind of tapped out. She's just like, No, I can't do this. You know, it was your local hometown accountant. And so what I have found in the past few years is someone who has familiarity with YouTubers and familiarity with creative entrepreneurs. That's who you ultimately want, because they're going to know the ins and outs of the revenue streams that are coming in and the types of expenses you're going to have coming out.
[00:05:08] So this is one area where I would advise you, it might be easy to go to the hometown accountant. You probably want to find somebody that is super specialized. If they specialize in authors, great. I had a hard time finding someone that did that, but if they can specialize in creatives, you're going to be in a lot better situation.
[00:05:26] Matty: Well, I'm going to use your mention of the costs related to indy publishing as an entree to our topic, which is how much does it cost to self-publish a book. And again, this is something that is surprisingly hard to find information on. And when I came across your video about this, you encapsulated it so nicely. So I'm going to prompt you with the categories that you mentioned in your video and have you take it away in terms of describing what is involved there.
[00:05:51] So the first big category is editing. And right off the bat, you had a recommendation that I want to have a little bit of conversation about, but what's the biggest expense that an author could spend in the editing realm?
[00:06:03] Michael: Yeah. So there's three types of editing. There's developmental editing, copy editing, and proofreading. And in that order, those are the most expensive to the cheapest. In theory, a developmental editor is going to look at the big picture of your story, make recommendations on your plot, recommendations on your character arcs. And they're going to spend the most time with your story. So therefore you're probably going to spend the most money with them. And there are a lot of developmental editors out there who that's all they do. That's what they specialize in. That's how they make their living. So it's a pricier ticket item.
[00:06:39] And I tell people you can expect to spend anywhere from a couple hundred dollars up to several thousand dollars, if not more for a developmental editor. And I have frequently told people that it's not something that I recommend. I don't have anything against developmental editors, I think there are good folks out there, but this is such an unregulated type of service that it can be really easy to get taken for a ride. And as a business owner, I have not seen any conclusive evidence that a developmental editor will guarantee that you can sell more books. So that's developmental editing.
[00:07:12] Copy editing is when your editor looks at your manuscript line by line, makes sure that the words on the page are the right words and that everything flows properly. And it depends on the length of your novel, but for a copy editor, you can expect to spend anywhere from several hundred dollars upwards. It just depends on the length of your novel, the experience of your editor. And that's the one type of editing I don't recommend that anyone do without. Copy editing is where the book becomes a book, it's where everything starts to sing. And I highly recommend that.
[00:07:43] And then if you can afford it, there's a proofreader, someone who checks the work of the copy editor and they check for last minute typos, they check for formatting issues. And it's really your last line of defense before the book goes public. And it depends, with proofreaders sometimes, generally speaking from my perspective, I have tended to pay less than a copy editor. And I use those words in quotes, because I hate to give values because you just never know. But sometimes proofreaders can be just as expensive as copy editors because just because the amount of work that they have left to do isn't as much, that doesn't mean that they're not going to spend a fair amount of time on the book.
[00:08:22] So in that order is the level of costs.
[00:08:26] Matty: I was very interested when I heard in your video that you were saying that if you had to do without, for cost reasons, I assume, the developmental edit, that avoiding that was something you could get behind.
[00:08:36] And although it's not a guarantee of a best-selling book, my fear is that it leaves the opportunity open that you have beautiful prose, all the copy edit kinds of things are right in line, but there's a character that isn't well-developed or there's a plot line that doesn't go anywhere that the copy editor is not necessarily going to catch.
[00:09:00] So do you have any recommendations, if someone really can't ante up for the developmental editor, what steps can they take to make sure that they're doing as much of that themselves as they can?
[00:09:10] Michael: The one thing I would recommend is to get feedback from readers instead of an editor. Because if you think about it, an editor is going to have experience in editing the books. They don't always have the experience or even a track record of predicting what's going to work because ultimately the plot arcs and the character arcs and all that, that's subjective, it's a subjective opinion. It may strengthen your story. It may weaken your story. And to me, if I was going to make a decision on that, I would much rather get that feedback from a reader.
[00:09:40] So you could use a beta reader, a number of different beta readers, to give you feedback on how the story looks. And you could even pay -- you can find paid beta readers these days on places like Upwork. There are different forums out there where you can find beta readers and you can pay them a certain amount. It would be a fraction of what you would pay for a developmental editor, if you pay them anything at all. And that would give you some feedback from people who are potentially, if you've done your homework right, in your target audience. And they would give you feedback that you could use more realistically.
[00:10:14] Matty: I think it is an important caveat that you want to get readers in your genre, because if you're writing sci-fi fantasies and you get a cozy reader, they're going to hate it right out of the gate.
[00:10:25] Michael: Exactly. If their feedback begins with, Hey, this is not the book I typically read, you probably haven't done your homework. And I made that mistake probably for my first three or four books before I started saying, okay, now I need to find somebody who's actually a reader in this genre.
[00:10:41] Matty: The other thing I wanted to ask about is that I don't use them myself, but you hear about ProWritingAid or Grammarly or some of these other systems that are becoming much more sophisticated than just a spellchecker or a grammar checker. Do you have any experience with those, and a sense of how they do or don't overlap with copy editing services from a human being?
[00:11:05] Michael: Yeah, absolutely. So first things first: nothing replaces an editor. ProWritingAid and Grammarly are fantastic, I happen to like them both. In fact, I've done a video on my channel, where I compared both of them. And I actually ran them through the gamut and tested them out in terms of the numbers of errors that they found in my work and the accuracy and all that stuff. And I think that they're great. I think once you've gotten your book edited and you're ready to publish it, using them as a last line of defense -- ProWritingAid or Grammarly -- I think is a really smart idea because it can help you find typos that maybe your editor might've missed. Or if you start finding a bunch of typos that your editor should have caught, then maybe it tells you that you need to hire a different editor.
[00:11:48] But my general experience -- and this is just Michael La Ronn's opinion -- my general experience is that ProWritingAid is better for fiction because it has more tools, I think, that a fiction writer can use. And Grammarly tends to be better for non-fiction. It's just my experience that the accuracy rate tends to be better in each of those respective categories. But yeah, it's no substitute for an editor, but I think that they'll help you catch things that Microsoft Word spellchecker won't. And so it's not a bad investment.
[00:12:18] Matty: The one thing that I found that has really cut down on the typos that are in any document I would send to a proofreader is listening to it in a text to speech app, because there's a point at which you don't want a machine, you want a human being. There's a point in which you don't want a human being, you want a machine because the human being is going to know what the sentence is supposed to say and can easily read over an error because they correct it in their own minds. Whereas a machine is going to read it exactly like you've written it. And I found I can find a bunch of stuff by listening to it. Not only typos, but stylistic things or just odd repetition of words. Is that something that you use at all?
[00:13:02] Michael: I do every once in a while. It gets tedious to read out the whole thing, the whole book. But what I do like to do is the first couple of chapters, because that's going to make the biggest impression on the reader. And then I'll do a couple chapters in the middle, maybe where there's a plot twist or something that I want the readers to really be engrossed in. And then I'll maybe do the last couple chapters.
[00:13:24] So that way, you're not listening to the whole thing with a machine, but you're listening to some of the critical parts and you can do that at any point in the process.
[00:13:33] Matty: The tools that I've used that make it a little less painful to actually listen to the whole thing, because I do listen to the whole thing, are Natural Reader. It has pretty good voices for free. And also if you have a Mac, you can get Siri to read it to you. Except for a couple of odd pronunciation things that Siri does that always makes me leap for the screen to see what I've written -- that she pronounced it that way and it turns out to be fine -- but those are pretty easy to listen to from the point of view of the naturalness of the voice. And also, I always listened to it at like 1.8 speed, so that moves things along a little bit.
[00:14:11] The other tip that I found ... I've only paid a token amount for proofreads because one approach I used was that I belong to several writers' groups, like Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America -- and I sent a note out to the members of my Sisters in Crime chapter, and I said, I have this book coming out and I will give you a free preview copy if you'll read it and let me know if you find any typos. And if you find a typo, I'll pay you a $5 bounty per typo, up to a maximum of $50.
[00:14:44] And it was great because they were very excited about getting an early copy of the book. And I don't know that they actually found 10 typos, but I gave them the $50 anyway, because they were being good sports, but sometimes you can find some really well-qualified people who are just willing to do it for the love of it. And you can also compensate them a little bit for the time they spend. But it would be an alternative for people who maybe can't ante up for the full professional proofreader service.
[00:15:13] Michael: Exactly. And what I'm finding is that there is a growing number of readers who offer services like that to the public. So I think that readers are starting to realize, Hey, there's a lot of authors out there that need feedback from people like me that read all the time. Why not get paid for something like this? And the rates that they're going to command are going to be significantly less and generally very affordable if you need that level of assistance.
[00:15:38] Matty: Yup. And if you get through that experience and you find that they haven't found any typos, you haven't sacrificed as much money as if you pay for the full professional, in some cases, and then find out you didn't get a full value for money.
[00:15:55] Michael: Yep. Well said.
[00:15:57] Matty: So the other big category of cost is the cover. So talk a little bit about the alternatives people have when it comes to coming up with a cover for indy published books.
[00:16:08] Michael: Yeah. There's a number of different alternatives. The first is to hire a full-out cover designer, professional cover designer, somebody who preferably does this for a living. And they can charge you anywhere from -- I'll just go based on what I've paid. I've paid anywhere from $300 all the way up to about $800 for a cover design and the $800 cover design wasn't necessarily better than the $300 cover design. Just because something costs more doesn't mean that it's better.
[00:16:38] A lot of that has to do with the experience level and the demand of that cover designer. It depends on if that person is the right pick for you. So one trap that people fall into sometimes is they think, if I pay more for a cover, I'll get more. And that's probably true if you're paying $25 for a cover designer. You're probably not going to get very much if you pay $25. That's generally what I've paid -- anywhere from $300 to $800. That's the first option.
[00:17:03] The second option is to use a pre-made cover. So there are a number of pre-made book cover websites out there and I think I paid between $30 and $40 for some of my first books, which for pre-made covers. I've seen them go all the way up to $75. You look through the gallery, you figure out which one works best for you. You buy it. And then the cover designer puts your name and title on it, and then they remove that cover from sale. So you still get an original cover, but you get it at a fraction of the cost. And the only downside to pre-made covers is that you may have a cover that does the job, but it's still not designed specifically for you. And then there's also things you have to consider with series as well. Will the designer design additional books in the series for you? What's that rate? All those things are things you have to think about.
[00:17:50] Another option would be crowdsourcing your covers, so you could crowdsource them with a site like 99designs where you pay one fee, it's like a couple hundred bucks, depending on what level of service you buy, and then many different designers will pitch you bids on concepts. And then you can pick from a number of different designers. It's a good way to pay one fee and can get a lot of different choices. Naturally there's some folks that are concerned about the ethics of that. And that's one of those things you have to do your research on, but it can be a pretty good way to get a cover as well.
[00:18:24] Matty: I did a blind cover design contest on 99designs because for my Lizzy Ballard books, when the first one came out, ROCK PAPER SCISSORS, I had no idea, I had no idea what I wanted the cover to look like. And so I put that up as a blind contest And it was very interesting because people brought very different perspectives to it. And I use Juan Padron, who was the person who won that contest, for all the subsequent books, which actually made me think of a question regarding pre-made. If you purchase a pre-made cover and it becomes the first of a series, can you then show that cover to a cover designer and say, I need part two that looks compatible with this and has a similar theme, a similar look?
[00:19:11] Michael: You can. There's some can of worms caveats there. Preferably you would use the same designer because that way they have the source file. They know what fonts exist. They created it, so they're going to be far more familiar with the design. That's what I would recommend. Because if you go through another designer and have them try to match the design, you run into potential copyright issues, right?
[00:19:36] Because you have to remember that you're basically licensing the cover from the designer. You don't own the copyright unless you ask for it. And so you also want to be careful of that and also be respectful of the other designer's copyright. So that's why I recommend that if you're going to do it, do it with the same person.
[00:19:52] And probably have that conversation with them before you buy so you know what you're getting into, because there's also all sorts of other issues as well. Like, do you get the source file? That's something I always recommend if you can get it.
[00:20:04] I've got a book and it's called 150 SELF PUBLISHING QUESTIONS ANSWERED. And I answer 150 self-publishing questions, actually more than that, but 150 was a good number for marketing, and we have an entire section on cover design in there. And one of the things I try to get people to be careful of is, I hate to be morbid, but what happens if your cover designer gets hit by a bus tomorrow? I mean it's possible. And what if you've got a five-book series and they've only completed book three. What are you going to do? And so if you can get that source file or at least understand what the fonts are and where they got the images, that makes it a lot easier too.
[00:20:40] So it's really more of a cover your bases type question is what I would say.
[00:20:45] Matty: Yeah, I've done that. And the finding out what the fonts are is important. Then if I'm doing promotional material or something like that, I can make it concurrent with the book it's advertising.
[00:20:55] The other thing I found is that I had the covers for my Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels professionally designed, but I have a whole series of suspense shorts, and I couldn't really afford to have each one get the full professional treatment. And so what I did is I found out what the fonts were and then in Canva I created a template and the designer had used two different fonts in the title and a certain font with my name that's kind of a branded font for me. And then I got photographs from Unsplash or in some cases I purchased them from Shutterstock, and I got the nice photograph as the background and then the title and the author name and so on in the fonts that matched. And you can line them all up and it's not clear unless you look really carefully which are professionally designed and which are not.
[00:21:44] Michael: And that's a lot easier to do when you did, like you did, where you got the fonts from the designer. A lot of people don't think to ask for it, but I think it's a really smart idea because the designer can just tell you off the top of their head, usually, what the designs are.
[00:21:56] And then another thing you also want to think about is, you want to make sure that your designer has the license to use the fonts that are on your cover because some fonts are copyrighted, and you have to pay a license to be able to use it. And so it makes a lot of sense to keep paperwork on file, to make sure that the designer has all those necessary clearances.
[00:22:16] Because designers, they're kind of like authors, where we make our living from copyright, but we don't always think about the copyright law part of it. And designers are no different. Sometimes designers don't always understand that. And so you just want to make sure your cover your bases because you're going to be the one that gets the cease and desist if you don't have the rights to use the content of the cover.
[00:22:36] Matty: What do you ask for from the designer to confirm that they have those rights?
[00:22:41] Michael: I just asked for the name of the fonts and then Google them and most designers, to avoid any issues, they like to use the open-source fonts. So these are free fonts that you don't have to worry about getting copyright clearance for. If the designer uses open-source fonts and you verify that, then you're fine. But every once in a while, you might catch a premium font on a cover. And so it's an opportunity to ask the designer a question: I just want to make sure you've got the license to that. And if you can't verify that, then what you could do is go off and buy the license yourself. So that way you would protect yourself. Again, that's something I never hear anybody talk about, but it's an important aspect because you never know.
[00:23:19] Matty: Do you have any idea what the cost for fonts is?
[00:23:23] Michael: They're not that expensive. I think I had one where I think I paid around $40 for it. I've seen some that are several hundred dollars, but that's pretty extreme. They're actually very affordable. I was kind of surprised. I thought, Oh my gosh, I've got to pay a lot for fonts. But if you do your own book covers, for example, that's the one thing I didn't mention. That's always an option. you can always pay to get those fonts as well.
[00:23:47] Matty: In the past, the whole do-your-own-book-cover has been a total no-no among people who are trying to be professional indy authors, and I was definitely in that camp for a long time. And I'm starting to loosen up a little bit because if you go to sites like Canva or BookBrush, their templates are quite good, especially if your book is in a certain genre that they've focused on creating a whole bunch of templates that support that. What are your thoughts about that level of DIY?
[00:24:18] Michael: Yeah. I've evolved on this topic. So I'm kind of like you, I thought, I'm a word person, I'm not a design person. But the more I think about it and the more I've seen some of the tools out there and gotten more familiar with Photoshop and BookBrush, the more I realized, this is probably the greatest expense saving you could make, if you could do it and do it right. Because if you do it yourself, you might pay for a couple of different stock images. I don't know what the going rate on those is today, but not that expensive, $7 to $20 maybe, don't quote me on that, but they're not that expensive. And then you can get open-source font, so you don't have to pay for that. And you can create a template, like you said, that is consistent, with consistent branding.
[00:25:05] And then it's just a matter of finding the right images, using the right effects, making sure you can master Photoshop. And that takes time. It takes energy. It's not something you can do overnight. But if you could do that, just think about how much money you would save over the course of your career. I've published over 50 books and I've paid for professional covers for all of them. I would have saved a tremendous amount of money if I could have learned to do a lot of that myself.
[00:25:30] Matty: Yeah, it will be interesting to see if the world of professional cover designers and the world of these kinds of DIY programs start to mesh because I can imagine going to someone who was, let's say, very proficient with Canva, who explicitly designed something for you that you can then manipulate for follow ons.
[00:25:50] Michael: Yeah, I've done that, actually. So with my non-fiction books, I've got a bunch of books for writers. One of the things that I did is I hired a designer very early on and I said, Hey, I'm going to pay you -- I don't remember what it was, it was a multiple of what his going rate was for the cover -- I want you to design me a template. And it's got branding, so every nonfiction book that I create from here on out will look exactly the same. The only thing that's going to be different is the color scheme, the background and the actual forefront image. And he did that for me. And now I've got a pretty good branding scheme for all my books for writers, to where I can just send him the idea and I can send him the image I'm thinking of and then he just takes care of it. And it saves a tremendous amount of time and also save me a lot of money, too.
[00:26:38] Matty: You can make a benefit out of what might initially seem like a detriment, because if you're doing a series, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, you want them all to kind of look the same, so you don't want to come up with a brand-new idea every time you have a book in that series. And even when it comes to pre-made covers -- my objection to pre-made covers for a while was you would go and you would look and it was like, Oh my God, it's 500 covers with a shirtless guy on the front.
[00:27:09] It's because for that genre, the shirtless guy in the front is what sells. And so in a sense, there's not even a benefit to having a design that's hugely different than the other people in your genre, because there's a message that those tropes are conveying to the potential reader that it's going to satisfy certain requirements. So, you know, unique is good, but too unique is a problem.
[00:27:33] Michael: Exactly. And one of the other issues I've come across just personally with pre-made covers is there's a lot of pre-made folks out there and sometimes they use that as a steppingstone. So sometimes the quality of the pre-made covers may not always be as strong as something that you would get from a more experienced designer. Because it's their training ground. Those covers are their practice sessions in some regards.
[00:27:54] And so it's just a matter of how much money you have to spend. And it just goes back to understanding what the best-selling self-published books in your sub-genre and even your sub-sub-genre, what those look like, because then you guys have to learn how to replicate them because there's really only five parts of a book cover. There's the title, and/or subtitle, the foreground, the background, and the author name. And if you understand what each of those elements should look like, based on what the best-selling books in your subject sub-genre look like, then it makes it easier to give those instructions to a designer.
[00:28:31] And then it also makes it easier to know when you're looking at, say, a pre-made cover, if this actually hits the mark, or if there's elements that put the book outside of genre.
[00:28:41] Matty: It would also be interesting to see over the life of a book, that, for example, it seems to me like every time I open BookBub, every BookBub email has a cover that has a woman in a yellow coat running away. I don't know why the yellow coat, but for a while, it was a woman in a red coat running away, but now it's morphed over to a woman in the yellow coat. So there must be dozens of books out there with a woman in a yellow coat.
[00:29:05] And I've got to believe that in a year or two years, three years, that's going to look dated and everyone will be saying, Oh yeah, the woman in the yellow coat was so 2020. And so if you're really looking strategically at this, you also want to factor in that if you're doing something that's sort of time-specific, you may want to relook at doing that in a couple of years to whatever the trope is at that time.
[00:29:29] Michael: Oh, that's such a great point because that's another reason why I've kind of evolved on doing my own covers is because tastes change every three to five years. So urban fantasy, for example, what was hot in 2014 is nothing at all, the covers look completely different now. You used to see the female on a leather jacket with her back to you and her head was kind of turned, you know, you could kind of see her face, but not quite. And now you don't see that as often. Now there's a trend to more illustrated covers. And so the tastes change and so if you have to hire a cover designer to change your cover every three to five years, that's an expensive thing to do, especially when you're like me and you've got50 books, that's an expensive proposition.
[00:30:13] So, you know, if you can do it, cool. You just have to commit the time and the energy to learning, because you can just as easily do it and make it look horrible. So you've got to do it and make sure it looks right.
[00:30:27] Matty: I wanted to close out with two related questions. One is where can people go to find reputable professionals who can help them with these different costs that we've talked about? And then what should they be looking out for to make sure that they're reputable for professionals? What are danger signals that maybe you're not going to the right person?
[00:30:49] Michael: Yeah. So first things first, I have to throw it out there that I am the outreach manager for the Alliance of Independent Authors, and they are a nonprofit organization for self-published writers and their mission is ethics and excellence in self-publishing. And it's really cool to have a nonprofit that advocates for self-published writers.
[00:31:10] And one of the things that they do, it's called a service ratings directory. And they find as many different service rating for self-publishing services as they can. And they throw them all into a database. And ALLi has a watchdog named John, and what he does is he vets all of these services and he rates them based on their ethicality the reasonableness of their prices. And you can check that out at selfpublishingadvice.org/ratings. And if you ever come across an editor or a service, and you're like, huh, I wonder if they're good, or if they're legit, I wonder if they're too good to be true or not, you can go there and you can search for the name and it'll tell you, Hey, caution, runaway, or it'll say, Recommended. That to me would be first port of call because ALLi is very trusted in the industry. They do a lot of good work there, and that would be a great place to start.
[00:32:03] As far as making sure that there's no red flags, first thing I would check is does this person have experience? There's a lot of first-time folks out there that they're fly by night, or they maybe just started editing yesterday and they really don't know anything about editing. So to me, if I'm an author, I don't want to spend the money training somebody. That's just my personal opinion. Don't spend your money training somebody. That will help.
[00:32:29] Second things first, Google the person's name or the name of the company plus scam and see what comes up. Sometimes you'd be surprised. Maybe there's somebody who's really disgruntled, and they go on a forum to warn all their friends about this person, how they took their money and never offered any services back.
[00:32:45] Another thing to do is to check the terms on the person's website. So if it's a reputable person, they should outline what to do if you come to a crossroads. Say you're just not meshing, they're giving you advice that you don't agree with or they didn't do what they said they were going to do, hopefully they would have something on there that outlines what would happen in that sort of situation.
[00:33:08] Another way that you can protect yourself, and I know I'm throwing a lot of things at you here, but another thing you could do to protect yourself is to draft up a contract. So just a very basic contract of what the service is, who the parties are, what the date the things should be delivered, and then outline what happens if things go south. That way both of you are on the same page when you hire a cover designer and or an editor, and if something goes wrong, then you can rely on the contract to help you resolve your dispute.
[00:33:37] Matty: Yeah, I think that's particularly important with regard to what all the components are because on the surface it might seem like give me a book cover is very straightforward, but I ended up putting together a contract. it was ebook cover that will meet the requirements for KDP and Draft2iDgital and all the other places. I want a paperback cover, a hard cover if you're doing that, audio book cover, which has different requirements. I've always asked for the raw materials and I've never had anyone push back, and I totally agree with the value of having that. A lot of times they'll provide you with promotional -- you know, here's the book in somebody's hand, here it is on an iPhone. You can ask for promotional things and that's usually easy for them to do. And the background image is the other thing that I've asked for, in a JPEG or PNG file, because a lot of times it's nice to have the background image and for creating your own promotional materials. And the fact that I've documented all that has saved me a couple of times, if there started being questions about it.
[00:34:40] Michael: Yeah. I always tell people to be careful. As writers, we have dreams and we're willing to spend money on those dreams because we all want to be the next J K Rowling or the next Stephen King. And there are a lot of bad guys out there that know that. And they will say just the right thing in just the right way to get you to pay them money. And sometimes they will charge an exorbitant amount of money and you get very little value, if anything, for the service.
[00:35:08] And it just breaks my heart to talk to writers who say, yeah, I ended up publishing through a vanity press, or, I won't name names, but we all know who we're talking about here, some of the bad actors. This is expensive enough as it is. If you do it the right way, it's even more expensive if you do it the wrong way, in terms of paying higher fees, having to potentially lose your copyrights and damage your career. That can be a really expensive mistake.
[00:35:33] And so that's why I always tell people just to be careful and don't give away your agency or your power. You have to remember that at the end of the day, you're the one making the decisions. Don't give that to somebody else because they'll take it if you let them.
[00:35:47] Matty: Yeah. I think that a good first check, not the final check, but a first check, is, is the person you're thinking about working with, do they benefit if I benefit? So it's in Amazon's best interest, it's in Barnes and Noble's best interest, to help me sell books because when I make money, they make money, the reader's happy. And sometimes you can just look at business plans and it's clear that they have no skin in the game, that all they care is that you buy a thousand books and if they're in your garage 10 years from now, it doesn't matter to them because they've made the sale. So I wouldn't stop with that test, but that can be a first test to weed out the real bad players.
[00:36:27] Michael: And look at credibility. Just the other day I was talking to a writer and they were bragging about their publisher and they're like, Oh, the publisher has done all this for me, and they are the best and the CEO is just a real good person and we get along. And so after we talked, I got to Google the name of his company. So I went on Google and looked at it and, I kid you not, the website looked like it was made in 1990. And the company was started like last year and they were charging all this money to do things that a regular publisher would do for free.
[00:36:58] So like they were charging several hundred dollars just to create a paperback version that they would only sell on their website, that wouldn't distributed anywhere else. You know, you really picked the wrong person here. So that's why you got to be careful. Sometimes with bad actors they can be charming, but I've been around long enough. I've been doing this for about eight years. I've talked to enough authors who have made some sort of mistake in this front. And usually the reason they make the mistake is because of that personal connection. So just don't let it fool you.
[00:37:30] Matty: Yeah. The ALLi resource is a great one. I'm a member of ALLi myself, so I always like to put in a good word that your organization is wonderful.
[00:37:39] Michael: ALLi is amazing.
[00:37:40] Matty: Yeah. A great podcast, too.
[00:37:42] Michael: Yes. And I co-host one of those podcasts. So if you want to hear more of me, you can listen to that too.
[00:37:48] Matty: Let's use this as an opportunity, first of all, for me to thank you for sharing all this hard-won knowledge, and also let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and your work online.
[00:37:59] Michael: Absolutely. So first and foremost, you can find out everything that I do and all the adventures, and sometimes misadventures, that I'm up to at authorlevelup.com. And that has a link to my YouTube channel, Author Level Up, where I do videos every single week, every single Friday, for authors to help them become better versions of themselves.
[00:38:18] I also have several podcasts, so you can find all of those. And I've got about a dozen books for writers. So, if anything that you heard today resonated with you, you can find it there as well. And the book that I mentioned that I actually wrote with ALLi, it's called 150 SELF-PUBLISHING QUESTIONS ANSWERED, and we talk about the costs of self-publishing. We talk about covers. We get really nitty gritty into things like ISBNs and how to work with an editor and how to work with a cover designer. And you can find all of that authorlevelup.com/150.
[00:38:49] Matty: Great. Michael, thank you so much. This has been so edifying.
[00:38:53] Michael: Yeah, it's been my pleasure, Matty. Thank you for having me.
[00:03:11] Matty: That's interesting that one of Nick's two pieces of advice in the episode that I mentioned was get an accountant, and you can listen to a lot of podcasts and read a lot about indy publishing and not hear the recommendation to get an accountant, so I think it's valuable to hear that you have the same recommendation that he did.
[00:03:29] Michael: Yeah. And it's something I didn't do until this past year. I've had someone that's done my taxes, but I haven't had anyone that has done my bookkeeping and it was something I probably should have invested in early on, but didn't, and so I'm at a point with my business now where I'm running a profit, and so I pretty much have to, in order to avoid getting taxed to the max. So the sooner you can do it the better.
[00:03:52] Matty: And if someone is looking for someone to help them with that, do you have any advice about, is it important that they find someone who is familiar with indy author business models or any advice on that front?
[00:04:07] Michael: Oh, that's such a great question too, because the accountant that I used to have, bless her heart, she was great because here in the United States we've got Schedule C filing, so she was able to do that for me and also do my personal taxes. But as my business started ramping up, I started calling her with these weird out of the box questions like, Hey, I've got 20 revenue streams, what's the best way to handle this? or, Hey, I'm about to sign a deal that's going to get some money coming in, how do I handle this? or, Hey, I'm going to be doing some consultancy work, but the company is in the United Kingdom and they're paying me every month, how do I handle that?
[00:04:44] And so she just kind of tapped out. She's just like, No, I can't do this. You know, it was your local hometown accountant. And so what I have found in the past few years is someone who has familiarity with YouTubers and familiarity with creative entrepreneurs. That's who you ultimately want, because they're going to know the ins and outs of the revenue streams that are coming in and the types of expenses you're going to have coming out.
[00:05:08] So this is one area where I would advise you, it might be easy to go to the hometown accountant. You probably want to find somebody that is super specialized. If they specialize in authors, great. I had a hard time finding someone that did that, but if they can specialize in creatives, you're going to be in a lot better situation.
[00:05:26] Matty: Well, I'm going to use your mention of the costs related to indy publishing as an entree to our topic, which is how much does it cost to self-publish a book. And again, this is something that is surprisingly hard to find information on. And when I came across your video about this, you encapsulated it so nicely. So I'm going to prompt you with the categories that you mentioned in your video and have you take it away in terms of describing what is involved there.
[00:05:51] So the first big category is editing. And right off the bat, you had a recommendation that I want to have a little bit of conversation about, but what's the biggest expense that an author could spend in the editing realm?
[00:06:03] Michael: Yeah. So there's three types of editing. There's developmental editing, copy editing, and proofreading. And in that order, those are the most expensive to the cheapest. In theory, a developmental editor is going to look at the big picture of your story, make recommendations on your plot, recommendations on your character arcs. And they're going to spend the most time with your story. So therefore you're probably going to spend the most money with them. And there are a lot of developmental editors out there who that's all they do. That's what they specialize in. That's how they make their living. So it's a pricier ticket item.
[00:06:39] And I tell people you can expect to spend anywhere from a couple hundred dollars up to several thousand dollars, if not more for a developmental editor. And I have frequently told people that it's not something that I recommend. I don't have anything against developmental editors, I think there are good folks out there, but this is such an unregulated type of service that it can be really easy to get taken for a ride. And as a business owner, I have not seen any conclusive evidence that a developmental editor will guarantee that you can sell more books. So that's developmental editing.
[00:07:12] Copy editing is when your editor looks at your manuscript line by line, makes sure that the words on the page are the right words and that everything flows properly. And it depends on the length of your novel, but for a copy editor, you can expect to spend anywhere from several hundred dollars upwards. It just depends on the length of your novel, the experience of your editor. And that's the one type of editing I don't recommend that anyone do without. Copy editing is where the book becomes a book, it's where everything starts to sing. And I highly recommend that.
[00:07:43] And then if you can afford it, there's a proofreader, someone who checks the work of the copy editor and they check for last minute typos, they check for formatting issues. And it's really your last line of defense before the book goes public. And it depends, with proofreaders sometimes, generally speaking from my perspective, I have tended to pay less than a copy editor. And I use those words in quotes, because I hate to give values because you just never know. But sometimes proofreaders can be just as expensive as copy editors because just because the amount of work that they have left to do isn't as much, that doesn't mean that they're not going to spend a fair amount of time on the book.
[00:08:22] So in that order is the level of costs.
[00:08:26] Matty: I was very interested when I heard in your video that you were saying that if you had to do without, for cost reasons, I assume, the developmental edit, that avoiding that was something you could get behind.
[00:08:36] And although it's not a guarantee of a best-selling book, my fear is that it leaves the opportunity open that you have beautiful prose, all the copy edit kinds of things are right in line, but there's a character that isn't well-developed or there's a plot line that doesn't go anywhere that the copy editor is not necessarily going to catch.
[00:09:00] So do you have any recommendations, if someone really can't ante up for the developmental editor, what steps can they take to make sure that they're doing as much of that themselves as they can?
[00:09:10] Michael: The one thing I would recommend is to get feedback from readers instead of an editor. Because if you think about it, an editor is going to have experience in editing the books. They don't always have the experience or even a track record of predicting what's going to work because ultimately the plot arcs and the character arcs and all that, that's subjective, it's a subjective opinion. It may strengthen your story. It may weaken your story. And to me, if I was going to make a decision on that, I would much rather get that feedback from a reader.
[00:09:40] So you could use a beta reader, a number of different beta readers, to give you feedback on how the story looks. And you could even pay -- you can find paid beta readers these days on places like Upwork. There are different forums out there where you can find beta readers and you can pay them a certain amount. It would be a fraction of what you would pay for a developmental editor, if you pay them anything at all. And that would give you some feedback from people who are potentially, if you've done your homework right, in your target audience. And they would give you feedback that you could use more realistically.
[00:10:14] Matty: I think it is an important caveat that you want to get readers in your genre, because if you're writing sci-fi fantasies and you get a cozy reader, they're going to hate it right out of the gate.
[00:10:25] Michael: Exactly. If their feedback begins with, Hey, this is not the book I typically read, you probably haven't done your homework. And I made that mistake probably for my first three or four books before I started saying, okay, now I need to find somebody who's actually a reader in this genre.
[00:10:41] Matty: The other thing I wanted to ask about is that I don't use them myself, but you hear about ProWritingAid or Grammarly or some of these other systems that are becoming much more sophisticated than just a spellchecker or a grammar checker. Do you have any experience with those, and a sense of how they do or don't overlap with copy editing services from a human being?
[00:11:05] Michael: Yeah, absolutely. So first things first: nothing replaces an editor. ProWritingAid and Grammarly are fantastic, I happen to like them both. In fact, I've done a video on my channel, where I compared both of them. And I actually ran them through the gamut and tested them out in terms of the numbers of errors that they found in my work and the accuracy and all that stuff. And I think that they're great. I think once you've gotten your book edited and you're ready to publish it, using them as a last line of defense -- ProWritingAid or Grammarly -- I think is a really smart idea because it can help you find typos that maybe your editor might've missed. Or if you start finding a bunch of typos that your editor should have caught, then maybe it tells you that you need to hire a different editor.
[00:11:48] But my general experience -- and this is just Michael La Ronn's opinion -- my general experience is that ProWritingAid is better for fiction because it has more tools, I think, that a fiction writer can use. And Grammarly tends to be better for non-fiction. It's just my experience that the accuracy rate tends to be better in each of those respective categories. But yeah, it's no substitute for an editor, but I think that they'll help you catch things that Microsoft Word spellchecker won't. And so it's not a bad investment.
[00:12:18] Matty: The one thing that I found that has really cut down on the typos that are in any document I would send to a proofreader is listening to it in a text to speech app, because there's a point at which you don't want a machine, you want a human being. There's a point in which you don't want a human being, you want a machine because the human being is going to know what the sentence is supposed to say and can easily read over an error because they correct it in their own minds. Whereas a machine is going to read it exactly like you've written it. And I found I can find a bunch of stuff by listening to it. Not only typos, but stylistic things or just odd repetition of words. Is that something that you use at all?
[00:13:02] Michael: I do every once in a while. It gets tedious to read out the whole thing, the whole book. But what I do like to do is the first couple of chapters, because that's going to make the biggest impression on the reader. And then I'll do a couple chapters in the middle, maybe where there's a plot twist or something that I want the readers to really be engrossed in. And then I'll maybe do the last couple chapters.
[00:13:24] So that way, you're not listening to the whole thing with a machine, but you're listening to some of the critical parts and you can do that at any point in the process.
[00:13:33] Matty: The tools that I've used that make it a little less painful to actually listen to the whole thing, because I do listen to the whole thing, are Natural Reader. It has pretty good voices for free. And also if you have a Mac, you can get Siri to read it to you. Except for a couple of odd pronunciation things that Siri does that always makes me leap for the screen to see what I've written -- that she pronounced it that way and it turns out to be fine -- but those are pretty easy to listen to from the point of view of the naturalness of the voice. And also, I always listened to it at like 1.8 speed, so that moves things along a little bit.
[00:14:11] The other tip that I found ... I've only paid a token amount for proofreads because one approach I used was that I belong to several writers' groups, like Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America -- and I sent a note out to the members of my Sisters in Crime chapter, and I said, I have this book coming out and I will give you a free preview copy if you'll read it and let me know if you find any typos. And if you find a typo, I'll pay you a $5 bounty per typo, up to a maximum of $50.
[00:14:44] And it was great because they were very excited about getting an early copy of the book. And I don't know that they actually found 10 typos, but I gave them the $50 anyway, because they were being good sports, but sometimes you can find some really well-qualified people who are just willing to do it for the love of it. And you can also compensate them a little bit for the time they spend. But it would be an alternative for people who maybe can't ante up for the full professional proofreader service.
[00:15:13] Michael: Exactly. And what I'm finding is that there is a growing number of readers who offer services like that to the public. So I think that readers are starting to realize, Hey, there's a lot of authors out there that need feedback from people like me that read all the time. Why not get paid for something like this? And the rates that they're going to command are going to be significantly less and generally very affordable if you need that level of assistance.
[00:15:38] Matty: Yup. And if you get through that experience and you find that they haven't found any typos, you haven't sacrificed as much money as if you pay for the full professional, in some cases, and then find out you didn't get a full value for money.
[00:15:55] Michael: Yep. Well said.
[00:15:57] Matty: So the other big category of cost is the cover. So talk a little bit about the alternatives people have when it comes to coming up with a cover for indy published books.
[00:16:08] Michael: Yeah. There's a number of different alternatives. The first is to hire a full-out cover designer, professional cover designer, somebody who preferably does this for a living. And they can charge you anywhere from -- I'll just go based on what I've paid. I've paid anywhere from $300 all the way up to about $800 for a cover design and the $800 cover design wasn't necessarily better than the $300 cover design. Just because something costs more doesn't mean that it's better.
[00:16:38] A lot of that has to do with the experience level and the demand of that cover designer. It depends on if that person is the right pick for you. So one trap that people fall into sometimes is they think, if I pay more for a cover, I'll get more. And that's probably true if you're paying $25 for a cover designer. You're probably not going to get very much if you pay $25. That's generally what I've paid -- anywhere from $300 to $800. That's the first option.
[00:17:03] The second option is to use a pre-made cover. So there are a number of pre-made book cover websites out there and I think I paid between $30 and $40 for some of my first books, which for pre-made covers. I've seen them go all the way up to $75. You look through the gallery, you figure out which one works best for you. You buy it. And then the cover designer puts your name and title on it, and then they remove that cover from sale. So you still get an original cover, but you get it at a fraction of the cost. And the only downside to pre-made covers is that you may have a cover that does the job, but it's still not designed specifically for you. And then there's also things you have to consider with series as well. Will the designer design additional books in the series for you? What's that rate? All those things are things you have to think about.
[00:17:50] Another option would be crowdsourcing your covers, so you could crowdsource them with a site like 99designs where you pay one fee, it's like a couple hundred bucks, depending on what level of service you buy, and then many different designers will pitch you bids on concepts. And then you can pick from a number of different designers. It's a good way to pay one fee and can get a lot of different choices. Naturally there's some folks that are concerned about the ethics of that. And that's one of those things you have to do your research on, but it can be a pretty good way to get a cover as well.
[00:18:24] Matty: I did a blind cover design contest on 99designs because for my Lizzy Ballard books, when the first one came out, ROCK PAPER SCISSORS, I had no idea, I had no idea what I wanted the cover to look like. And so I put that up as a blind contest And it was very interesting because people brought very different perspectives to it. And I use Juan Padron, who was the person who won that contest, for all the subsequent books, which actually made me think of a question regarding pre-made. If you purchase a pre-made cover and it becomes the first of a series, can you then show that cover to a cover designer and say, I need part two that looks compatible with this and has a similar theme, a similar look?
[00:19:11] Michael: You can. There's some can of worms caveats there. Preferably you would use the same designer because that way they have the source file. They know what fonts exist. They created it, so they're going to be far more familiar with the design. That's what I would recommend. Because if you go through another designer and have them try to match the design, you run into potential copyright issues, right?
[00:19:36] Because you have to remember that you're basically licensing the cover from the designer. You don't own the copyright unless you ask for it. And so you also want to be careful of that and also be respectful of the other designer's copyright. So that's why I recommend that if you're going to do it, do it with the same person.
[00:19:52] And probably have that conversation with them before you buy so you know what you're getting into, because there's also all sorts of other issues as well. Like, do you get the source file? That's something I always recommend if you can get it.
[00:20:04] I've got a book and it's called 150 SELF PUBLISHING QUESTIONS ANSWERED. And I answer 150 self-publishing questions, actually more than that, but 150 was a good number for marketing, and we have an entire section on cover design in there. And one of the things I try to get people to be careful of is, I hate to be morbid, but what happens if your cover designer gets hit by a bus tomorrow? I mean it's possible. And what if you've got a five-book series and they've only completed book three. What are you going to do? And so if you can get that source file or at least understand what the fonts are and where they got the images, that makes it a lot easier too.
[00:20:40] So it's really more of a cover your bases type question is what I would say.
[00:20:45] Matty: Yeah, I've done that. And the finding out what the fonts are is important. Then if I'm doing promotional material or something like that, I can make it concurrent with the book it's advertising.
[00:20:55] The other thing I found is that I had the covers for my Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels professionally designed, but I have a whole series of suspense shorts, and I couldn't really afford to have each one get the full professional treatment. And so what I did is I found out what the fonts were and then in Canva I created a template and the designer had used two different fonts in the title and a certain font with my name that's kind of a branded font for me. And then I got photographs from Unsplash or in some cases I purchased them from Shutterstock, and I got the nice photograph as the background and then the title and the author name and so on in the fonts that matched. And you can line them all up and it's not clear unless you look really carefully which are professionally designed and which are not.
[00:21:44] Michael: And that's a lot easier to do when you did, like you did, where you got the fonts from the designer. A lot of people don't think to ask for it, but I think it's a really smart idea because the designer can just tell you off the top of their head, usually, what the designs are.
[00:21:56] And then another thing you also want to think about is, you want to make sure that your designer has the license to use the fonts that are on your cover because some fonts are copyrighted, and you have to pay a license to be able to use it. And so it makes a lot of sense to keep paperwork on file, to make sure that the designer has all those necessary clearances.
[00:22:16] Because designers, they're kind of like authors, where we make our living from copyright, but we don't always think about the copyright law part of it. And designers are no different. Sometimes designers don't always understand that. And so you just want to make sure your cover your bases because you're going to be the one that gets the cease and desist if you don't have the rights to use the content of the cover.
[00:22:36] Matty: What do you ask for from the designer to confirm that they have those rights?
[00:22:41] Michael: I just asked for the name of the fonts and then Google them and most designers, to avoid any issues, they like to use the open-source fonts. So these are free fonts that you don't have to worry about getting copyright clearance for. If the designer uses open-source fonts and you verify that, then you're fine. But every once in a while, you might catch a premium font on a cover. And so it's an opportunity to ask the designer a question: I just want to make sure you've got the license to that. And if you can't verify that, then what you could do is go off and buy the license yourself. So that way you would protect yourself. Again, that's something I never hear anybody talk about, but it's an important aspect because you never know.
[00:23:19] Matty: Do you have any idea what the cost for fonts is?
[00:23:23] Michael: They're not that expensive. I think I had one where I think I paid around $40 for it. I've seen some that are several hundred dollars, but that's pretty extreme. They're actually very affordable. I was kind of surprised. I thought, Oh my gosh, I've got to pay a lot for fonts. But if you do your own book covers, for example, that's the one thing I didn't mention. That's always an option. you can always pay to get those fonts as well.
[00:23:47] Matty: In the past, the whole do-your-own-book-cover has been a total no-no among people who are trying to be professional indy authors, and I was definitely in that camp for a long time. And I'm starting to loosen up a little bit because if you go to sites like Canva or BookBrush, their templates are quite good, especially if your book is in a certain genre that they've focused on creating a whole bunch of templates that support that. What are your thoughts about that level of DIY?
[00:24:18] Michael: Yeah. I've evolved on this topic. So I'm kind of like you, I thought, I'm a word person, I'm not a design person. But the more I think about it and the more I've seen some of the tools out there and gotten more familiar with Photoshop and BookBrush, the more I realized, this is probably the greatest expense saving you could make, if you could do it and do it right. Because if you do it yourself, you might pay for a couple of different stock images. I don't know what the going rate on those is today, but not that expensive, $7 to $20 maybe, don't quote me on that, but they're not that expensive. And then you can get open-source font, so you don't have to pay for that. And you can create a template, like you said, that is consistent, with consistent branding.
[00:25:05] And then it's just a matter of finding the right images, using the right effects, making sure you can master Photoshop. And that takes time. It takes energy. It's not something you can do overnight. But if you could do that, just think about how much money you would save over the course of your career. I've published over 50 books and I've paid for professional covers for all of them. I would have saved a tremendous amount of money if I could have learned to do a lot of that myself.
[00:25:30] Matty: Yeah, it will be interesting to see if the world of professional cover designers and the world of these kinds of DIY programs start to mesh because I can imagine going to someone who was, let's say, very proficient with Canva, who explicitly designed something for you that you can then manipulate for follow ons.
[00:25:50] Michael: Yeah, I've done that, actually. So with my non-fiction books, I've got a bunch of books for writers. One of the things that I did is I hired a designer very early on and I said, Hey, I'm going to pay you -- I don't remember what it was, it was a multiple of what his going rate was for the cover -- I want you to design me a template. And it's got branding, so every nonfiction book that I create from here on out will look exactly the same. The only thing that's going to be different is the color scheme, the background and the actual forefront image. And he did that for me. And now I've got a pretty good branding scheme for all my books for writers, to where I can just send him the idea and I can send him the image I'm thinking of and then he just takes care of it. And it saves a tremendous amount of time and also save me a lot of money, too.
[00:26:38] Matty: You can make a benefit out of what might initially seem like a detriment, because if you're doing a series, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, you want them all to kind of look the same, so you don't want to come up with a brand-new idea every time you have a book in that series. And even when it comes to pre-made covers -- my objection to pre-made covers for a while was you would go and you would look and it was like, Oh my God, it's 500 covers with a shirtless guy on the front.
[00:27:09] It's because for that genre, the shirtless guy in the front is what sells. And so in a sense, there's not even a benefit to having a design that's hugely different than the other people in your genre, because there's a message that those tropes are conveying to the potential reader that it's going to satisfy certain requirements. So, you know, unique is good, but too unique is a problem.
[00:27:33] Michael: Exactly. And one of the other issues I've come across just personally with pre-made covers is there's a lot of pre-made folks out there and sometimes they use that as a steppingstone. So sometimes the quality of the pre-made covers may not always be as strong as something that you would get from a more experienced designer. Because it's their training ground. Those covers are their practice sessions in some regards.
[00:27:54] And so it's just a matter of how much money you have to spend. And it just goes back to understanding what the best-selling self-published books in your sub-genre and even your sub-sub-genre, what those look like, because then you guys have to learn how to replicate them because there's really only five parts of a book cover. There's the title, and/or subtitle, the foreground, the background, and the author name. And if you understand what each of those elements should look like, based on what the best-selling books in your subject sub-genre look like, then it makes it easier to give those instructions to a designer.
[00:28:31] And then it also makes it easier to know when you're looking at, say, a pre-made cover, if this actually hits the mark, or if there's elements that put the book outside of genre.
[00:28:41] Matty: It would also be interesting to see over the life of a book, that, for example, it seems to me like every time I open BookBub, every BookBub email has a cover that has a woman in a yellow coat running away. I don't know why the yellow coat, but for a while, it was a woman in a red coat running away, but now it's morphed over to a woman in the yellow coat. So there must be dozens of books out there with a woman in a yellow coat.
[00:29:05] And I've got to believe that in a year or two years, three years, that's going to look dated and everyone will be saying, Oh yeah, the woman in the yellow coat was so 2020. And so if you're really looking strategically at this, you also want to factor in that if you're doing something that's sort of time-specific, you may want to relook at doing that in a couple of years to whatever the trope is at that time.
[00:29:29] Michael: Oh, that's such a great point because that's another reason why I've kind of evolved on doing my own covers is because tastes change every three to five years. So urban fantasy, for example, what was hot in 2014 is nothing at all, the covers look completely different now. You used to see the female on a leather jacket with her back to you and her head was kind of turned, you know, you could kind of see her face, but not quite. And now you don't see that as often. Now there's a trend to more illustrated covers. And so the tastes change and so if you have to hire a cover designer to change your cover every three to five years, that's an expensive thing to do, especially when you're like me and you've got50 books, that's an expensive proposition.
[00:30:13] So, you know, if you can do it, cool. You just have to commit the time and the energy to learning, because you can just as easily do it and make it look horrible. So you've got to do it and make sure it looks right.
[00:30:27] Matty: I wanted to close out with two related questions. One is where can people go to find reputable professionals who can help them with these different costs that we've talked about? And then what should they be looking out for to make sure that they're reputable for professionals? What are danger signals that maybe you're not going to the right person?
[00:30:49] Michael: Yeah. So first things first, I have to throw it out there that I am the outreach manager for the Alliance of Independent Authors, and they are a nonprofit organization for self-published writers and their mission is ethics and excellence in self-publishing. And it's really cool to have a nonprofit that advocates for self-published writers.
[00:31:10] And one of the things that they do, it's called a service ratings directory. And they find as many different service rating for self-publishing services as they can. And they throw them all into a database. And ALLi has a watchdog named John, and what he does is he vets all of these services and he rates them based on their ethicality the reasonableness of their prices. And you can check that out at selfpublishingadvice.org/ratings. And if you ever come across an editor or a service, and you're like, huh, I wonder if they're good, or if they're legit, I wonder if they're too good to be true or not, you can go there and you can search for the name and it'll tell you, Hey, caution, runaway, or it'll say, Recommended. That to me would be first port of call because ALLi is very trusted in the industry. They do a lot of good work there, and that would be a great place to start.
[00:32:03] As far as making sure that there's no red flags, first thing I would check is does this person have experience? There's a lot of first-time folks out there that they're fly by night, or they maybe just started editing yesterday and they really don't know anything about editing. So to me, if I'm an author, I don't want to spend the money training somebody. That's just my personal opinion. Don't spend your money training somebody. That will help.
[00:32:29] Second things first, Google the person's name or the name of the company plus scam and see what comes up. Sometimes you'd be surprised. Maybe there's somebody who's really disgruntled, and they go on a forum to warn all their friends about this person, how they took their money and never offered any services back.
[00:32:45] Another thing to do is to check the terms on the person's website. So if it's a reputable person, they should outline what to do if you come to a crossroads. Say you're just not meshing, they're giving you advice that you don't agree with or they didn't do what they said they were going to do, hopefully they would have something on there that outlines what would happen in that sort of situation.
[00:33:08] Another way that you can protect yourself, and I know I'm throwing a lot of things at you here, but another thing you could do to protect yourself is to draft up a contract. So just a very basic contract of what the service is, who the parties are, what the date the things should be delivered, and then outline what happens if things go south. That way both of you are on the same page when you hire a cover designer and or an editor, and if something goes wrong, then you can rely on the contract to help you resolve your dispute.
[00:33:37] Matty: Yeah, I think that's particularly important with regard to what all the components are because on the surface it might seem like give me a book cover is very straightforward, but I ended up putting together a contract. it was ebook cover that will meet the requirements for KDP and Draft2iDgital and all the other places. I want a paperback cover, a hard cover if you're doing that, audio book cover, which has different requirements. I've always asked for the raw materials and I've never had anyone push back, and I totally agree with the value of having that. A lot of times they'll provide you with promotional -- you know, here's the book in somebody's hand, here it is on an iPhone. You can ask for promotional things and that's usually easy for them to do. And the background image is the other thing that I've asked for, in a JPEG or PNG file, because a lot of times it's nice to have the background image and for creating your own promotional materials. And the fact that I've documented all that has saved me a couple of times, if there started being questions about it.
[00:34:40] Michael: Yeah. I always tell people to be careful. As writers, we have dreams and we're willing to spend money on those dreams because we all want to be the next J K Rowling or the next Stephen King. And there are a lot of bad guys out there that know that. And they will say just the right thing in just the right way to get you to pay them money. And sometimes they will charge an exorbitant amount of money and you get very little value, if anything, for the service.
[00:35:08] And it just breaks my heart to talk to writers who say, yeah, I ended up publishing through a vanity press, or, I won't name names, but we all know who we're talking about here, some of the bad actors. This is expensive enough as it is. If you do it the right way, it's even more expensive if you do it the wrong way, in terms of paying higher fees, having to potentially lose your copyrights and damage your career. That can be a really expensive mistake.
[00:35:33] And so that's why I always tell people just to be careful and don't give away your agency or your power. You have to remember that at the end of the day, you're the one making the decisions. Don't give that to somebody else because they'll take it if you let them.
[00:35:47] Matty: Yeah. I think that a good first check, not the final check, but a first check, is, is the person you're thinking about working with, do they benefit if I benefit? So it's in Amazon's best interest, it's in Barnes and Noble's best interest, to help me sell books because when I make money, they make money, the reader's happy. And sometimes you can just look at business plans and it's clear that they have no skin in the game, that all they care is that you buy a thousand books and if they're in your garage 10 years from now, it doesn't matter to them because they've made the sale. So I wouldn't stop with that test, but that can be a first test to weed out the real bad players.
[00:36:27] Michael: And look at credibility. Just the other day I was talking to a writer and they were bragging about their publisher and they're like, Oh, the publisher has done all this for me, and they are the best and the CEO is just a real good person and we get along. And so after we talked, I got to Google the name of his company. So I went on Google and looked at it and, I kid you not, the website looked like it was made in 1990. And the company was started like last year and they were charging all this money to do things that a regular publisher would do for free.
[00:36:58] So like they were charging several hundred dollars just to create a paperback version that they would only sell on their website, that wouldn't distributed anywhere else. You know, you really picked the wrong person here. So that's why you got to be careful. Sometimes with bad actors they can be charming, but I've been around long enough. I've been doing this for about eight years. I've talked to enough authors who have made some sort of mistake in this front. And usually the reason they make the mistake is because of that personal connection. So just don't let it fool you.
[00:37:30] Matty: Yeah. The ALLi resource is a great one. I'm a member of ALLi myself, so I always like to put in a good word that your organization is wonderful.
[00:37:39] Michael: ALLi is amazing.
[00:37:40] Matty: Yeah. A great podcast, too.
[00:37:42] Michael: Yes. And I co-host one of those podcasts. So if you want to hear more of me, you can listen to that too.
[00:37:48] Matty: Let's use this as an opportunity, first of all, for me to thank you for sharing all this hard-won knowledge, and also let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and your work online.
[00:37:59] Michael: Absolutely. So first and foremost, you can find out everything that I do and all the adventures, and sometimes misadventures, that I'm up to at authorlevelup.com. And that has a link to my YouTube channel, Author Level Up, where I do videos every single week, every single Friday, for authors to help them become better versions of themselves.
[00:38:18] I also have several podcasts, so you can find all of those. And I've got about a dozen books for writers. So, if anything that you heard today resonated with you, you can find it there as well. And the book that I mentioned that I actually wrote with ALLi, it's called 150 SELF-PUBLISHING QUESTIONS ANSWERED, and we talk about the costs of self-publishing. We talk about covers. We get really nitty gritty into things like ISBNs and how to work with an editor and how to work with a cover designer. And you can find all of that authorlevelup.com/150.
[00:38:49] Matty: Great. Michael, thank you so much. This has been so edifying.
[00:38:53] Michael: Yeah, it's been my pleasure, Matty. Thank you for having me.
Links
Become a Writer: How much does it cost to self-publish a book? from Michael La Ronn's Author Level Up YouTube channel
Alliance of Independent Authors - I love ALLi so much, I'm an affiliate!
Episode 52 FIVE KEYS TO BUILDING A RESILIENT INDY BUSINESS with Nicholas Erik
What did you think of this episode? Leave a comment and let us know!
