First, yes, I did NaNoWriMo again, aiming to crunch out a novel, or at least 50,000 words across the month of November. Outcome for me? Yeah. Never made it this time, for many reasons, but I did complete just over 40,000 words of a manuscript, or approximately half of what the novel might eventually be. For now, that project will be shelved. It was fun and important to make a significant start on the project as it is a concept I’ve wrestled with for more than a decade. I will nibble at it for a while.

October was a productive month in that I can honestly say that I have finally converted all my out-of-print fantasy series – Andrakis, Ashuak Chronicles, Dreaming in Amber – into digital print-on-demand on Amazon. Basically, if you want copies of any of the books – Guardians, Kingmaker, Dragonlords, Blood, Pasion, Freedom, The Amber Legacy, A Solitary Journey, Prisoner of Fate or The Demon Horsemen – I can provide them. Just so that you know 
 
This entry, I thought you might be interested in a hypothetical – How much does it cost to write a book? There is no real comparison with salaried or waged employment, but here’s a breakdown based on my experiences. Careful, it’s lengthy.
 
Conceptualising a novel is not easy to quantify. While I can tell you that a recent project was developed from an idea to a draft within two months, another novel that I am drafting for NaNoWriMo in November is a concept now more than twenty years old. However, as a good friend and I recently did, a concept could technically be the product of a day’s think-tank workshop, bouncing various ideas around and teasing out potential plots and characters and scenarios, so we will use this as the basis for costing the writing of a novel. Let’s say I am paid a casual rate at $80/hr, which is a current approximation for a mid-range copywriter (source), and we spend an eight hour day on conceptualising the novel, making the initial cost or investment $640.
 
Most of my novels are around the 100,000 word mark, some up to 140,000 words. A current unpublished manuscript of mine is 120,000 words, so I will use that manuscript for this hypothetical. While I can generally type at about 90 words per minute, I’ve timed and know that it generally takes me around 30 minutes to create a page of a fiction piece (300 words). This is because the creative writing process is a complex mixture of thinking, typing, reading, revising, editing and altering, and not a simple copy or fast typing exercise. On average, I complete maybe ten words a minute in draft format. A novel draft of 120,000 words, based on that rate of production, requires at least 200 hours of constant typing. On the copywriter’s wage, the draft has cost $16,000 to produce, representing almost five weeks of fulltime working. As a reference, a novel I did complete and have published, of similar length, took close to three months to complete in first full draft when I took long service leave, so pumping out a novel in five weeks, while doable, is not close to the time generally required.
 
Once the draft is created, it requires editing, and editing is not a simple or one-off process. Editors refer to at least four phases that I can attest to as a writer/editor:
 

1. Structural editing – checking that the story has an arc, appropriate scene and event transitions, pace and timing and so on.
2. Line editing – checking sentence lengths, tonality, consistencies and so on.
3. Copyediting – checking spelling, grammar, punctuation and so on.
4. Proofreading – checking the work is presented best for a reader, usually done when the work is ready for submission/publishing

 
While much of the above also occurs during the creative writing process, when the draft is completed all of the above have to be done at least once each before a manuscript is considered ready for submission to anyone. Good editors currently charge around $60-$120 per 1000 words, so I’ll suggest the rate for this hypothetical will be $60 per 1000 words. For the hypothetical project, the time involved will be around 120 hours so the cost of editing the draft into a suitable manuscript will be $7,200. Note: when I showed this to a few people they were shocked at what it can cost to have a book edited, and a couple of writers said they could never complete their project if that was a cost they were facing.
 
Creating the novel from concept to manuscript nominally costs $23,840 as a paid exercise, assuming there are no interruptions or major rewrites involved in the process.
 
We can factor in a variety of additional costs, like home office equipment (depreciation), utility services and so on. It is likely the full cost of writing a manuscript is around $25,000 of equivalent wages through time and equipment.
 
After that, the writer has to attract interest from an agent, and the agent has to interest a publisher. Those already connected in the industry can go directly to people and businesses that will, if they like the work, publish and market their novel. The costs involved in establishing contacts can range from $0 through email and voice contact through to attending conventions and fairs which involve registration, travel and accommodation costs. For this exercise, let’s say I attend a convention in Adelaide and one in Canberra where I endeavour to make myself known to prospective agents and publishers. The Adelaide event costs only time, say 3 days at 5 hours a day, which is 15 hours at my lower wage rate of $60 or $900. Canberra, however, involves similar time, plus air flights, taxi or public transport, meals and accommodation. I’ll fly in on the opening morning and leave the final evening, I won’t attend social events, even though I know they are great places to meet people in the industry, and I will eat sparingly. The last time I ever did such an event, it required an outlay of $300 flights, $300 accommodation and about $150 food and drinks. Altogether, the Canberra event, plus wage time, requires $1650 of time and money.
 
So, I’ve power-written my novel over a five-week period, power-edited it over another two weeks, and by some miracle coincided attendance at two conventions in the same month. I’ve needed, between time and actual costs, an income of around $30,000 in that month to sustain the entire project from start to publisher acceptance. Of course, let’s be realistic and use my personal example of the process for The Last Wizard taking three months from start to ready manuscript, so that comes back to a mere $10,000 a month income required to sustain the project.
 
And another miracle happens. A publisher buys the rights and pays an advance of maybe $10,000 with a deal of 10% on future sales of the book. The book hits the Australian market and over a two year period sells, say, 10,000 copies – a very minor success. The price is set at $25, so the book generates $250,000 revenue and the writer receives $25,000 less the $10,000 advance, that is, $15,000 over the two years. The publisher might invest in sending the writer to some public events and interviews to build profile, and the writer might also pick up workshop gigs to bolster income from the book. And they might not.
 
The other miracle is the instant blockbuster where the writer reaps a significant fortune from a series. Think Harry Potter and big crime series. This is the equivalent of a lottery win in the industry with probably less odds.
 
There are instances in the industry where people have achieved this otherwise almost impossible task of pumping out a novel in a month and being immediately traditionally published, but these individuals are generally professional writers with significantly successful track records who write entirely for their living, or, more recently, people who employ a combination of ghost writers, editors and even AI to write the book. For the vast majority of writers, however, the hypothetical could actually represent many years of time and effort, not a single month (or three months in my case).
 
As this is a hypothetical, let’s say I fail to attract publisher attention. I turn to self-publishing. More costs accrue. I’ll need to choose a self-publishing platform. Some charge for the process. I pick Amazon because it is initially free to publish. They provide templates for interior and cover design. I prepare a manuscript layout. It’s relatively easy, although I do have to carefully check page and chapter breaks and also adjust/edit text to avoid leaving a single or a few words on a whole page at the end of chapters. This process might take between 1-10 hours, depending on the state of my manuscript. This will also include checking the font size and type, and line spacing, for readability and ensuring the styles are consistent throughout. On average, this takes me 5 hours, so we add more editing cost, approximately $400.
 
Then there’s cover design. During COVID, I paid a $1000 for original artwork for a front cover piece. It is possible to have a cover design done via external providers for as cheap as $40. If you have the skills to create art, design and lettering, and use a template layout, you could design a book cover for free. You can implement AI programs. For the hypothetical, I’ll suggest a combination of purchasing cheap art and doing the full design by myself, which can take a day to work out layout. The cover in this hypothetical is valued at around $1000 of layout design and purchasing cheap art.
 
The hypothetical book is now valued in labour and purchases around $26,000-$27,000 from concept to uploading on Amazon (or an equivalent).
 
All the easy part of a book creation is completed. The hard part starts once the book is ready/ available. The writer who self-publishes also must budget for marketing, stock and mailing. I receive offers to market my existing books through social media and across reader forums for as low as $80 from certain companies. I had an individual offer to do a similar task for $30. I decide to market this way and invest the $80. I might also create a blog on my web site, record a podcast, and create a promotional video and upload it to a variety of social media sites. These tasks take me, say, an hour for the blog, an hour to record and edit a podcast, and similar time for my video. This assumes I already have the software and equipment available to do these things (which I have). That’s another $250-$300 time investment. To assist my buyers who want to buy direct, I stock, say, 20 copies of my book that I buy from the publisher at author price (for the hypothetical, it’s $10 a copy), so I invest another $200.
 
To break even on a single, simple novel project, I have to recoup a minimum of $25,000-$30,000. Through traditional publishing, I’d need the publisher to sell at least 10,000 copies to break even. Self-publishing, where the profit margin for me is significantly greater, I’d have to sell at least 3000 copies of the book. It’s lucky I don’t do this as a paid wage to myself. I could not afford to be a writer.
 
There are plenty of flaws in the hypothetical above, but its point is to demonstrate that the ‘art’ of writing is neither cheap, nor simple, and is rarely financially rewarding for the majority of us. Yes, we write because we love to write and we desperately want to share our ideas and stories with readers, but that doesn’t justify people demeaning our work in relation to paid salaries and wages. There are reasons why writers in the past needed wealthy benefactors, or wealthy partners, or were/are good friends with people in publishing, or own their publishing companies.

And if you think my observations are scary, read this article on Linkedin (if you have an account, sorry): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-much-does-cost-write-book-what-do-you-have-lose-chandler-bolt-xmxdc/
 
Something to think about.