Publishing a romance book is a project and, like any project, it has costs that must be analyzed in advance before making any decision or investment. There are cheaper means, more expensive means, and more complicated means of publication. Today we will look at all these possibilities to inform you how much it costs to publish a romance book!

With self-publishing romance eBooks at Amazon, you can register and distribute your romance eBook for free. However, to make a fair survey of how much it costs to publish a book, we will consider all the main means available: traditional publishing with large publishers, publishing with smaller publishers, self-publishing of print books, and self-publishing of romance eBooks.

How much it costs to publish a romance book with a major publisher

To publish a romance book with a major publisher, you must submit your finished book manuscript and hope that it will be authorized for publication. In this model, the publisher usually bears all the production costs, such as cover design, printing, and also distribution. In return, you only get about 8 to 10% in royalties on the cover price. In this page you can find a great premade romance book cover website where you can buy your covers.

The main problems of relying on a large publisher, apart from the low percentage in royalties, are the difficulty in getting published, the waiting time until publication, and the lack of creative freedom.

It is common knowledge that it is not very easy to be chosen by a major publisher as an unknown author. For this reason, many aspiring writers spend their whole lives just dreaming about an author’s career, without really taking a step forward.

When an author is finally selected by a publisher, not everything is as expected. The publisher may make certain demands on the romance book’s content that go against your wishes, and if your work follows a trend, it is possible that this trend will have cooled off by the time the book hits the shelves.

In summary, the cost of publishing a romance book with a major publisher is quite small, as the company bears the main production costs, but there are other disadvantages. For example, spending your time writing a romance book and possibly investing money in proofreading the manuscript to make it presentable and in the end not getting it published.

How much it costs to publish a romance book with a smaller publisher

Smaller publishers, on the other hand, are less discerning when it comes to choosing books to publish. On the other hand, since they are companies with less purchasing power, there is a good chance that the production costs of the book will be divided between the publisher and the author.

In fact, some smaller publishing houses are willing to publish the books of almost any interested author, provided that he or she bears all the production costs. In practice, these companies are more “publishers” than anything else.

In this model, the author must pay an initial fee of about $2,500 for a book of only 100 pages, a price that is adjusted according to the size of the book and certain publishing preferences.

This amount refers to the expenses with proofreading, layout, cover, handling, packaging, invoice issuance, publicizing, selling and printing of the first copies, which is usually a run of about 50 books.

The author is entitled to royalties of about 10 to 30% of the net revenue from the sale of the books, and the publication time usually takes at least 90 days, that is, about three months.

In short, you have to pay about $5,000 if you want to publish a small book, around 250 pages, and you are entitled to 30% or less of the revenue from the sale of the books. The advantage is to have more assurance that it will be published and disseminated.

How much it costs to self-publish a printed romance book

Self-publishing is not only about eBooks. In the printed book mode, there is print on demand. Basically, you can prepare your book yourself and print one copy at a time when there is a reader interested in buying.

In this model you have total creative freedom and do not need anyone’s permission to publish the book. On the other hand, the expense is almost entirely up to you, and it is usually more expensive to print one book at a time, so this additional cost is often reflected in the cover price, reducing the reader’s incentive to buy.

Among the responsibilities of self-publishing printed romance books are:

• Proofreading – $1 per page
• Copyediting – $3 to $10 per page to prepare the text
• Cover – $500 on average when hiring a professional cover artist
• Desktop Publishing – $200 for a 100-page book
• Proofreading – $1 to $3 per page to proofread the final version
• Printing – $20 minimum per unit
• Publisher’s registration – $235 to register as an author
• ISBN – $16 to register book
• Catalogs – $100 to create the book’s card

If we consider the length of the pages as equal to the length of the pages, the initial cost to publish a 250-page book with a print run of 50 copies would be at least $3,601, without the publicity and distribution services offered by the editors and publishers.

How much it costs to publish a romance book at Amazon

Amazon is a specialist in self-publishing and distribution of romance eBooks. We believe that everyone has the right to express themselves freely, so we offer total creative freedom to our writers.

Publishing an romance eBook at amazon costs nothing. We take care of the ISBN registration and you don’t have to worry about costs with layout, publisher registration, catalog file, and distribution negotiations.

Just register your book on our site, fill out the necessary information, choose the cover price and the region where it will be distributed, and send your book to us. Publication is done within 72 hours, and if you wish, distribution is done globally. We also offer free anti-piracy measures.

You can adjust cover prices at any time, write your own synopsis, choose the genre and category of your book, and even edit whenever you like. After completing the first $50 of revenue, you will receive a monthly royalty of 70% of the net revenue from the eBook sales.

When you publish an eBook in Amazon you only have to worry about writing your book, an activity that takes a lot of time (and time is money), and the final quality that you will present to the readers.

We recommend that you seek a professional editor to make sure that the romance eBook is error-free, and it is also a good idea to hire a cover artist to develop artwork that will greatly attract the readers’ attention. However, none of this is mandatory.

To facilitate your sales, we provide a catalog of ready-made and standardized covers, so that you can publish romance eBooks even if you have not hired a chapbook designer. On our blog, we offer weekly writing and self-publishing tips, including how to edit your own book.

The cost of publishing a book at Amazon is the lowest among all the options. Here you publish a romance eBook for free and receive the highest percentage of the sales. The only catch is that we work only with digital books, and even this can be very beneficial for both the author and the readers.

What’s up, author? Have you put your costs on the line? Are you ready to publish a book? If you want to learn more about digital books, take a look at our articles What is an romance eBook and How to make an romance eBook.