The four quarters of every book-publishing budget
This is the second of three articles on budgeting for book-publishing projects. The first is ‘What is your book’s job?’. The next is ‘Cost-vs-quality trade-offs in book publishing’.
We all have blind spots when we plan project budgets. We tend to include things we understand well, and forget things we underestimate. For example, an illustrator might not budget enough for marketing. A sales-driven entrepreneur might skip good editing.
If we underestimate a key requirement, we’re going to run out of money and our project may fail.
How can we reduce the risk that we miss something important? We need a short list of the most important factors in a publishing budget, so we can make sure we’ve covered our bases. Over time, all publishing budgets must give equal weight to these cost categories:
- Expertise
- Development
- Distribution
- Promotion
These make up four, roughly equivalent quarters of your total costs. When you budget, if you’re not spending roughly the same on these four elements, you’re probably forgetting something.
This is a way of thinking about your investment in a book project. How you express your budget in a spreadsheet, for example, might look different. For one thing, expertise is not always separate, and may be baked into the costs of great development, promotion, and distribution. Your spreadsheets might also vary based on the timeframe they cover, and to what extent your costs integrate with the rest of your organisation.
Within each quarter, some costs are incurred once, and others are ongoing. Their totals tend to even out over the book’s active lifespan – the time you will spend actively working on it. Unless a book is central to your long-term business model, and you revise it often, it’s likely to have an active lifespan of one to three years.
Let’s take a closer look at what these costs actually look like in practice.
Expertise
Who’s in the room helping you make decisions? For each dollar spent, a real expert will get you exponentially more impact. While you might hire an independent consultant for their overall book-publishing expertise, the cost of expertise is more likely baked into who you hire for the other three quarters.
It’s worth recognising that expertise is essentially a cost in itself, because you will choose whether to spend money on it or not. When you pick any partner or supplier, you will need to decide consciously whether or not to hire more talented, experienced and, therefore, more expensive people.
While you could get development, distribution, and promotion done with little or no expertise, the more you spend on expertise, the more bang for your buck you’ll get. Put another way: hiring real experts could constitute 25% of your costs, but it’s also more likely to get you the results you’re after.
Development
Development includes all the creative work that goes into crafting the final product: strategy, writing, editing, user experience, packaging, branding, graphics and typography, quality assurance, accessibility, and more. For small, low-cost projects, everything might be done by a writer and a single freelancer. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a book might have a team that includes strategic planners, graphic designers, software developers, writers, editors, illustrators, testers, and more.
If you’re sad or surprised that development is only a quarter of the pie, you’re not alone! This might take the most time and be the most fun, but it rarely makes up most of the overall publishing budget.
Distribution
Distribution includes everything you need to have in place to deliver your product to its audience. For small, personal projects, that might be your neighbourhood printer and your car boot. For big, multi-format projects, distribution might need software, printing, warehousing, logistics services, accounting systems, server infrastructure, distributor and retailer relationships, and more. The costs might take the form of software subscriptions, hosting and warehousing fees, retailer discounts, delivery costs, and time spent on customer service.
These costs often sneak up on you, hidden behind the scenes until you tally your expenses over time.
Promotion
Always expect to invest as much in promoting your book as you do in developing it. Your book can’t do its job unless people know about it and like it, before they read it. Promotion can begin before you’ve finished writing. Promotional strategies vary wildly, and include things like crowd-funding campaigns, advertising, events, SEO, and networking.
What you’re doing, fundamentally, is community building: creating a group of champions that add their own time and money to yours, to help your book do its job.
You cost money, too
Remember the cost of your own time in each quarter. Project budgets often don’t factor in the cost of the people running the project. If your budget doesn’t include you, it’s not a good reflection of what you’re investing in the project.
Quantifying the cost of your own time also helps you weigh the costs and benefits of hiring in expertise. If you value your time at, say, $30 per hour, then someone who saves you ten hours is instantly worth $300, and they can probably do it faster. And someone who costs you ten hours in supervision or fixing mistakes is costing you $300 more than you’re paying them.
Lead with your budget
As you assemble your team, be upfront about your budget. Let’s say you have that $10 000 I mentioned earlier. You immediately know that – including a premium for expertise in each area – you’ll put about $3300 into each of development, distribution, and promotion. The experts you speak to will know how to get you the most impact in each area for that money.
If you’re speaking to the right person, you should come away feeling confident that they can find an impact sweet spot for your budget, and that your book will do its job for what you can spend on it.
I talk more about the impact sweet spot in the first post in this series, ‘What is your book’s job?’. The next article in the series is on making ‘Cost-vs-quality trade-offs in book publishing’.