How Much Will It Cost to Produce Your Book?

Your book will become transformed through the professional design, production and printing phases into a bound volume of which you can be proud. While every project is unique (we will provide an estimate customized to your particular project), the following cost schedule provides a range for your planning purposes.

1.  Preliminaries and Project Management. Initial consultation, evaluation of your manuscript and the availability of collaterals (photos, drawings, charts you may wish to include in your book), review of the book's anticipated front and back matter, preliminary planning for front and back cover content, and planning for your  marketing effort and how it may affect the production phases of your project. Includes applications for ISBN, Library of Congress and unique website domain name (a value of around $500 by itself).

Estimated cost:  $1,500 to $2,500

2.  Optional: Editing and Manuscript Processing (For manuscripts not previously edited/processed). General editing of the manuscript. Our professional editors address such issues as transitions between ideas, sentence structure, whether the message communicated is the message intended in any given section and point-of-view. In the processing phase, we scan the manuscript for fix-'em-ups, i.e., removing double and triple spaces between sentences, replacing semi-colons with colons where appropriate, repairs to grammar, punctuation and so forth.

Estimated cost: $1,500 to 2,500*

3.  Design/Production. We bring your manuscript's electronic file into our page layout program. We create a library of typographic styles just for your book, so all chapter headings will use the same font and be set with the same number of spaces above and below the text, so body text throughout the book will appear consistent in style and all repetitive elements will be uniform and professional in appearance. We set graphics, captions, headers, footers and page numbers, footnotes, the table of contents, index, copyright page and everything that will appear in print in their respective styles. We import the graphics and layout the pages, addressing technical issues during the process.

Estimated cost: $2,200 to $2,800
(Based on up to 250 text pages.)

4.  Cover Design. One of our trained graphic artists designs a couple of concepts for your consideration, using text and images we provide after consulting with you. Your cover selection is then transformed into the final cover design and the file is prepared in its proper format for printing. Our price includes two sets of revisions of the concept you select.

Estimated cost: $400 to 600

5.  Printing. Printing cost is estimated and based upon many different factors about your book and the printer's capabilities. Our service includes developing a specifications sheet and submitting a Request For Quote to reputable book manufacturing printing companies. We share the printers' estimates with you. We pay the printer directly, invoicing you for the actual printing cost without a mark-up.

Example:
Estimated cost for a 6x9" book with 200 pages,
black on white text pages, full color laminated cover,
perfect binding: $4.00 per book (500 copies minimum order):
$2,500 to $2,900 plus sales tax

6.  Optional: Post-Production. We assist you in setting up an account with Amazon.com and send copies of your new book to Amazon.com and the U.S. Copyright Office. We can also assist you in making application to library wholesalers and other wholesalers and distributors as you wish and sending review copies to appropriate publications.

Estimated cost at $40/hour; estimated time 6 hours

7.  Optional (but Highly Recommended). Book website. Every book worth its author's promotional effort needs a dedicated website, or a website which it shares with the author's other books. Our firm has developed hundreds of websites since 1995. Our trained designers and developers are ready to create a customized look for your site.

Estimated cost for a basic site: $1,550*
*Special effects, e-commerce, custom-design and illustration,
photography and other factors quoted separately
Add hosting: $240/year payable quarterly
(first six months' web hosting free)

Notes about Artwork

Many times, a book calls for free hand illustration, photos, charts or other types of graphics. If you provide the graphics, they should be HIGH RESOLUTION (300 dpi) standalone files (not embedded in a Word or program document). If you will be printing the text pages of your book in color, the color of the images should be CMYK, not RGB (used for JPGs on websites). We'll address all these issues when we meet with you to discuss your project.

If we must provide graphics, the costs will be in the neighborhood of:

• Freehand illustrations: $150 to $200 each drawing

• Computer graphic illustration: $ 60 per hour

• Clip art and stock drawings from our library: $25 each

*How We Work the Payment Thing. We require a $1000 deposit before we begin the Preliminaries phase. From that point, we'll invoice with ten-day payment terms at completion each phase of the project.

Let's schedule a free consultation. We're happy to meet with you in person if you're in California, eastern Oklahoma or surrounding areas. Service is our specialty and we'd love to be of service to you. Contact us today.