As a prospective academic author, you may already be aware that you’re not likely to make much money off of publishing your book. Scholars write books for all kinds of reasons, but profit is not a realistic one for most people.
What you may not have realized is that there are some costs of publishing a scholarly book that will likely fall to you, the author. I’m not talking about pay-to-play publishing deals here (run away from those!), but rather about things you may decide you want for your book that your publisher will most likely not foot the bill for.
So how much can you expect to spend in the process of getting your book published?
The answer, as alwaaaaays, varies depending on the book, the press, the author, and the specific deal between the press and the author. But in any case, first, there's the cost of researching and writing the thing. Your publisher is not going to pay for that, so ideally you have an employer who will at least pay you a salary for your time and maybe even throw in some funding for research.
After writing the book, here are the costs you may encounter when preparing your manuscript for publication:
Indexing
Most publishers place the responsibility on you to have the book indexed. For a typical scholarly book and a professional freelance indexer, that'll run you anywhere from $1k–$2k give or take.
You can make the index yourself, but that costs your time. You will likely only have a few weeks to turn around your index and your personal schedule might not line up with your publisher’s. Plus you may not know how to make an index and will have to spend time getting over the learning curve.
Copyediting & developmental editing.
Most academic publishers still pay for manuscripts to be copyedited, but that happens to the final manuscript that goes into production. If you want to have your materials edited before submission, you'll have to pay for that yourself.
Not everyone needs to have their materials edited before submission. I only recommend it when there are a lot of errors that could interfere with peer reviewers' understanding of the material or the writing/organization is so rough that the manuscript might get rejected on that basis.
For more on when you might want to hire a developmental editor, there's this post. Developmental editing can cost anywhere from $1000 on up into the several thousands (it depends on the editor and the scope of work you want them to do).
Copyediting varies widely in price, but if you want an experienced professional who has training & credentials, you could pay up to $5000 for a full book manuscript. You may be able to find someone who charges less; just make sure you’re confident in the person’s experience and qualifications before you shell out your money.
There's proofreading too
You can check the proofs yourself (I think this is most common) but if you don't trust yourself to find errors for whatever reason you can hire a professional. That could run from several hundred up to a few thousand dollars.
Permissions
If you want to use copyrighted material in your book, you may have to pay for the rights to reprint it. The costs can vary widely depending on the material and who owns it. You can sometimes get the copyright owner to give you a break if you provide proof that you’re publishing with a nonprofit press such as a university press (thanks to Johns Hopkins UP editor Laura Davulis for this tip).
Subventions
Some presses will ask you to provide a subvention to cover things like open access publishing or printing of color images (if you want either of those things). I would only advise you to do this if you can get your institution or an external grant to cover these costs. Note that subvention requests are common and not usually seen as unethical. But if you have concerns that your publisher is asking you for money in a shady way, seek advice from a resource like the Authors Guild or Writer Beware.
Promotion
You may also incur costs when you promote the book, if you are paying for your own travel to give talks, for example. However, you can try to only give talks where people are inviting you and their institutions are able to pay travel expenses (and speaking fees hopefully).
Some authors hire freelance publicists to help their books get press coverage. This type of service will cost you thousands of dollars, and there will be no guaranteed return on the investment. You are very unlikely to see a return in terms of book sales, but if you are hoping to raise your public profile for other reasons, engaging the services of a publicist may be worth it to you.
Finding funding
You may be able to get institutional funds to cover any of the costs I mentioned above. University research funds or start-up money might be applicable to the costs of publishing your book.
University presses are non-profits, and will likely put more money into publishing your book (average is $30–50k) than they will see back in sales. It'd be great if they could cover all the costs I mentioned (and some will cover some of them—you can ask) but most just can't.
For-profit commercial academic publishers are also unlikely to help you financially (perhaps even less so than university presses).
I know this list of costs might look discouraging, and no doubt it will unfairly preclude some people from being able to enter the publishing game. But if you are aware of these costs up front, you can try to plan and calculate whether publishing a book is truly worth it to you.
alternatives to spending your own money
One way to avoid spending your own money on getting your book published is to take advantage of the free resources already available to you. For example, while you could hire a freelance publicist to help promote your research in the broader media, but this is also something your press’s in-house publicist should be equipped to help with as well. See the post where Maria Whelan of Princeton University Press talks about how authors can work collaboratively with their press’s promotions team to get the most attention on their books.
The level of engagement you get from your press’s promotions team may vary, but you can at least take the initiative to pursue as many opportunities as possible, such as asking for help pitching op-ed essays, asking your press for tips on getting media appearances, and finding out if and how your press can support you with speaking gigs and author events.
For other services, like editorial support or proofreading and indexing, your institution may have a writing center with professionals who can help or you may be able to draw on research funds to hire a freelancer.
In addition to exploring free resources, you can also hone your own skills and DIY some of the things that others outsource to professionals. You might want to invest in some low-cost educational resources to set you on the right track—such as books or courses about indexing or proofreading—but you can also probably find these for free at your institutional or public library.
Of course there is still a cost to DIYing, because you will be spending your time and you won’t necessarily be getting expert-level service from yourself. You have to make the calculation as to the value you place on the time and expertise provided by a professional relative to your own time and effort.
How to decide whether (or how much) to invest in professional support
Which brings me to how you decide when it’s worth it to make a monetary investment in professional support. Your budget plays a huge role in this, because you can’t spend money you don’t have and I wouldn’t encourage anyone to go into debt for a scholarly book. But if you do have the funds and just need to decide whether this is how you want to spend them, I have some questions I suggest you ask yourself:
Will you make the money back via royalties or an advance?
Investing in professional support to strengthen your book proposal or book manuscript could pay off when it’s time to pitch your project to publishers. If you show up with a well-crafted, competitive pitch, publishers may think they need to compete to land your book and offer you some monetary incentive in the form of a cash advance or higher royalties.
However, this isn't super common in academic publishing. For a first book (revised dissertation), I've seen my clients receive anywhere from $1000 to $5000 as an advance, but most get nothing. If you do get an advance, you won't get any of it until the contract is signed, and you might not see all of it until the book is actually published. You will also not see any royalties from the book until the advance is “earned out.”
Hiring a publicist to help promote your book could pay off in book sales down the road—but do some math to see how many books you’d have to sell to cover the retainer fee, because it’s probably a lot of books, and publicity doesn’t always lead to sales.
Will you make the money back via other income-generating opportunities that come as a result of your book?
An obvious example here is when your book aids you in getting a professional promotion, such as tenure or advancement from associate to full professor. You might spend a few thousand dollars to get support from a developmental editor, but if that support makes the difference in getting your book out in time to go up for promotion and salary increase, you’ll likely see a return on your investment many times over as your pay increase compounds over time.
Another example would be if you are hoping to leverage your book for a greater public presence as a recognized expert. The payoffs of hiring a publicist for this kind of thing may be indirect, but over time your broader platform could lead to attractive job offers or supplemental income streams such as paid speaking engagements.
Are the benefits of hiring professional support intrinsically valuable to you?
Here’s where the time question comes back in. If your time is very valuable to you, and you’d much rather be spending your time with your family or doing something personally meaningful instead of learning how to make an index for your book, the money to hire an indexer might feel well worth spending.
You might also consider how you want to feel about your book when it’s published. Does it just need to be good enough to get you a line on your CV, or do you want to feel like you published the best book possible with the best publisher possible? How you define “best” in these contexts is totally up to you, but if spending money to get your book closer to what and where you want it to be will give you peace of mind for years to come, the monetary costs might be worth it.
Finally, for some people, publishing a book is a lifelong dream. They might feel that hiring professional help to fulfill that dream is just as worthwhile as spending the money on a vacation or a hobby or new furniture. (And, again, I understand that not everyone has the budget to spend money on any of these things.)
These are all super personal questions and there aren’t wrong or right answers. I’m not saying you should want to invest money in getting your book published, or that you have to spend your own money in order to have a high-quality, successful book at a great press. My point is only that it’s worth giving some thought to what kind of value you will get in exchange if you do decide to make a monetary investment.