Dollar cost of writing a novel

All hobbies cost something. Paints, manuals, spare parts, screws, shoes or gloves, you pay a little to play anything. For my first couple of novels, my costs were low. I liked to do my edits on paper, so printing and binding drafts was a budget item. And, as I've written before, I paid a friend to do the ebook cover design.

This last book was the first where I took the agent querying process seriously, and that increased my costs (though not all costs had to do with querying). I thought I'd share here what I ended up spending on this hobby:

Printing: $50. This is where I tend to save money. My real job has a print shop and will print and bind my draft copies for only a few dollars each. Once during the pandemic I used Office Depot to print a copy, which somehow cost $30. The total here is inflated due to Office Depot - truly "Taking Care of Business".

Editing: $60. I've always relied on friends as beta readers to help with plot holes and catch bad grammar. This book was the first time I paid someone for chapter edits (just the first chapter). The price here is cheap because this was done by a friend; as a side note, if your friends charge for something they're good at, pay them! They deserve it.

Query Edits: $100. Like I said, THE WITCH AND THE TEMPLE was the first time I took querying agents seriously. Since query letters are an art form unto themselves, I hired professional help (and got a lot of free help on Reddit and from friends). Though I wasn't successful in querying (story for another time), I'm still happy with this spend as the query letter eventually became my book blurb.

Comp Titles: $40. In order to query, you have to have recent books to compare yours to. I bought and read several looking for a good match. Though I wanted to find two, I eventually settled with one great match: THE BOOK OF KOLI.

Book Cover: $85. I wrote before about paying a professional for custom cover art, something I won't ever regret. Though Canva offers a free trial, I ended up keeping the software to continue fiddling with the cover, so that is also included.

Not pictured: laptop & Microsoft Word. Kind of like saying, "Mountain biking is free!" and not mentioning how much a bike costs. All in, THE WITCH AND THE TEMPLE cost $335 to publish. I now make $2 from every copy sold, so I just need my mom to buy 669 more copies to break even.