Publishing Life on Orcas Island: The Numbers

I love knowing the details of people’s experiences. They’re not only fascinating, they’re also immensely helpful if you’re in a similar situation.

When self-publishing, there are a lot of details you can find if you dig, but there are some that are hard to find – seemingly nonexistent.

Here is my personal nitty gritty regarding all the numbers associated with Life on Orcas Island, if it helps you in your journey or your curiosity…

• 150 pages in the book
• 8.5 x 8.5 inches
• 194 photos
• 1 photographer & writer (me)
• 1 graphic designer (Kayleigh Jankowski)
• 2 editors (Donna Lane and Molly Johnson)
• 1 attorney (Michael Royse)
• 5 months from blank file to published book (October 21st to March 16th)
• 4 actual months spent on the book due to four weeks of travel in between
• 10,000 photos I looked through to select the ones I chose
• $3,000 – the approximate amount I wanted to spend making the book
• $3,900 – the total amount I spent making the book
• $1,800 fee to graphic designer – the amount she proposed in her bid for the project
• $250 extra I sent to graphic designer when I asked her to change the font of all captions a few days before publishing
• $180 fee to Reedsy.com, where I found the designer and where we collaborated on the project
• $450 fee to attorney for 2.7 hours of time to discuss project and draft 2 release forms
• $320 payment to first editor for 3 separate rounds of editing at $40/hour
• $240 payment to second editor for 1 round of editing at $40/hour
• $21 to Microsoft 365 (for Word) at $7/month for January, February, and March
• $30 to Eversign (online release form service) at $10/month for January, February, and March
• $43 to Adobe (for Lightroom) at $10.82/month for December, January, February, and March
• 292 emails sent to people, showing them the photo and/or caption involving them
• 292 accompanying online release forms prepared and emailed to the people shown in the book
• $39 for ISBN number via BookBaby
• $99 proof copy of almost-finished book to see how it was looking and if there were errors
• $399 fee to BookBaby for print-on-demand service
• $40.99 – retail price of book (BookBaby rep did calculations and said if priced below $40.50, I would lose money on each book sold)
• $1.20 is what I can expect to make per copy from each online sale on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.
• $20 is what I can expect to make per copy from each BookBaby Bookshop sale
• $20.34 ($18.78 + $1.56 tax) is my cost per book for a 250-book order
• $5,085 for first purchase of 250 books ($4,695 plus $390 tax) on the same day that it was submitted for publishing
• $90 for a business license
• 500 hours – calculated estimate of how long I spent working on the book (~25 hours/week for first 2 months, ~40 hours/week for last 2 months)
• 120 hours – the graphic designer’s calculated estimate of how long she spent on the project
• $17 is about what my designer earned per hour (see below*)
• 10:00 PM – the latest you can work at the library if you reserve a particular room
• 2022902234 is the book’s Library of Congress control number
• 978-1-66783-151-0 is the book’s ISBN (International Standard Book Number)

It would be easy to assume two things before embarking on self-publishing a book – that it is too expensive to make, and that each task will take a large amount of time.

For years, I assumed it would have to cost $5,000-$10,000 to publish the book in my head, so I didn’t do it until an old acquaintance told me he published his cookbook for $3,000.

Concerning time, the best thing I had going for me was time constraints – I refused to give up my morning walk every day after the kids went to school, I am a math tutor from 10:15-12:00 every Monday through Thursday, and I am adamant about being home and present when my kids get home from school. That left only three hours of free, undisturbed time some days.

I got so much done in the hours I had because I knew I couldn’t prolong each stage. It’s a big realization when you see things you thought were monumental tasks get done much more quickly than you ever envisioned because there was no time to hem and haw, waffle, or question yourself. I had set firm deadlines from the start, which was mandatory after choosing a designer through Reedsy, so I planned to be done mid-March. When I anticipated that some weeks would require more hours, I either stayed at the library until 6 PM (and a few times until 10 PM) or worked in the bedroom in the early morning hours or when our kids were doing their own projects or had friends over.

If you’re anything like me and you have a big goal, don’t give yourself all hours of the day to do it. If you have some constraints built in, it puts a fire in you to accomplish a lot with the few hours you’ve set aside for it. You make every minute and every task matter, efficiently. Even more importantly, it gives you the other hours you can’t work on it to constantly refine in your mind what you’ll do with the next block of time.

I’ve done the opposite in the past – once I gave myself a year without work to go for a dream job. There was so much amorphous time that I was totally ineffective. It was a horrible learning experience, but I used that knowledge for good in the making of this book.

* Kayleigh, the designer, added some important numbers, noting that I could share them with readers of this article:

For more context, I would charge a publisher $6-10k for a book of a similar size. When asked for hourly rate I quote based on $100+/hour but much prefer flat rates with a set # of rounds then switch to hourly when going over. I also now charge x50% of the total rush fees for same-week turnaround (30% for Rizzoli, but only because I work with them so often).

For your book, you caught me at a particular time where I just wanted something new to work on, so I was willing to quote far less. And what a great project it was! Totally worth it for the experience. For future self-published book projects I probably will not go below 3/4k total considering even small books that ‘should be easy’ rarely are.

Lastly, for context, I’m assuming other designers are like this too: I ‘bill’ like a lawyer – 1 hour of time isn’t exactly 60 minutes of constant design work. It could be 20 minutes of type corrections or some correspondence.”

I hope this is helpful, useful, and enlightening, whatever your goals may entail.

The photo shows my chicken scratch at the beginning of the book-making process, writing down the numbers of photos I was hand-picking for the book from my stock of about 10,000 photos.