We just wrote a children’s book this year. Worked with a publisher. Since we have no artistic talent we hired an artist and had the choice to pay a fixed fee and keep all the royalties, or pay a portion from each sale. We paid a fixed fee through our publisher. If you’re self publishing there’s a Facebook group with super desperate artists that are working for cheap (like less than minimum wage cheap when you factor in how long it probably takes). (Edit: not meant to imply to do this, as mentioned below it’s a poor practice and we used a recommended artist at their rates. Also a caution lots have shown stories of people finding the cheapest artist only to discover plagiarized work) We also had to order a set amount of books at a fixed fee, to get our ISBN.
All in all we probably were into it for about $1000.
We’ve used this first book as a way to understand the process. Have another book in mind we’d like to complete, but still figuring out some more stuff.
The route we chose is very difficult to make any money in Canada. Our book sells for $11.99 in the US, which is about the most you can realistically charge. To do the equivalent in CAD the price point becomes too high. We were able to get Amazon to force the cad price lower than equivalent, but that eats into the very tight margin. Still have not conquered indigo, they seem to have a different listing system than the standard one the US publisher uses. (Our book is all over the US outlets, Walmart.com; Barnes and noble, Amazon, etc.)
Our book is a simple song we made up with the kids, which we really wanted to produce as a board book. But you’ll find out that you can’t print board books unless you order massive quantities, and then you can print in China.
We might break even one day. I’d like to do the process again now that we’ve done it once. The key to doing this without losing money is to be able to sell the batch of books you order direct as an author. With the right price point you could cover your costs from those sales, and anything else would be net positive. We never got our books due to covid cancelling a trip of ours to the US and they are sitting at a friends house. Originally we were going to go to some community type trade shows with the kids to teach them some business skills; and have fun together. Again covid
or