Publishing the book costs nothing. Uploading to Amazon KDP, Kobo Writing Life, Draft2Digital or Apple Books is free, and they take their cut from sales instead of charging you up front. Everything else on the bill is a service you choose to buy, which is why the honest answer to what self-publishing costs sits somewhere between about £50 and several thousand pounds per title.
That range is useless on its own, so it helps to split the spending into three piles: money that belongs to a single book, money that belongs to you as an author regardless of how many books you have, and money you can decide about later.
Costs that belong to the book
Editing is usually the largest single line. Based on 2025 data from its marketplace, Reedsy puts average freelance rates at roughly $0.020 per word for proofreading, $0.027 for copy editing and $0.036 for developmental editing. On an 80,000-word novel that works out at around $1,600 for a proofread and $2,900 for a developmental edit, before you add a second pass. The Editorial Freelancers Association rate survey shows similar territory when editors charge hourly rather than per word. Rates below that exist, and some are fine, though a quote that undercuts the market by 80% is worth a sample edit before you commit.
Cover design varies more than any other item. Reedsy reports a median of $930 with more than half of its cover projects landing between $630 and $1,200. Studios selling packaged designs advertise from around $199 for ebook-only up to roughly $450 for a custom illustrated cover, and premade covers sell for less than that again. Written Word Media's author surveys have found that over half of indie authors pay for professional cover design, which tells you something about where experienced authors put their money.
Interior formatting can be free if you use the tools KDP and Draft2Digital give you, or a one-off software purchase if you want more control. Vellum and Atticus both sell as a single licence rather than a subscription, priced in the low hundreds of dollars, and you use them for every book after that. Paying a formatter per title costs somewhere in the low hundreds too.
ISBNs are optional for ebooks on most stores and free from KDP for print, with the catch that a KDP-supplied ISBN ties that edition to KDP. If you want your own imprint, UK prices from Nielsen run about £89 to £91 for a single ISBN and roughly £164 to £174 for a block of ten, so the single almost never makes sense. In the US, Bowker charges $125 for one and $295 for ten.
Costs that belong to you, not the book
These recur monthly or annually and cover your whole catalogue. An author website on a hosted builder typically runs £12 to £25 a month. Email platforms are free at small list sizes and start charging somewhere around 500 to 1,000 subscribers, after which the bill climbs with the list. Ebook delivery and ARC distribution through services like BookFunnel or StoryOrigin is billed annually, cheap at the entry tier and into the hundreds if you want team features and large ARC campaigns. Selling direct adds a store or checkout tool plus payment processing fees. Stack four or five of those and the monthly total often lands between £40 and £100, which is the gap a single flat-fee membership is meant to close.
Costs you can decide about later
Print copies cost nothing up front with print on demand, because the printing charge comes out of each sale. Advertising is pay as you go, and Amazon Ads lets you run a campaign on about £1 a day, so the real risk is spending steadily without tracking what it returns. Audiobooks are the expensive optional extra, with human narration commonly quoted per finished hour in the low hundreds of dollars.
If the budget is tight
A workable first-book budget of a few hundred pounds usually means a premade cover, a proofread rather than a full developmental edit, free formatting tools and no ads until the book is live and earning. Editing and cover come first because they affect whether readers buy and what they say in reviews. Ads come last, once you have something worth sending traffic to.