An editor: the man who works with the author on the big picture of the book. How are these chapters hanging together? Does this character make sense? What book should we work on next?
A typesetter: makes the inside of the book look professional and easy to read, well put together
Designer: interior art, layout, more look and feel of the inside. The look and feel of the outside of the book and how it incorporates the cover art
Art: someone has to paint, create, or put together the graphics that sell the book
Copy editor: this person goes through and makes sure the book is readable, looks for internal consistency (your character has blue eyes here, but brown here. Suns don’t actually go nova like that).
Proofreader: this final pass looks for any final typos that have slipped through everyone else.
Those are just some of the people involved in making a professional book.
I’m not including marketing/advertising, or the author’s advance in this little mental experiment.
In this article by K.T. Bradford, Jeremy Lassen, who runs a lean, focused, smaller press, says those initial investments for a book run from $7,000 to $20,000.
If you were making an eBook only, to make a professional, slick, proofread and well edited project, let’s take that lower number. Let’s say you farm this all out and pay an up and coming artist $3000 for a painting, a proofreader $1,000 to go over and copy edit, and then later proof the manuscript, a designer $1,000 to design the book’s look and feel all throughout, and a freelance editor to help throughout all this. I have no idea what an editor costs who’s freelance, but let’s lowball this and say that person makes $2,000 a book, like the copy editor (this would mean, for an NYC based editor, that they’d edit 24 books a year to make a freelance living. A lot of hustle). That’s a $7,000 initial investment.
So you can see, even without printing the book, there are upfront ‘development’ costs in good books.