How much does it cost to self-publish a book in the UK?

Roughly £2,500–£6,000 done professionally end to end. It can be done for a few hundred if you do the editing yourself and buy only a proofread and a cover, and many good books are.

What's the one thing worth paying for?

A manuscript assessment at £400–£900, or a cover at £250–£800. Which depends on whether your problem is the book or the shelf.

Are these prices current?

Dated 9 September 2026, sourced to CIEP suggested minimum rates effective 1 March 2026 and Reedsy's published averages. Every row is flagged sourced, derived or estimated.

Why are the ranges so wide?

Length, condition and the editor's experience all move the number substantially. A rough 120,000-word manuscript costs far more to edit than a clean 70,000-word one.

Do I need to spend this much?

No. The sequence is what a trade publisher would do. Most self-published books need a structural read, a proofread and a good cover, and can skip the rest.

Hub

What it costs to make a book, end to end

Done entirely with professionals, a full-length book costs roughly £2,500–£6,000 to take from finished draft to published: developmental edit, copy-edit, proofread, cover, blurb and print setup. Add a ghostwriter and it runs £15,000–£50,000. Those are the real numbers, and they are why most finished manuscripts stay in folders.

Free. No card. Private.

A separate free preview: A free outside view of your own pages

A separate editorial preview of one extract; it does not read the whole book or do the specialist job this page describes. Send up to 5,000 words. You get back what the draft appears to be doing to somebody who wasn't there when you wrote it, the strongest thing in it named, the exact place a reader starts to drift, and three revision priorities in order.

Or see how it works first

A separate editorial preview of one extract; it does not read the whole book or do the specialist job this page describes. An AI-assisted read of your own pages. Not a human edit, not a line edit, and not a scored report.

How these prices were arrived at

Every row on every page below carries a confidence flag.

Sourced means published: CIEP suggested minimum rates effective 1 March 2026, Reedsy's own marketplace averages, Books.by, publishing.co.uk, The Ghostwriters Agency.

Derived means calculated from a published rate, with the working shown — a per-hour rate multiplied by a realistic throughput for a book of that length.

Estimated means market judgement with no published source. There are a few, they are labelled, and they carry a date.

Everything here is dated 9 September 2026. Prices move; a page without a date is not telling you anything.

The order that saves money

More is wasted on sequence than on rates.

Each editorial pass assumes the one above it is finished. A copy-edit is invalidated by a structural revision; a proofread is invalidated by a copy-edit. So an author who commissions a copy-edit first, then discovers the middle act needs rebuilding, pays for the copy-edit twice.

The order: assessment or beta readers first (cheapest, most diagnostic), then developmental, then line, then copy, then typeset, then proofread. Cover and blurb after the page count is final.

If you can afford only one thing, buy a manuscript assessment at £400–£900. It is the highest-value editorial purchase there is, and it frequently saves the £3,000 you were about to spend.

About Your Book Pro

Your Book Pro is a book-writing platform built in Britain. Start with an idea, notes, half a draft, a podcast, or a finished manuscript, and use our purpose-built AI tools for planning, feedback, editing, proofreading, cover designs, and to create print-ready files. Writing is totally free: you can type, upload or speak your book as much as you like, and use only the editing tools you need with Plus, or go unlimited with Pro.

Produce world-class drafts at the fraction of the cost of hiring a human editorial team.

Every account starts with 1,000 welcome credits, and a plain export of your own words is free.

Each guide says plainly when a person does the job better than AI. Guides on legal topics are general information, not legal advice.

The cost pages here are not a sales device — they are the reference we wanted to exist. Use them to brief a freelancer, to sanity-check a quote, or to work out what you actually need.

Where the platform changes the arithmetic: the editorial passes that cost £2,500–£6,000 with freelancers run here on credits, and every account starts with 1,000 that never expire. A whole-book review costs 600 of them. credit packs are there when you need more.

Where it does not: a legal read from a publishing solicitor, a cover designer who knows your shelf, a publicist's relationships, and real beta readers in your actual audience. Those are on these pages at their real prices because they are real purchases.

Run a whole-book review

Upload a manuscript written anywhere

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Questions people ask

How much does it cost to self-publish a book in the UK?: Roughly £2,500–£6,000 done professionally end to end. It can be done for a few hundred if you do the editing yourself and buy only a proofread and a cover, and many good books are.
What's the one thing worth paying for?: A manuscript assessment at £400–£900, or a cover at £250–£800. Which depends on whether your problem is the book or the shelf.
Are these prices current?: Dated 9 September 2026, sourced to CIEP suggested minimum rates effective 1 March 2026 and Reedsy's published averages. Every row is flagged sourced, derived or estimated.
Why are the ranges so wide?: Length, condition and the editor's experience all move the number substantially. A rough 120,000-word manuscript costs far more to edit than a clean 70,000-word one.
Do I need to spend this much?: No. The sequence is what a trade publisher would do. Most self-published books need a structural read, a proofread and a good cover, and can skip the rest.