What it costs
What book marketing costs — and what you're actually buying
A book marketing consultant costs £500–£3,000 and a publicist £1,500–£5,000 a month. What a publicist sells is relationships built over years, and it is genuinely not something a tool replaces — but for most self-published books it is not the right spend.
What good looks like
- A plan specific to your genre and your book
- Three things in priority order, not thirty
- Honest about what you cannot do without an existing audience
- Measurable, so you can tell whether it worked
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.
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.
What you are actually buying
Book marketing is the set of decisions about who the book is for and how they will hear about it. Most advice is written for a book that is not yours, which is why so much of it is true and useless.
Why it costs that
A marketing consultant's day rate is professional time, and a publicist's monthly retainer is access to relationships built over years — which is genuinely what you are buying and genuinely cannot be generated. The wide range reflects a wide market: some consultants are experienced publishing professionals, and some are people who launched one book successfully and now sell a course about it.
How to spend less
Spend on the cover and the blurb first. They move more copies than any campaign, and a campaign cannot rescue a book that signals the wrong genre. Then do the free work: categories and keywords, a mailing list, and twenty honest reviews from ARC readers. Only advertise once people who see the sample are actually buying — otherwise you are paying for a bigger audience for a no.
What good looks like
- A plan specific to your genre and your book
- Three things in priority order, not thirty
- Honest about what you cannot do without an existing audience
- Measurable, so you can tell whether it worked
Questions to ask them
- What have you launched in my genre?
- What do you expect this to achieve, in numbers?
- What should I not bother with?
Red flags
- Guaranteed bestseller lists
- A price that does not depend on scope
- Advice to buy reviews, which breaches platform terms
- A plan that is a list of thirty tactics
Honestly
A publicist has relationships — with reviewers, festival programmers, booksellers and radio producers. That is what you are buying and it cannot be generated. For most self-published books, the honest answer is that the cover and the first ten pages do more than any campaign.
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.
These prices are here to be used, not to sell you something — brief a freelancer with them, sanity-check a quote, or work out what you actually need. Where Your Book Pro changes the arithmetic, the page says so; where it does not, it says that too.
A publicist has relationships — with reviewers, festival programmers, booksellers and radio producers. That is what you are buying and it cannot be generated. For most self-published books, the honest answer is that the cover and the first ten pages do more than any campaign.
What it costs
| What you are buying | Typical range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Organic only | £0 | Your own effort |
| Amazon ads | £100–£500/month | UK market |
| Comprehensive launch campaign | £500–£2,000+ | UK market |
| Publicist retainer | £1,500–£4,000/month | Typical UK trade retainer |
| Reedsy marketing strategy benchmark | $910 (about £687) | Buys a plan, not the advertising itself |
UK ranges from publicly advertised freelance rates. Benchmark from Reedsy, verified 24 September 2026.
Plan your launch
Email me my free review linkQuestions people ask
- Do I need a publicist?
- For most self-published books, no. A publicist is worth it when you have a genuine media angle and a book that can capitalise on coverage.
- What's the cheapest thing that actually works?
- Categories and keywords, done properly. Free, takes an afternoon, and consistently underdone.
- When should I start marketing?
- Twelve weeks before publication, and most of that time goes on the book itself — cover, blurb, sample, metadata.
- Are paid press releases worth it?
- No. Journalists do not read distribution wires for book news, and it is the clearest waste on the list.