Typesetting costs £100–£400 from a freelancer for straight prose, and more for anything with figures, tables or poetry layout. Vellum at $249.99 and Atticus at $147 both do it yourself in minutes, which for a novel is usually the better trade.
What it costs
What formatting and typesetting costs — and what you're actually buying
What good looks like
- A sample chapter typeset before the whole book
- Print and ebook treated as different jobs, because they are
- Correct handling of images, tables and footnotes
- A PDF that a printer will accept without queries
What your book will actually cost
Four questions — genre, length, what you have already, what you want at the end — and we send a costed plan for your book.
What you are actually buying
Typesetting is what makes the inside of a book look like a book rather than a document. Margins, running heads, chapter openings, widows and orphans, and the hundred small decisions that readers never notice unless they are wrong.
Why it costs that
Typesetting is priced on page count and complexity. Straight narrative prose is fast; anything with figures, tables, footnotes, poetry layout or multiple text levels is not. A freelance typesetter at £100–£400 for a standard novel is doing a day's work; a textbook with 200 figures is a different job at a different price entirely.
How to spend less
Use a formatting tool. Vellum at $249.99 (Mac only) and Atticus at $147 (cross-platform) both produce professional output from a clean DOCX in minutes, and Reedsy Studio does it free. For straight prose these are genuinely as good as a freelancer and cost less than one book. Pay a person when the interior is complex — poetry, illustrated non-fiction, textbooks, anything with a figure programme.
What good looks like
- A sample chapter typeset before the whole book
- Print and ebook treated as different jobs, because they are
- Correct handling of images, tables and footnotes
- A PDF that a printer will accept without queries
Questions to ask them
- Have you supplied files to my printer before?
- What happens when I need to correct a typo afterwards?
- Is the ebook conversion included or separate?
Red flags
- One price quoted for print and ebook together with no detail
- No sample
- Files supplied without bleed or crop marks for print
Honestly
For straight prose, modern tools do a decent job and paying for typesetting is optional. For anything with images, tables, poetry, scripts or a complex interior, it is not.
What Your Book Pro does here
Your Book Pro is a British book-writing platform. You bring a book — an idea, a folder of notes, half a draft, or a finished manuscript written somewhere else — and it gives you the editorial process a publisher would run: a plan, structured feedback, a simulated beta read, a line edit, a proofread, a cover, a blurb and a print-ready file. You can type it, upload it or speak it. The tools sit in one place and work on the same manuscript, so the feedback compounds instead of arriving as twelve disconnected opinions.
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.
For straight prose, modern tools do a decent job and paying for typesetting is optional. For anything with images, tables, poetry, scripts or a complex interior, it is not.
What it costs
| What you are buying | Typical range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| DIY with free tools | £0 | Free tools |
| Complex or illustrated interior | £200–£300 | UK market |
CIEP suggested minimum rates effective 1 March 2026; Books.by; publishing.co.uk; The Ghostwriters Agency. Dated 9 September 2026.
Try it free
Get my costed planQuestions people ask
- Can I typeset my own book?
- For straight prose, yes, using a formatting tool. For poetry, illustrated books and textbooks, a person is worth it.
- Is Vellum worth $249.99?
- If you are on a Mac and will publish more than one book, it usually pays for itself against a single freelance typesetting fee.
- What do I give a typesetter?
- A final, proofread, clean DOCX with real heading styles, plus your trim size and printer template.
- Should I typeset before proofreading?
- Yes. Proofreading happens on the typeset file, because typesetting introduces its own errors.