What it costs
What formatting and typesetting costs — and what you're actually buying
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 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
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
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.
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.
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 |
| Reedsy marketplace average | $800 (about £604) | Half fall between $475 and $1,275 (about £359–£963) |
Software prices from each vendor's own pricing page. Marketplace average from Reedsy. All verified 24 September 2026.
Try it free
Email me my free review linkQuestions 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.