How Much Should You Spend Marketing a Self-Published Book?

There's no single right number, but there is a right order. Spend on the things that make every later pound work harder, and postpone the rest.

Spend on the product first

Before any marketing, three things determine whether marketing can work at all.

Cover — $300–800. The highest-return money you will spend. A cover that doesn't signal genre means paid traffic bounces and organic browsers scroll past. If your budget is tiny, spend it here and nowhere else.

Editing — $500–2,500 depending on depth. A copy-edit at minimum. Reviews mentioning typos suppress sales permanently, and you can't fix a reputation retroactively.

Formatting — $0–200. Vellum, Atticus or Reedsy's free tool produce professional results. Don't pay someone hundreds for this.

If you've got $1,000 total, all of it should go here. Marketing a book that isn't ready is throwing money after a problem you haven't solved.

Then the cheap things that work

Once the book is solid, several effective things cost almost nothing:

• Email service — free up to 500–1,000 subscribers
• Genre community participation — free, costs time
• ARC outreach — free
• Consistent social posting — free
• A newsletter swap with another author — free

Most authors skip these to buy ads, which is backwards. Ads amplify a book that already converts. They expose a book that doesn't.

Then promotion sites

Once you have 10–20 reviews, discounted-book newsletters become the best-value paid promotion available.

BookBub Featured Deal is the gold standard — $200–2,000 depending on category, and frequently pays for itself several times over. It's also extremely competitive; most submissions are rejected, and it's normal to apply repeatedly.

The second tier — Freebooksy, Bargain Booksy, Robin Reads, Fussy Librarian — cost roughly $30–150 per promotion. Results vary, but they're cheap enough to test.

Run these when you have something to gain: a launch, a price promotion, a new book in the series to pull readers into.

Then ads, carefully

Amazon Ads are the most natural fit — you're reaching people already shopping for books. Start at $5–10 a day. Expect to lose money for the first few weeks while you learn which keywords convert.

Facebook Ads need more skill and a bigger budget to learn on. Powerful for series with a strong first book; usually a poor place for a beginner to start.

The honest rule: ads rarely make a single standalone book profitable. They work when you have a series, because a reader acquired at a loss on book one pays for themselves across books two through five.

What not to pay for

• "Guaranteed reviews." These are fake and can get your book removed.
• Most paid blog tours. Largely read by other authors on the same tour.
• Press releases. Effectively nobody reads them.
• Swag. Bookmarks and stickers are lovely for existing fans and useless for finding new ones.
• Expensive "author platform" courses, when the free advice is abundant and identical.
• Vanity presses. If someone asks you to pay to be published, walk away.

Three realistic budgets

$0. Community participation, email list, consistent posting, ARC outreach. This works. It's slow and it costs time instead of money, but plenty of careers started here.

$1,000. All of it into cover and editing. No paid marketing. Do the free things well.

$3,000. Cover and editing ($1,800), a couple of promo-site slots ($200), and $1,000 spread across three months of Amazon ads at $10/day while you learn.

The question that decides it

Before any spend, ask: is this money buying attention for a book that converts, or hiding a problem the book has?

If your cover doesn't fit your genre or your blurb doesn't hook, more traffic just means more people deciding no.

The cheapest lever

The free tier of this list — community, email, consistent posting — has the best return of anything here. It also has the highest failure rate, because it depends entirely on doing it week after week.

BookSpur exists for that part: a specific plan for your book, a task a day, with the words written. About the cost of a single promo-site slot per month, and it's the thing you do every week rather than once.

Try it free for 7 days.