In this tiny article, I want to show you how much money I spent to create, launch and sell my latest book Service Design Principles 201-300.

Cost breakdown

Here is an overview of all the tools I used and the external help I got to create this book in one year.

• Proofreading | 792.01$ | Direct
  Help from external people to review the grammar of my English texts. I've used Proofed for the book interior and Papertrue for the foreword. 

• Podia | 331.5$ | Indirect
  The tool I use for the community of co-creators and to host my books

• Taskbullet | 220$ | Direct
  External help with administrative tasks like verifying every link or importing all my notes from Notion to Pages.

• Grammarly | 144$ | Direct
  A tool that helps me to improve my English writing.

• Scribd | 87.11$ | Indirect
  A subscription to get unlimited ebooks and audiobooks. Like Netflix but for books. A lot of the inspiration for my books comes from other books, both for the structure and the content.

• Undraw Plus | 49$ | Indirect
  The annual subscription to support the open-source illustration set I use on my website.

• Notion | 48$ | Indirect
  The tool that I use to manage all my writing.

• Illustrations | 39$ | Direct
  A one-month subscription to Streamline to illustrate the last version of the book.
  

Total: 1710.62$

Overview of costs

Once the data is shown in a graph, it's pretty clear that proofreading is the biggest expense I have to create a book, as it takes nearly half of my budget.