A book launch service for indie authors, priced in plain numbers.

Budgeting for a launch without lighting money on fire

The number on the invoice is only half of any pricing decision. The other half is what that spend buys you in visibility, sales, and, just as much, your own time and sanity. A $95 Reader Blast that fills release week with honest early reviews is doing wildly different work than $75 of graphics, even though the prices are close. Budgeting well is matching the spend to the stage you’re at rather than buying the most impressive-sounding thing you can afford. A debut almost always gets more from a solid foundation (a simple website, an ARC setup, a launch plan) than from an expensive social retainer sitting on top of nothing.

If money is tight, the cleanest way to plan is to fund things in the order a reader meets them. A place they can land, even a one-page site, and a way to capture them, a newsletter sign-up, come before the ARC campaign and the release-week assets, and those come before the ongoing social and newsletter rhythm that keeps the book alive after launch week. Fund that order top to bottom and stop where the budget runs out. You’ll still have built the parts that compound, instead of spreading the same money thin across everything and getting no real result anywhere. The packages on this page bundle each of those stages at better value than buying the pieces one by one.

Why so few marketers show you the price

A lot of author marketing is sold with the numbers hidden, and there’s a reason for it: opaque pricing lets someone quote each author whatever they think that author will pay. I print the numbers instead. It respects your time, because you shouldn’t have to sit through a sales call just to learn whether a service is even in your range. And it keeps me honest, because published rates mean the same work costs the same for everyone, and any discount is a deliberate, logged decision rather than a random outcome of how a negotiation went. Printed prices also make it easy to say no cleanly, which is healthier for both of us than a soft yes to something that was never going to fit.

That carries through to what isn’t included. Third-party costs (hosting, domains, BookFunnel, newsletter software, ad spend) are always yours, and I always pass them through at cost. I won’t mark them up or fold them into a fee so you can’t see what you’re paying for. On a Literary Inspired invoice, the service fee is the service fee and the external costs sit clearly outside it. You always know exactly what your money bought.

Packages or a la carte, and how to tell

The packages exist because authors at the same stage need the same predictable cluster of things, and bundling them costs less than buying each alone, which is why each package’s listed value sits above its price. A debut gets the launch foundation in The First Chapter. An author with a release coming gets visibility in The Spotlight Effect. An author who wants to stay present between books without building content from scratch gets the monthly rhythm in Socially Awkward. An author who wants the whole thing off their plate gets the full ongoing system in Goodbye Burnout. A package is the right call when your needs match the bundle and you’d rather not assemble the pieces yourself.

À la carte is the right call when your needs are specific or partial: you already have a website but want the ARC handled, you only want the Amazon listing fixed, you want a blurb and nothing else. Buying the single service keeps you from paying for a bundle you won’t use. The two also combine, so you can book a package and bolt on the extras your particular book needs. If you genuinely can’t tell which is more economical for your situation, the $75 consult call is a cheap way to get the answer before you commit to anything larger. None of this is built to push you toward the biggest number. It’s built to help you spend what you have in the order that does your career the most good, then get to work.

Paying once versus paying monthly

The pricing here mixes two different kinds of cost, and it helps to plan them separately. The once-off fees (a website, a blurb, an ARC setup, a brand audit) buy assets you own: you pay once and the result keeps working long after, a website that serves readers for years, a blurb that keeps converting, an ARC system you reuse for every future book. The monthly fees (social management, newsletter creation, evergreen recycling, maintenance) buy ongoing work that stops when you stop paying. Both are legitimate; they just suit different situations and different cash-flow realities. A sensible split is to fund the once-off foundation first, since those assets make everything else more effective, then add monthly services only for the ongoing work you won’t do yourself. If you’re not sure how to split yours, tell me where you are and what you’re launching, and I’ll point you at the smallest spend that will move your career the most.