"How much does it cost to format a book" has no single answer, because the options are genuinely different products at genuinely different prices. Here is the landscape, including where we sit in it and where we are the wrong choice.
Prices below are as we understand them at the time of writing and change without warning; check current figures before deciding.
Doing it yourself: free, plus your time
Word, Google Docs, Scrivener and LibreOffice can all produce a usable interior and a usable EPUB. The formatting conventions are documented, most of them are in the other guides here, and none of them are conceptually hard.
The real cost is hours and the risk of one invisible mistake. Mirrored margins off, page numbering that never restarts at chapter one, an EPUB with no navigation document. Each is a single setting, and each is invisible until a proof arrives or a store rejects the file.
If you have one book, time, and patience, this genuinely works.
One-off software: roughly $150–250
Vellum is the best-known, at around $200 for the ebook-only version and around $250 for the version that also does print. It is Mac-only, it is a one-time purchase, and it produces beautiful output with very little effort. People who own it tend to be evangelical about it, and fairly.
Atticus is around $150, one-time, and runs in a browser, so it is not Mac-only. It is a writing environment as well as a formatter.
The maths is straightforward: these are expensive for one book and cheap for ten. If you are writing a series, buying software once and using it forever is almost certainly the right answer, and we would tell you so.
Free tools: $0
Reedsy Studio formats for free in the browser, and produces EPUB and print-ready PDF. It expects you to work inside its editor.
Kindle Create is Amazon's own, free, and produces files for KDP. It is Amazon-shaped by design, which is fine if you are Amazon-exclusive and limiting if you are not.
Free is a real option and worth trying before spending anything.
Freelance formatters: roughly $100–500 a book
A person doing it for you, typically quoted per book or per page. The range is wide because the work is: a straightforward novel is quick, and an illustrated cookbook is not.
This is the right choice when your book is genuinely complicated — images, tables, footnotes, unusual structure — or when your time is worth more than the fee. It is also the only option on this page that can exercise judgement about your specific book.
Note that "book formatting service" as a search term mostly returns these, and they are not software. If you want a person, hire a person; software will frustrate you.
Where we sit
Our tools are free to format and $5 to unlock one file, or $12 a month for everything. The free tier is a complete book with one credit line at the end, so you can see the whole result before paying anything.
When $5 is right: you have one book and one edition of it. It is a one-time payment on one file, no account required, and it never renews.
When $12 a month is right: you have several books, or one book in several editions. A novel usually needs three files — a manuscript for agents, an ebook, a print interior — which is $15 at the one-time price, so the subscription pays for itself in the first month.
When we are the wrong choice: if your book needs images, tables or footnotes, our pipeline does not handle them and will lose them. An illustrated book, a cookbook or a heavily cited academic work should go to Vellum, to a freelancer, or to InDesign. We would rather say that here than take $5 and disappoint you.
Working out your own answer
Roughly, by number of books:
- One book, no rush. Do it yourself, or use a free tool. If you want it to take an afternoon rather than a weekend, $5 here.
- One book, want it done properly, no time. $5 here, or a freelancer if the book is complicated.
- Two to five books. The subscription is cheaper than per-file, and much cheaper than one-off software.
- A series or a backlist. Buy Vellum or Atticus. Software you own forever beats a subscription once you are past a year, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
- An illustrated or heavily structured book. A freelancer, or InDesign, or Vellum. Not us.
The cost nobody quotes
Order a proof copy before a full print run. It is a few dollars plus shipping and it is the only way to find out whether the margins are comfortable, how the type sits on paper, and whether the spine text is where you think it is.
Every route above can produce a file that looks correct on a screen and wrong in the hand. The proof is the cheapest insurance in publishing.