Calculator
How many copies before an independently published novel pays for itself
Enter your production spend, your list price and your print cost, and see the blended margin per sale and the number of copies that clears the bill.
Free tools
Calculators for authors running submissions and print runs
Two small tools for the arithmetic that decides whether a book pays for itself and whether a query round fits inside the hours you actually have.
Publishing decisions get made on rough numbers scribbled at the kitchen table: what the edit and the cover will cost, what a copy leaves you after the store takes its share, how many evenings a batch of eight queries really eats. These two calculators do that arithmetic properly so you can argue with the result instead of the sums.
Both run in the browser, keep nothing, and start on defaults drawn from what independent authors and small presses in the US are actually paying and waiting. Change the inputs to your own numbers, then take the answer to your next planning session or your next contract conversation.
Calculator
How long a full query round takes when you have a day job
Set your list size, your batch size and the hours you can give submissions each week, and see how long the round really runs and how much silence to expect.
Working document
The submission packet checklist for agents, presses and contests
Everything that has to be true before a batch goes out, and the record that has to exist the moment it does.
Why these calculators are open to any writer mid round
Both sums get done by hand at the end of a working evening. One author adds up the developmental edit, the copyedit, the proofread and the cover, guesses what a paperback leaves once the store, the distributor and the printer have taken their share, and tries to work out how many copies clear the bill. Another counts the agents and presses on her list, multiplies by the minutes it takes to read the guidelines and cut a sample to the exact page count asked for, and wonders whether the round fits in the hours she has after the day job. Neither question needs an account, so neither calculator asks for one.
Run them once and they have already paid for themselves. A break even figure gives you something concrete to hold against a small press offer and its royalty terms before you answer it, and a week count tells you whether a sixty name target list is a season of work or most of a year. Take the answer to the print quote, to the contract conversation, or to the decision to cut the list down to the agents who genuinely represent your category, and never come back here if you would rather not.
The number is the easy part
A break even count and a week count are each one moment of arithmetic. What runs for the next eighteen months is which version went to which agent, which press has a reading period closing on Friday, and who is now due a polite nudge. A short demo shows how that sits in one pipeline instead of a spreadsheet, a sent mail folder and four agency pages left open.