How Much Money Does It Costs to Run a Book Blog?

By Briana | Pages Unbound on 07/17/2024

How much money do you spend book blogging?

It's a question I see often, either from people who are looking to start blogging and wondering exactly how expensive this hobby is going to be, or from people looking to point out to authors who want free marketing that, well, book blogging costs more money to do than it earns!

The short answer is, of course, that you can spend as much or as little money as you want. I've seen a wide range of answers to this question, depending on factors like whether the blogger pays to host their own web site and how much they invest in things like props, cameras, or editing software for book photos or videos. (I do not count "books" as part of the cost of blogging, though some people might, especially those active on platforms like Instagram who may buy certain colored books to stage photos.)

So this post will address specifically how much we spend to blog at Pages Unbound.

Here are some of the things we pay for or have paid for in the past (and when I see "we," I mainly mean "me" because Krysta is really good at this not spending money at all to blog thing):

A WordPress Plan

You can blog on WordPress completely free, and we did that for many years. However, Pages Unbound was founded in 2011, so we've been blogging for so long that we have exceeded the storage limit for content on a free blog. One option might be to go through our old posts and media and delete some in order to free up space, but currently we pay about $50/year for the first paid tier of WordPress (which primarily includes more storage and no ads on the blog). This our biggest expense.

Giveaways

Giveaways used to be more popular on book blogs. I suppose these days a lot of bloggers don't see enough traffic to make it feel worthwhile. However, I have run the occasional giveaway at Pages Unbound, and I would try to keep it low-cost by doing one or two a year, at a cost of about $20/giveaway.

Bookstagram Props

I have recently quit Bookstagram both because the algorithm changes meant literally no one was seeing my content anymore and because Meta announced they would be using everyone's content to train generative AI, with no option for users in the United States to opt out.

However, in the past, I did buy some props for Bookstagram. I mean, you have to have something in the photo, right? Again, I kept it budget-friendly, so a lot of the costs were things like $1 flowers from the dollar store. The other props I used were generally things I already had at home.

Tailwind

When I was focusing on using Pinterest to get traffic for the blog a few years ago, I did pay for a month of Tailwing (basically a scheduler that can put your pins on multiple boards, suggest your pins to others to repin, etc.), I did pay for a month of Tailwind because I found it pretty effective. However, since we have made exactly $0 from blogging in the 13 years we have been blogging, I did not continue this paid experiment. The unfortunate reality of being a book blogger is that there is no financial gain to getting traffic. It doesn't matter if 50 people visit my blog per day or if 50k visit per day. I get nothing out of it besides the satisfaction of having other people read my content.