Self-Publishing Courses Compared 2026: What Each One Costs, What It Omits, and the Free Courses That Cover the Same Ground

Last reviewed by Robert Prime — 6 August 2026

Search “best self-publishing courses” and almost every result you get is written by someone who earns a commission on the answer. That is not a conspiracy theory: affiliate programmes are standard across author education, commissions on a $749 course are meaningful money, and the reviews that rank are the reviews that convert.

We sell a £197 course ourselves, so treat that as the bias it is — which is why this guide leads with the free options, quotes every competitor’s price from their own live page rather than from another blog, and includes a section on who should not buy ours. We are not an affiliate for anything listed here. We earn nothing if you buy Mark Dawson’s course, Dave Chesson’s course, or nothing at all.

Every price below was fetched from the vendor’s own page on 6 August 2026. Prices move, and several of these vendors change them monthly, so check before you buy. Dollar-to-sterling conversions use the rate on that date (1 USD ≈ £0.74, £1 ≈ $1.35) and are indicative only. Where a vendor does not publish a price, this guide says so rather than repeating a figure from a review site.

The short version

If you have never published a book, start free. Reedsy Learning’s 10-day email courses, Amazon’s own Ads Academy, ALLi’s free guidebooks and Kindlepreneur’s free courses together cover the mechanics of getting a book onto Amazon and running your first ads. On the topics both tiers cover, that is most of what a beginner course sells, and the section after next sets out the comparison topic by topic instead of asserting it.

Paid courses earn their money in three places: structured accountability, one specific advanced skill (ads scaling, translations, TikTok), and a community you can ask questions in. If you cannot name which of those three you are buying, do not buy.

The free tier, first

This is the section affiliate reviews bury or skip. All of the following were live and free on 6 August 2026.

Ricardo Fayet teaches a free 10-day “Amazon Ads for Authors” email course on Reedsy. He also teaches a paid course called “Amazon Ads for Authors” on Mark Dawson’s platform, published at $397 (about £294) or 12 monthly payments of $35. These are not the same product, and the paid one is longer and video-based, but if you are choosing where to start, the free version by the same instructor is an obvious first stop and you will almost never see it mentioned in a review of the paid one.

The second point is less comfortable for us. ALLi’s free Getting Started Guide plus Amazon Ads Academy plus KDP University will take a competent, patient author from manuscript to published book with running ads, without a course at any point. If you are the kind of person who finishes free courses, the free tier is not a stepping stone to a paid one; it may be the whole answer.

One resource we removed from this list on checking: Coursera’s guided project “Self Publish Your Book on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing” is widely cited as free. The page we fetched shows it as beginner level, 1.5 hours, rated 4.4 from 98 reviews, and included with Coursera Plus rather than carrying a standalone free price. It does carry a prominent “Join for Free” button, but that is Coursera’s generic sign-up flow, not a free price for this specific project. We cannot call it free, so we have not.

What the free tier covers, and what $179 adds

The claim “free is enough for most people” is worth nothing unless someone shows the working. Here is ours, comparing the free tier against Kindlepreneur’s Authorpreneur Academy at $179 (about £133) — the best-value complete paid beginner course we found, and one of the few that publishes its curriculum: six sections, “7+ hours on-demand video” (the vendor’s own figure), and 33 lessons by our own count of the syllabus (the six sections’ list items sum to 33, excluding a separate “Plus:” bonus block).

Nine of thirteen have direct, structured free coverage, once Reedsy’s full 55-course catalogue is counted rather than just the seven named on page one. Three are partial. Only sequencing — the order to do it all in — has nothing comparable in the free tier at all.

That is our rubric, published so you can disagree with it. What it suggests is that $179 does not buy information the free tier lacks. It buys one voice, one order, and someone else’s decision about what to do first. If ordering the work yourself is the part you find hard, £133 is a fair price for that. If it is not, you are paying to have things you can already find arranged tidily.

The price-versus-outcome table

One thing to know before you read the SPF rows. Ads for Authors at $749 is a bundle: SPF’s own page for it lists four core courses — Facebook Ads for Authors, the Amazon Ads course taught by Ricardo Fayet, TikTok for Authors and BookBub Ads for Authors — plus bonus modules on advanced Facebook ads, ad copywriting (Bryan Cohen), ad design (Stuart Bache) and SPF University. The standalone pages for the core courses do not mention that they sit inside it. Buy the two $397 ads courses separately and you pay $794 for material the $749 bundle already contains, plus TikTok and BookBub thrown in. If you think you will eventually want more than one platform, the bundle is the cheaper first purchase, not the upgrade.

Also as at 6 August 2026, SPF is running a 30% code (SUMMER30) that takes the bundle to $525 and each $397 course to $278. Self Publishing Launchpad is excluded from it.

Sorted by published list price. “Not published” means the vendor does not show a figure on the page we fetched.

Kindlepreneur pricing

Genuinely two free courses and two paid: Mastering Keywords and Categories at $49.99 (about £37) and Authorpreneur Academy at $179 (about £133), both with working checkouts on Podia, confirmed 11 August 2026. A third card on the same page, “Amazon Ads Course 2.0,” displays $49.99 (20% off $79.99), but its “Enroll now” button’s href is a literal "#" placeholder — it doesn’t link anywhere. Kindlepreneur’s own site search for “Amazon Ads Course 2.0” returns zero results, and the site’s own top-nav “Courses” dropdown item for “Amazon Ads 2.0” instead routes to /courses/free-amazon-ads-course/, which leads to a Podia page whose own price data reads "prices":{"0":"Free"} and whose copy says “you can join our 5-day Amazon Ads 2.0 course absolutely FREE.” Every live, working path to an Amazon Ads course on Kindlepreneur’s site leads to a free course; none leads to a $49.99 checkout. Treat the $49.99 card as a stale listing the vendor hasn’t taken down, and take the free course instead. Kindlepreneur sells its working paid courses through Podia, not Udemy. Dave Chesson’s business is publishing software, so the courses lean technical: keywords, categories, ads and tooling rather than craft or coaching.

SPF pricing

Seven courses publish prices between $197 and $749, all confirmed on learnselfpublishing.com. The $749 Ads for Authors is the bundle described above and carries a stated 30-day full refund. Note the instructor: SPF was founded by Mark Dawson, but the Ads for Authors bundle, the standalone Facebook Ads for Authors course and Self Publishing Launchpad are each fronted “with James Blatch” on the vendor’s own pages — checked 11 August 2026, and Mark Dawson’s name appears on none of the three. Self Publishing Launchpad, SPF’s beginner course, is $597 via SPF’s own course store (learnselfpublishing.thinkific.com), confirmed live and excluded from the current sale; its main marketing page currently shows enrolment closed with a waiting list and no price displayed there, which is why an earlier version of this article called it unpublished. SPF’s site also lists three shorter, cheaper “Self Publishing Shorts” (Format with Vellum, Master Scrivener, Improve Your Launches) that do not show a price on the courses listing page — we could not verify a figure for these, so they are not included in the table below.

We cover SPF’s full course-by-course pricing, including the Launchpad rename history, in more depth in our dedicated Mark Dawson / Self Publishing 101 review. This section exists to place SPF’s prices next to every other vendor’s; go there for the full breakdown of what’s inside each course.

selfpublishing.com pricing

Both flagship programmes publish the same figure: $9K (about £6,700), with payment plans available. That is more price transparency than most high-ticket coaching, and less curriculum transparency than a $49 Reedsy course.

Reedsy pricing

We paginated all seven pages of Reedsy’s course listing: 53 free 10-day email courses and exactly two paid ones, How to Plan a Novel at $49 and How to Write a Novel at $1,399 (101 video lessons plus weekly live teaching and a 12-month membership). There is nothing in between, which tells you Reedsy treats the free courses as the funnel and the cohort as the product.

Best Page Forward pricing

A $9 two-week challenge at the entry point, a $119/month or $999/year membership in the middle, and a priced ladder above it on Best Page Forward’s shop: Royalties Rising $799, The Series Makeover Bundle $1,099 (from $1,292), the New-Author Masterclass Mentorship Bundle $1,249 (from $1,435), and the Groundbreakers Author Mastermind $1,999–$3,299. Bryan Cohen’s business is ads and book descriptions; expect depth on those and silence on everything else.

What each one omits

The four things worth knowing before you buy

1. The “free 5-Day Challenge” everyone recommends is now $9. Bryan Cohen’s 5-Day Amazon Ad Profit Challenge is one of the most-recommended free resources in indie publishing, cited in hundreds of blog posts. When we fetched authorsadvertise.com on 6 August 2026 it redirected to a 14-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge priced at $9, with an optional $9 add-on for an ebook and event replays. Nine dollars for two weeks of structured ad training and a coached group is still the best value in this entire guide. The recommendation you will read elsewhere is out of date, and that matters mainly because it tells you how stale the rest of the advice around it is likely to be.

2. Two of the biggest programmes publish no curriculum. selfpublishing.com publishes $9K on both its Become a Bestseller and Fundamentals of Fiction & Story pages, which is more transparent than most high-ticket programmes. What it does not publish is a module list, a lesson count, or a course length. You are told what the package contains — six private coaching sessions, unlimited office hours, cover design, formatting, distribution, ISBN, a six-week launch plan — but not what the teaching contains. That may be fine. At $9,000 you should ask for it in writing before you pay.

There is a second thing worth noticing. selfpublishing.com’s own guide to publishing costs puts “author tools/courses” at $500–$6,000 and total publishing cost at “about $6,000 from start to finish”. Their own entry-level programme is $9,000. Both figures can be defensible. But if a site’s cost guide implies one number and its checkout implies another, read the cost guide as marketing.

3. SPF’s beginner course, Launchpad, is closed for enrolment right now — but it isn’t unpriced. Self Publishing Launchpad is described on SPF’s own page as “The essential course for launching your author business”, eight modules, taught by James Blatch, not Mark Dawson (Dawson founded SPF but isn’t the instructor of Launchpad, Facebook Ads for Authors or the Ads for Authors bundle — every one of those three pages credits Blatch by name). SPF’s marketing page for Launchpad said enrolment “IS CURRENTLY CLOSED”, offered a waiting list, and displayed “COURSE OPENS: 29th APRIL 2026” in one place — an opening date roughly three months in the past — and “COURSE OPENS: 2027” and “COURSE OPENS: 2026” elsewhere on the same page, with no price shown there. It is the one SPF course excluded from the current 30% sale. The price does exist, though: $597, confirmed live on SPF’s own course store at learnselfpublishing.thinkific.com.

Self Publishing Launchpad is a rename of the course many authors still call Self Publishing 101 — our dedicated Mark Dawson / SPF review confirms this on SPF’s own materials, and we’ve matched that finding here rather than leaving it as unconfirmed.

4. List prices are theatre on both platforms, and that is fine. Kindlepreneur’s courses are sold on Podia — not Udemy — as “$179 (45% off)” and “$49.99 (20% off from $77.99)”, with the discount effectively permanent: the seller sets both the list price and the markdown, so the list price is a reference point rather than a price anyone actually pays. SPF does the same thing differently, with a 30% code running as we write. The practical advice is identical on both: never pay a list price, because there is almost always a sale, usually within weeks.

Which reader each course suits

You have not written the book yet. Do not buy a marketing course. Reedsy’s free courses will do, plus a craft course if you want structure and can afford it. Reedsy’s How to Write a Novel at $1,399 (about £1,035) buys 101 video lessons, weekly live masterclasses and a community, which is a real cohort programme at a price comparable to a part-time evening course. How to Plan a Novel at $49 is the cheap test of whether that format works for you at all.

You have written the book and want it published properly. Free tier first: ALLi’s Getting Started Guide, KDP University, and our free KDP readiness audit to find out what is wrong with your files before you pay anyone to teach you anything. If you want one paid course, Kindlepreneur’s Authorpreneur Academy at $179 (about £133) is the best-value complete path we found, from someone who builds publishing software rather than sells coaching.

Your book is published and not selling. This is the biggest group and the most over-sold. The honest sequence is: fix metadata (Kindlepreneur’s Mastering Keywords and Categories, $49.99), then test ads cheaply (the $9 14-Day Challenge, or Amazon Ads Academy free), then and only then consider a $397–$749 ads course. Buying the $749 bundle before you have fixed your keywords is spending £554 to advertise a listing that cannot convert.

You are spending real money on ads already and plateauing. This is where the expensive courses stop being a luxury. Ads for Authors at $749 (about £554) with a 30-day full refund, or Author Ad School Unlimited at $119/month (about £88), are defensible if your monthly ad spend is a multiple of the course price. If you spend £2,000 a month on ads, a course that improves ACoS by 15% pays for itself in a fortnight; if you spend £50 a month, it will not pay for itself at all.

You want someone to do it for you. Then you are not buying a course, you are buying a service, and you should compare it against services rather than against courses. $9,000 (about £6,700) at selfpublishing.com buys coaching plus production plus distribution. Priced separately in the UK, professional formatting starts around £69 and a full launch service around £499. Whether the coaching is worth the difference is a real question, and the answer depends on how much you value having someone in your calendar every week.

Our own course, and who should not buy it

We sell Sell More Books at £197 (about $266) launch price for the first 100 students and £347 (about $468) standard. It runs to 17 modules with interactive tools that read your manuscript and generate outputs specific to your book: description rewrites, keyword strategy, Amazon ad variants, email sequences, a 90-day launch calendar. Lifetime access, 14-day refund if you have completed less than one module’s exercises. We also sell an AI Discoverability course at £149, or £249 if our team does the work for you. Both are on our courses page.

Who should not buy it:

• Anyone whose problem is narrower than the course. If your book is published and the specific failure is search visibility, Kindlepreneur’s Mastering Keywords and Categories costs $49.99 (about £37) against our £197 — it goes deeper on that one subject than we do, because for Kindlepreneur that is the entire product rather than one module out of seventeen. For ad efficiency specifically, Kindlepreneur’s genuinely free Amazon Ads course covers the same ground its dead-linked $49.99 “Amazon Ads Course 2.0” card claims to. Buy ours only if you want the other fifteen modules and the generated outputs. If your metadata is already right and ads are the sole problem, buy or take theirs instead.
• Anyone who has not finished a manuscript. Every module assumes a book exists.
• Anyone whose real problem is the writing. We do not teach craft. Reedsy does, better.
• Anyone who wants live coaching or a cohort. Ours is self-paced with tools, not calls. If you need someone to hold you to a deadline, Author Ad School Unlimited or a coaching programme fits better, even though both cost more.
• Anyone who has not done the free tier. If you have not read ALLi’s free guide or run the free Amazon Ads Academy modules, do that first and keep your £197 if they solve the problem.

That leaves a specific reader: someone with a finished, published book that is not selling, who wants a systematic marketing pass they can run themselves, with the outputs generated rather than described. If that is not you, the table above has cheaper answers, and several of them cost nothing.

What we could not verify

• Kindlepreneur’s “Amazon Ads Course 2.0.” The vendor’s own courses page shows $49.99, but the enrol button doesn’t resolve to a checkout and site search returns zero results for the product. We’ve treated this as not genuinely for sale rather than guessed at a real price — see the Kindlepreneur pricing section above.
• The one-off Author Ad School course price. Best Page Forward refers to “Author Ad School: Course and Community” without a figure. The published prices on shop.bestpageforward.net are Author Ad School Unlimited at $119/month or $999/year, plus Royalties Rising ($799), The Series Makeover Bundle ($1,099), the New-Author Masterclass Mentorship Bundle ($1,249) and the Groundbreakers Author Mastermind ($1,999–$3,299). Figures circulating elsewhere for a one-time lifetime-access version of Author Ad School itself could not be confirmed on Bryan Cohen’s own site.
• SPF’s three “Self Publishing Shorts”. Format with Vellum, Master Scrivener and Improve Your Launches are listed on learnselfpublishing.com/courses with no price shown on that page, and we could not locate working individual product pages to check further.
• The end date of SPF’s 30% sale. The sale page names the code and the reduced prices but does not publish a closing date.
• Coursera’s KDP guided project being free. The page carries a “Join for Free” button — the generic Coursera sign-up — but the project itself is listed as included with Coursera Plus, not as a standalone free course. We cannot call it free, so we have not.
• Individual KDP University video and webinar titles. The KDP Help Centre lists “Webinars” and “Videos” as sections but does not enumerate them at the level we could fetch.
• ALLi Partner tier pricing. Only the three author tiers publish figures: Associate £89, Author £109, Authorpreneur £129 per year.
• What any of these courses actually contains beyond the published outline. No guide can tell you that from outside the paywall, and any that claims to is guessing.

The one-paragraph decision

Spend nothing for two weeks. Do Reedsy’s free Book Marketing 101 email course, sign up to Amazon Ads Academy, download ALLi’s free Getting Started Guide, and run our free readiness audit on your files. At the end of that fortnight you will know precisely which gap remains, and the gap will have a name: metadata, ads, craft, accountability, or production. Then buy the cheapest thing that closes that specific gap, which for most authors is somewhere between $9 and $199. Reserve the $749 and $9,000 decisions for the point where you have revenue to protect, not revenue to imagine. Every affiliate review in this category inverts that order, because the order that makes you money is not the order that makes them money.

Related guides

• Amazon ads for authors — the mechanics the paid ads courses assume you already know
• KDP keyword research — fix this before you spend anything on advertising
• Self-publishing costs UK — what publishing actually costs once the course is over
• Reedsy UK guide — what Reedsy is, beyond its free courses
• Book marketing UK complete guide — the free version of most of what a marketing course sells
• Mark Dawson / Self Publishing 101 review — the full breakdown of every SPF course, instructor and price, in depth

Frequently asked questions

What is the best self-publishing course in 2026?

There is no single best course, because they solve different problems at wildly different prices; for a complete beginner wanting one paid course, Kindlepreneur’s Authorpreneur Academy at $179 (about £133) is the best value we found. The more useful answer is about sequence. The most common and most expensive buying mistake we see is an author with a published book buying a $397–$749 ads course while their keywords, categories and description are still wrong, which turns a course into a bill for advertising a listing that cannot convert. Fix metadata for about $50, test ads for $9, and let the results tell you whether you need the expensive course at all.

How much do Kindlepreneur courses cost?

Kindlepreneur’s genuinely purchasable paid courses run $49.99–$179 as at August 2026: Mastering Keywords and Categories at $49.99 (about £37), and the Authorpreneur Academy at $179 (about £133) for six published sections, 33 lessons by our own count and “7+ hours on-demand video”. A third card on the same page, “Amazon Ads Course 2.0,” also shows $49.99, but its enrol button doesn’t resolve to a checkout and site search returns zero results for it — the only working path to a Kindlepreneur Amazon Ads course is free. Three Kindlepreneur courses are genuinely listed at no cost: the Free Amazon Ads Course, MailerLite for Authors, and (in practice) Amazon Ads Course 2.0. Working courses are sold through Podia, not Udemy, with near-permanent discounts set by the seller — Mastering Keywords and Categories shown as 20% off $77.99, the Authorpreneur Academy as 45% off — so the list price is not a price anyone actually pays.

How much does Author Ad School cost?

Author Ad School Unlimited from Best Page Forward costs $119 a month (about £88) or $999 a year (about £739) as at August 2026. A separate one-time or lifetime “Author Ad School: Course and Community” is referred to on the site, but no price for it is published on Best Page Forward’s own pages, so any figure you find elsewhere is unconfirmed. Because Unlimited is a subscription rather than a one-off course, compare it against a month of your ad spend rather than against other courses, and treat the moment you stop asking questions inside it as the moment to cancel.

Is SPF’s Ads for Authors bundle worth $749?

It is worth it if your monthly ad spend is a multiple of the price, and it is also the cheapest way into SPF’s ads material rather than the upgrade from it. The $749 (about £554) price is for a bundle presented “with James Blatch” (SPF was founded by Mark Dawson, but Blatch is the credited instructor on this bundle, on the standalone Facebook Ads course and on Self Publishing Launchpad) whose published core modules are the Facebook Ads course, the Amazon Ads course taught by Ricardo Fayet, TikTok for Authors and BookBub Ads for Authors. Buying the two ads courses separately at $397 each comes to $794, more than the bundle, and neither standalone page mentions that its contents also sit inside it. A 30-day full refund is stated on the page, and as at 6 August 2026 a 30% code takes the bundle to $525.

Is selfpublishing.com’s $9,000 programme worth it?

It depends entirely on whether you are buying teaching or production. The $9K price on both Become a Bestseller and Fundamentals of Fiction & Story includes six private coaching sessions, unlimited daily office hours, group coaching, cover design, formatting, distribution, an ISBN and a six-week launch plan, so a meaningful part of what you are paying for is done-for-you service rather than course content. Neither page we fetched in August 2026 publishes a module list or lesson count, so ask for the curriculum in writing before paying, and price the production elements separately — UK formatting starts around £69 and a full launch service around £499 — so you can see what the coaching is really costing you.

Do I need a course to self-publish a book?

No. Amazon’s own KDP University, Amazon Ads Academy, ALLi’s free guidebooks and Reedsy’s 53 free email courses cover the full path from finished manuscript to published, advertised book at no cost. What the free tier cannot give you is a running order, feedback on your specific book, or anyone noticing when you stop; on our own topic-by-topic comparison, sequencing — the order to do it all in — is the one area where free materials have nothing comparable to a paid course. The clearest test is whether you can name the specific gap a course closes, because if you cannot, you are buying reassurance rather than education.

How much do self-publishing courses cost in 2026?

Published prices range from free to $9,000 (about £6,700). As at August 2026, selfpublishing.com publishes $9K for both its programmes, SPF’s bundle publishes $749 with its other courses at $197–$399, Kindlepreneur’s paid courses are $49.99–$179, Reedsy’s video courses are $49 and $1,399, and our own are £149 and £197. Two things change every year and are worth checking rather than assuming: prices drift upward while discount codes get more aggressive, so the list price and the paid price diverge further each year; and free tiers keep absorbing what beginner paid courses used to charge for, which is why a recommendation more than about a year old is usually pointing you at something you no longer need to buy.