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Ebook box sets are an easy way to sell more books and add another stream of revenue. Why are box sets effective and how are they a win for both readers and authors? Let’s take a look.
Ebook Box Sets Help You Sell More Books
Box sets are always sold at a discount; readers should get a better deal buying a box set than they do buying the books individually. Each type of box set has different advantages, but there are a few they all have in common:
- Everybody wins. The reader gets a great deal, and the author gets a guarantee sale on several books.
- You get a better return on marketing—you can promote several books in a box set for the cost and effort of promoting one book.
- A box set adds another stream of income for minimal effort.
- Because box sets are a good deal, they increase in ranking on the various platforms—especially if you put one on sale! Increase ranking means you can sell more books.
Series Box Set
One type of box set is a set of your own books from a series. These are beneficial to authors because it allows them to sell all or a portion of their series at once. Authors don’t have to worry about having to market the next book to the reader because the reader has already bought all of them. The danger of the reader losing interest, getting distracted, or simply not wanting to spend money on the next book is gone. For their part, readers get instant satisfaction and can binge read a series for a cheaper price.
You can make a box set of a complete series, or you can make a set of the first two, three, or four books in a series. What you do depends on how many books you have. Keep in mind that some vendors, like Amazon, won’t let you price your book above $9.99 and still receive 70% royalty, so you may not be able to include your entire series on their site without losing a lot of potential profit.
Series Starter Box Set
Another type of box set is a set that contains the first books of several different series. This is advantageous because a reader gets exposed to several different series at once, and they are likely to buy the next book in at least one of those series. Series starter box sets are a great way to introduce new readers to your writing.
Multi-author Box Set
When you create a box set with books from multiple authors, you can reach the fan base of all those other authors, which can in turn grow your own fan base. In order for this to be effective, all the books in the box set should be in the same genre with a similar content rating; that way, the other authors’ fans are likely to enjoy your book too and go on to buy more of your books.
Putting Your Set Together
To sell an ebook box set, you’ll need to combine the individual ebooks into one book. There are several help guides out there to help you do this. You can use a variety of software, such as Jutoh, Vellum, or Calibre.
You also will want to put together (or pay for) both a 2D and 3D cover for your box set. Apple Books only accepts the 2D version and Kobo recommends the 2D version as well, but on Amazon, readers expect to see a 3D design. However, if your box set is more than a few books long, you may want to stick with a 2D cover, so your box set doesn’t appear tiny on the screen, with a lot of white space.
When creating your 3D cover, try to keep it as big as possible and minimize white space. If you have a 2D cover for your box set, you can create the 3D cover yourself by using the cover, some colored rectangles and spine text, and the skew tool in your favorite graphics program. Here is a tutorial on using gimp to create a 3D cover. The concepts talked about here are the same that you would use on another graphics program, such as Photoshop.
How have you used ebook box sets to sell more books? We’d love to hear in the comments below.
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