Multi Author Boxed Sets as Short Term Marketing Tools & Money Makers!

Single and multi-author ebook boxed sets have become all the rage in the self-publishing world. Bargain hunter readers love them. What frugal reader wouldn't love twelve books for a dollar? (Or even two or three dollars?) Authors by the hundreds have jumped on the boxed set bandwagon, offering readers boxed set bargains galore. Some authors have complained about $0.99 boxed sets, claiming they "devalue" books (usually fully novels) by selling them at an incredible loss (sometimes $0.12 each!) What these authors don't realize is that there is room for boxed sets as a short-term marketing tool in the self-publishing repertoire. If they're done correctly (and there is a right way and a wrong way to do a boxed set) they can be big money makers and boost your readership.

An ebook boxed set is far more simple than a print one--ebook boxed sets are just one large file consisting of several ebooks. Single author boxed sets can combine serial novels so readers can read them all at once. Multiple author boxed sets usually publish novels along the same theme or in the same genre. Either way, both authors and readers can benefit from boxed sets!

BENEFITS FOR READERS

• For single-author bundles, the discount over buying all of the books in a series separately is a great selling point - readers save money and the author makes a sale! Readers also don't have to worry about cliffhangers or series that don't have an ending yet.
• For multi-author bundles, the discount for 6-12 books is enormous! Sometimes the bargain is just too good to pass up, even if there's just one book in the bundle they really want!
• Readers can use these bundles to "try out" new-to-them authors.

 BENEFITS FOR AUTHORS

• Authors can gain new readers and obtain visibility, which is hard to come by in the self-publishing world right now, in a way they might not be able to do on their own. Some boxed sets make it to Amazon's top 100, some even to the top 10. This creates huge visibility for authors and improves Amazon author rank at the same time!
• You make money! While it may seem counterintuitive to price 12 books at $0.99, you have to understand how well these boxed sets sell (when they're distributed and marketed correctly!) When done right, boxed sets can often make an author more (even split twelve ways) than they make on individual books. Depending on the author, sometimes all of their individual books combined! In some cases authors have made thousands of dollars each. Boxed sets can be quite lucrative. The whole can be greater than the sum of its parts!

• If a boxed set sells well enough, it can also hit the USA Today bestseller list, or even the New York Times bestseller list. As an writer, you can then forever claim to be a "USA Today" or "New York Times" bestselling author!

AUTHOR CONCERNS

I've heard authors say boxed sets devalue ebooks but it's just not true. Boxed sets are simply another marketing technique, one that self-published authors can take much better advantage of than legacy publishers can. We can afford to set a 12-book boxed set to $0.99 for a few weeks, raise the price to $2.99, and then sit back and let the money roll in. We have enough control over our pricing and pay close enough attention to our ranks that we can adjust our price to maximize both our exposure and our profit. Authors who haven't done a box set seem to be under the impression that they don't make any money, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

I've also heard other authors expressing concerns about creating their own single-author boxed set, too afraid the boxed set will cannibalize sales of their individual titles. In my experience, the profit at the higher price point more than makes up for any sales you lose of individual titles.

WHY CAN’T WE DO THIS ON OUR OWN?

Anyone can do a boxed set on their own, but it involves a lot of know-how and experience to do a boxed set well. We've done so many of our own boxed sets at Excessica that I've actually started a service for boxed sets alone. If you are an author who is interested in boxed sets, you can join our Excessica author forum. We put out calls for submissions for boxed sets there. If you already have a bunch of authors together and aren't quite sure how to proceed, you can check out our Excessica Boxed Sets page.

Goals: Are you looking to make the most money possible? Do you want to make the USA Today and New York Times bestseller lists? Excessica can help you clarify your goals and attain them!

Planning & Production: Working with up to a dozen authors can be like herding cats. There’s a lot of work involved in planning and producing a boxed set, from commissioning a cover, to formatting and uploading, to contracts, to working out all the financial details! It can be a great big headache. Excessica can help you with all of that!

Marketing: Marketing is KEY for these boxed sets. I've seen some boxed sets that should have easily hit Amazon's top 100, struggle to get into the 1000's and then drop off a cliff. You have to know where to market, how to market, and when to market. At Excessica, we have a very clear, specific marketing plan to help launch boxed sets as high as they can go!

Pricing: Most multi-author boxed sets aren't going to get much traction unless they start out at $0.99 but you won't keep your boxed set at this price forever. So how do you know when to change your price? At Excessica, we have very specific things we do with prices to maximize our bundle profits!

Limited Time Only: Multi-author boxed sets are usually limited time only. Think of them like concerts for books. They're a one-time experience. The reason for this is obvious - boxed sets are short-term marketing tools that work very well when utilized correctly. But long-term, they can cannibalize sales and start to be a detriment to authors. At Excessica, we can advise you, as a group, when it’s the best time for the ride to be over.

Boxed sets are simply another short-term marketing tool self-published authors can utilize to maximize both their exposure and their profits. Granted, there are no guarantees. I've had experiences where we've done everything right and a boxed set didn't perform as well as we expected. Sometimes genre is a limiting factor--boxed sets don't get home runs in every genre--but overall, especially in romance and erotic romance, boxed sets can do very well. In the end, they can be a win-win for both readers and authors!

Check out our BOXED SET service!

Selena Kitt 

Erotic Fiction You Won't Forget 

www.selenakitt.com 

LATEST RELEASE: A Modern Wicked Fairy Tale: Pinocchio

Fifty Shades of Suck

I keep hearing about how bad Fifty Shades of Grey is, how horrible its syntax and grammar, how the atrocious mistakes in point of view, repetitive words and kindergarten-level writing detract significantly from the enjoyment of the story. I keep hearing it, but as of this writing, they're still sitting pretty over at Amazon. They're still front and center at our local Barnes and Noble. They're still selling, in spite of the flaws, in spite of the (mostly true, it seems) criticisms. 

So why should this series of books be all the rage, while there are other books malingering on the shelves that are so grammatically perfect editors everywhere have little orgasms when they read their clever turns of phrase? 

Because the unwashed masses that the elitists in "big publishing" once believed they had to protect from bad grammar, those poor slobs that publishers believed they had to choose for, are now choosing for themselves. They are voting with their dollars. The great big experiment that capitalism is supposed to be is being played out on Amazon, as books that would never have seen anything except the inside of an agent's trash bin are now flooding the Kindle market, and readers are choosing which books they are actually interested in reading. 

It's the biggest market research study in the history of publishing happening right there on the marketplace. 

And it turns out that big publishing was wrong. Readers don't want to read what publishers thought they wanted to read. In fact, publishers were pretty far off the mark, if the bestseller lists are any indication. Big publishing has been surprised to see phenoms like EL James and Amanda Hocking and Tammara Webber flying up the charts. Publishers are aghast at the "grievous errors" in some of these infamously self-or-alternatively published books.

It turns out that readers want entertainment. They want a good story, plain and simple. And they're even willing to put up with horrible syntax and grammar to get it. In fact, turns out those things are just a minor annoyance for readers. In the end, readers want a good story. Not the story publishers think they should read, not the ones agents believe they can sell. They don't want Snooki's autobiography, simply because she's famous for being on television. They want a good story.

Reboots or rewrites or the same old formula? It doesn't matter. If it's a good story, readers will find it and read it. They will tell their friends about it. "Oh my god, I just read the best book, you have to read it!" It isn't luck that creates a bestseller. Contrary to publishing and all the money they spend on their biggest names, marketing doesn't sell books. Readers do. That's why a backlist is the best thing a writer can have under his or her belt. Because if readers like you, they will read you, again and again and again. If they like your story, they're going to want more. 

The floodgates are open, authors. Everyone's all-in, and if you thought the competition was fierce when big publishing held the reins, you're in for a wake-up call when you send your little boat out afloat into the ocean that is Amazon. There are a LOT of boats out there. The good news is, if your boat floats--if your story is a good one--readers will find you. They will tell their friends. And you will sell books. 

You couldn't do that before. Big publishing controlled the ocean. They had it buttoned up tighter than the Hoover Dam. 

Now, as an author, you can sail freely. Of course, you're captain of your own ship now. In the world of self-publishing, there are no luxury cruises on Big Publishing's Princess line. (But think of it this way--what were the odds you were going to get into one of the VIP suites anyway? You probably would have been relegated downstairs in steerage, like on the Titanic... and if you take this metaphor to its logical conclusion, yes, the boat that was too big to sink? It sank. Big publishing has hit an iceberg and they're too arrogant to acknowledge it... but that boat is taking in water and is hitting its critical tipping point... )

So to all those people who are complaining about Fifty Shades and books like it, where reader enjoyment won out over the Grammar Nazis, you can relax. The world didn't end because of a misplaced comma or the annoying repetition of a phrase or word. And clearly if so many people are reading it, it must be doing something right! You might have thought Fifty Shades sucked, but you have to admit that, first and foremost, it was entertaining. It's human nature to slow down to see a train wreck. Perhaps many of Fifty Shades readers were simply curious about the hype, or wondered if it was "as bad as people said." Still, the blog posts and reviews I've seen about just how awful it was as a book, clearly thought that it was entertaining--even if it wasn't exactly in the way the author intended. 

Now, I'm not condoning sending your little boat out there with holes in it. You should polish your manuscript, have a good cover, do your best to make your book water tight before you send it sailing. Doing so certainly does nothing but help you in your journey as an author. However, as books like Fifty Shades have proven, you never know what's going to appeal to readers until you put it out there and let them decide. And even the dingiest, most beat-up little boat out there in the ocean can still sail, as long as it has entertainment value, however that appears to and for readers. 

Big publishing has been shocked in the past few years by what readers are buying, reading, and telling their friends about. Books that were once denied to the market are being published--and they're being read. So much for the judgment calls, so much for the gatekeepers. They have no power anymore. What sells, sells. It's that simple. 

So while Big publishing might have once snickered and tossed EL James' books aside as Fifty Shades of Suck, they're now scrambling to catch up, looking for more books like it, and seeing how they can cash in on what readers really want. 

Me, I'm cheering for all the little boats out there on the Amazon ocean. I doubt, considering their history, that big publishing is going to wake up and smell the iceberg. But the reality is that the market is speaking loud and clear, for anyone who wants to listen.