Hi all!
I ran a poll on Twitter and the result was writing a blog post about boxsets. If you don’t know what a boxset is, it’s a collection of books in a series that you can buy as one product. In this post, I will cover the following points:
Design
Pricing
Readers
With design you need to think about the following points:
Spine Direction
Thumb Notch or no Thumb Notch
Boxset Cover
Although spine direction and thumb notch comes down to personal preference, the cover is the one you need to think about the most. You can get a whole new cover designed for it, or you can use your book covers. Depending on your covers, you could have multiple books on one cover. However, if your books feature the same model on each cover I would advise on picking one. With my boxset, I have chosen the cover for Blood and Water with my cover designer's advice, as they said having the same girl on the cover three or four times wouldn't look as good. Listen to the advice of you cover designer, they have more experience in that field than most authors.
Here is an example of a boxset of Warriors by Erin Hunter. The spines are facing the right and it does not contain a thumb notch:
Boxset of ‘The Prophecies Begin’ by Erin Hunter
With pricing, you need to make sure that it's reasonable, but also priced high enough for you to make a profit on advertising. I've found that a lot of authors on Amazon either set it at 99p for sales or slightly cheaper than buying each book separately. For example, each individual book may be priced at £2.99 and there's five in a series, but the boxset is priced at £7.99. Have a look through boxsets of authors in your genre to see what they're pricing their boxsets at.
Although most readers are happy to purchase a book and wait for the next one, there are a lot of people who will only buy a series when all the books are out. A boxset is perfect for them, as they can download all of the books in the series at once and read them at their own pace.
Now, onto the pros and cons.
Pros.
More readers.
As I stated above, some readers wait for all the books in a series to be published before picking up the series. A boxset is the perfect way for them to buy all your books at once.
Cheaper than buying all the books.
Having the boxset cheaper than all of the individual books combined will tempt some readers into checking out your books. It's a low risk, high reward scenario.
More reviews.
The readers who only buy boxsets gives you a new stream for reviews. The more reviews you have, the more Amazon will push your book in front of new eyes!
Cons.
Boxset design.
It's another thing to spend money on, and you need to make some design decisions so it matches other books in your genre. Although you can make it yourself, if you're not familiar with graphic design it might not turn out the way you like.
Amazon doesn't allow indie paperback boxsets.
Self published authors can only publish boxsets of their ebooks. If a reader wants the paperbacks, they'll have to buy each one separately. Or, you could combine all the books into one file. This would be one huge book, which would have high shipping and printing costs. Plus if it goes over a certain page count, Amazon won't print it.
Less profit.
Because boxsets are cheaper, you'll get less profit than if you were to sell each book individually.
Amazon doesn’t like the word ‘boxset’.
I’ve heard a lot of authors talk about how Amazon only likes the word boxset for paperback books. With ebooks, they prefer you to use ‘collection’ or ‘omnibus’. Some Amazon ads have been rejected for using the word boxset, so be careful when naming and advertising.
That's it for this week, I hope you enjoyed reading! Next week I'm going to talk about how to market with anxiety. See you next Sunday!
