Offering your novels as a boxed set or bundle

One way to increase sales of your books and increase your fan base is to offer your books as a bundle, or if you wrote a series to offer them in a boxed set. This applies no matter if you published a print or e-book version of your novel.

An e-book bundle or box set is simply multiple books offered together. It is one download and payment for a reader followed by hours of enjoyment. This ensures readers of a series can read each story in order (and immediately). And usually because the books are offered at a lower price than buying them individually, book lovers are getting a bargain. And who doesn’t love a bargain?

It cost you, the author, next to nothing to offer a box set. You simply create a file with all the books and then create a picture of a virtual box, and add it to your usual distributor websites with an appropriate blurb and price. (For more on this, check out my post about offering my trilogy as a boxed set.)

Box Set – One Author

You don’t have to have written a trilogy or series to have a box set. You can make a bundle out of any of your novels. This especially works well if they have a similar theme (small-town romances) or are the same genre (mysteries).

Box Set – Multiple Authors

It just doesn’t have to be your novels in a box set. You can get authors which write in the same genre together to offer a box set. Or you can have all women authors but different genres. Or perhaps there is something else that ties you novels together such as they are all second-chance romances or all have a dog as a character.

These multi-author sets bring readers entire new worlds in one convenient package. It is just a matter of getting some other authors to go in with you on a set. You will then have to work out how you will promote it and how profit will be distributed, but these are small issues compared to the amount of exposure it can bring you s an author.

Pricing

Readers typically expect some sort of price discount if they buy a box set or bundle. Basically plan to knock off several dollars off what it would cost if they bought the books individually. On my box set for my trilogy, I reduced the price by $1 per book. So Summoned costs $2.99 (as do Quietus and Destiny), but you can get the box set for $5.99.

When deciding on the price of your box set, you need to consider why you are doing one. If it is for the convenience of readers, so they can get the whole series at once, then you will probably only be looking at offering a small price discount.

But if you want to boost rankings and want a massive number of downloads, then you might put in as many books as possible and price the set as low as possible. A quick search on Amazon will show that there are box sets for 99 cents that offer up to a dozen books.

If you already offered the first book in a series at a reduced price or for free, it could help your sales of the remainder of the series if you offered the first book in a multi-author collection.

No matter how you do it – your books, your series, a collection of books from various authors – a box set or bundle is an excellent sales tool that every author with more than one book to their name should consider.