Our guest blogger today is Susan Daffron, an author I admire very much for her intelligence, wisdom, and success. Susan is the author of the Alpine Grove Romantic Comedies, a series of novels that feature residents of the small town of Alpine Grove and their various quirky dogs and cats. She is also an award-winning author of many nonfiction books, including several about pets and animal rescue. You can read more about Susan on her website. If you enjoy this guest post from her, be sure to read another article she wrote for us about her experience with BookBub ads.

How to create an e-book box set from a series of books

By Susan Daffron

If you have a series of books, you may have considered releasing a box set.

The process is fairly simple and it’s a great way to monetize your backlist. For a long time, even though I knew the advantages, I had a huge mental block about box sets. The old saying, “the confused mind does nothing” was me. Finally, once I had 8 books in my series, I decided to get over myself and figure out what I needed to do.

Although you see multi-author box sets online, particularly on Amazon.com, in this post, I’m focusing on how you can compile books from a single author (you). So in this article, I’m presuming you:

• Have written multiple books
• Have the rights to use the content

Some extremely prolific authors put all their “first in series” books into a set. Or you can do the first three or four volumes in a single series. Some authors with long series opt to put groups of their books into sets of three or four to appeal to readers who like to binge read.

To create a box set, first you need to answer these questions:

• Are your books exclusive to Amazon?
• How many books do you want to include in the set?
• How do you want to price the set?
• How are you going to format the set?
• How are you going to create a cover for the set?

Amazon issues

Amazon is touchy about its Select program. Any book that is enrolled in Select can’t be sold on another platform like iBooks or Barnes and Noble. So you need to consider:

• Whether or not your books are in Select, which includes the Kindle Unlimited program. If all of the books in your set are in Select, the box set can be in Select too, but you can’t sell it elsewhere.
• If any one of your books are “wide” (sold on platforms other than Amazon), you can’t put the box set into Select because part of the agreement is that none of the content can be sold anywhere other than Amazon.

In my case, the first book in my series is free on all platforms, so it isn’t exclusive to Amazon. At the time, the other books in the series that I included in my box set were in Select.

To address that situation, I put the box set only on Amazon, but didn’t put it into the Select program. Another alternative I could have taken was to not include my permafree in the box set instead. (I have since removed all of my books from Select and put the box set on other platforms.)

Pricing issues

Pricing is an important consideration for box sets. Amazon only pays a 70 percent royalty on books priced from $2.99 – $9.99. (The royalty is 35 percent for other price points.)

In my case, my books were $3.99 and the first book was free, so I did a four-book set for $9.99, which saved people a couple of bucks off buying the books separately. (I subsequently raised the prices on my books to $4.99, so the box set is now an even better deal.)

If you sell your box set on platforms other than Amazon, you have more flexibility with pricing. Some people sell sets of nine or 10 books on other platforms like iBooks for much more than $9.99.

Another pricing situation that may or may not come into play on a long set is digital delivery fees. If you have graphics or an extremely long set, check to ensure download fees won’t eat into your profit margin.

Formatting issues

Whether or not you do your e-book formatting yourself, you need to think about how the box set appears to the reader. The biggest issue comes from the table of contents.

In a regular e-book, you have one table of contents that lists the chapters. With a box set, you need to have a top-level table of contents that lists the books and each book also ideally should have its own table of contents that lists the chapters within that book.

As a reader, I can report that box set formatting often isn’t done correctly, which makes for an unpleasant reading experience. Make it easy for your reader to jump from book to book and from chapter to chapter.

Covers

As with any other book, you need to create a cover for your box set. For the cover, you can use thumbnail images of the books on the box set, a new image, or an image from one of the books.

Often people create a 3D angled cover so the image looks like a real set of books. If you have Photoshop skills, you can find 3D templates online like those at Covervault.

Note that iBooks will not let you use a 3D cover, so you’ll also need to create a flat version of your box set cover. My box set cover uses the art from my first book with a new title of Love, Laughter and Fur: Alpine Grove Romantic Comedy – Books 1-4. It is branded to look like the rest of the series with the same fonts and color scheme.

Box sets offer a great opportunity for promotion. After I made my box set wide on all platforms, I applied for a BookBub ad. Although I sold the set at a huge discount, I earned back the cost of the ad within hours and introduced a whole new set of readers to my series. Many of them went on to buy the other six books in the series.

And more readers is what every author wants.

Readers, have you packaged any of your books into a box set? Are readers buying it?

Tip of the Month

I always share a “Tip of the Month,” a free resource or tool for authors, on the last Wednesday of the month.

This one is for nonfiction authors struggling with the title for their prescriptive nonfiction books.

My writer friend Melanie Votaw is offering a free teleseminar tonight on how to craft compelling titles. No registration is required; join the call at 10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT (calculate for your time zone) by dialing 712-832-8290 and entering passcode 236228 when prompted.

Guest post: BookBub ads: One author shares her experience

By Susan Daffron

If you’ve been writing books for any length of time, you’ve probably heard of BookBub. When it comes to e-book advertising, The Bub is arguably the most well-known option.

The bad news for authors is that a BookBub ad is going to cost you. On countless forums, you see writers whining that ad rates are expensive. If your book falls into one of the larger categories like crime fiction or contemporary romance, for example, you’re looking at many hundreds of dollars. The largest lists have more than 3 million subscribers, but spending more than $900 on a single ad gives many struggling authors considerable pause.

Along with the money, getting accepted by BookBub is the other challenge you face. According to the rejection email, BookBub doesn’t accept 80% the submissions it receives. And according to a recent infographic, it received 55,000 submissions.

You are not alone.

The numbers are daunting to say the least. As far as I can tell based on my experience and the experience of many other writers I know, most of the time you submit, your book will be rejected, which can be difficult for a sensitive author to bear. But like the old saw, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Perseverance is sometimes rewarded!

After quite a few tries, BookBub has accepted my books three times – twice for a free promotion and most recently for a paid one. In my experience, if you can afford it and your book is actually accepted, one ad can change everything.

Getting noticed, at last!

I’m not a million-selling author. In fact, you could argue that I was an idiot to write a second novel, given how poorly the first one was selling. It was akin to the Samuel Johnson quote about second marriages: “a triumph of hope over experience.”

But continue to write I did. I released my first novel, Chez Stinky, in 2013. By the time the book finally was accepted for my first BookBub ad, I had five books in the series and I had made Chez Stinky free. (Note that you can’t set a price of zero on Amazon; to make a book free, you set the price to zero on another site, so Amazon will price match it.)

For whatever reason, BookBub finally accepted Chez Stinky in its Chick Lit category, which is one of their smaller ones. At the time, the April 16, 2015 ad cost me $70 (now it’s $105).

Here’s what happened.

Over the next few days, people downloadedabout 20,000 copies of Chez Stinky. That month, I had a total of 36,000 downloads just on Amazon. Books that had sold absolutely nothing on other channels like Barnes and Noble started selling.

Literally overnight, my books went from invisible to visible. Sales of the rest of the books in the series skyrocketed. The ad paid for itself within hours of the email going out. I got a large number of subscribers to my new releases email list, fan emails, and a lot of new reviews.

Subsequent ads

Although the results of my first ad were impressive, subsequent ad results haven’t been quite as earth- shattering, partly because as a group, my series of books is doing better. Going from almost zero to something (anything!) is always going to be thrilling. But make no mistake, the results from the subsequent ads have been far better than any other marketing I’ve tried, bar none.

My second ad for Chez Stinky ran in November 2015. That resulted in 14,000 downloads, more new reviews, and another increase in sales for the series, which by then had seven books. So although I received fewer downloads, I still got a tremendous return on investment because readers had more follow-on books in the series to read.

My most recent BookBub ad on January 10 was for the second book in the series, Fuzzy Logic, which I discounted from $3.99 to 99 cents. Because the ad was for a paid book, not a free one, it cost more ($210). But it still paid for itself the same day and shot the book into the top 10,000 in the paid Kindle store. I’m still seeing follow-on sales from the tail end of that ad. Interestingly, I have not received any new reviews yet, although I know hundreds of people have bought the book.

New release notifications

New release notifications are a free BookBub feature that started on January 4. The releases are tied to your BookBub author profile. Because I had advertised with BookBub, I had followers on my profile. Followers are those people who have virtually raised their hand to say that they want to know when I release new books.

To take advantage of this new feature, I did a pre-order on my latest book, The Treasure of the Hairy Cadre, so I could time the official release to occur after January 4. That way, BookBub would automatically send a notification to my followers. When the notification went out, it resulted in a nice bump in sales. It wasn’t as good as the email to my own in-house list, but it cost me nothing.

Between the pre-order, Amazon notification (they have a similar “follower” program), and the BookBub notification, my book has stayed in the “Hot New Releases” list for its category since its release.

A few final thoughts

When I looked at the infographic stats from BookBub, one thing that stood out to me was how few authors were selected and able to advertise in 2015. Thousands of e-books are released every single day on Amazon. But there are only 7,600 BookBub authors.

What that means to me is that if BookBub selects your book, you’re hanging out with a small crowd that includes a bunch of big name traditionally published authors. I’ve seen some articles that say BookBub has become a bit of a curating mechanism. In other words, if your book is selected by the mighty Bub, it probably means your cover, blurb, and reviews are good.

Although there are no guarantees in book publishing and everyone’s experience is different, I’m glad I kept trying for a BookBub ad even in the face of many rejections. In a marketplace where it’s almost impossible to get noticed, for me, advertising with BookBub gave my books unprecedented visibility.

Have you advertised with BookBub or any of the other daily deal newsletters? Please share your experiences with them in a comment.

Tip of the Month

I always share a “Tip of the Month,” a free resource or tool for authors, on the last Wednesday of the month.

This month’s relates directly to Susan’s excellent guest post above. If you’re thinking about advertising with BookBub or any of the book daily deal newsletters, you want to make sure your book’s description in the newsletter works hard for you to sell books.

BookBub has researched the language used in its book descriptions to determine which phrases or strategies sell more books. I shared that research in a guest post: “Six Magic Phrases You Can Use to Sell More Books.” You won’t go wrong using what you learn in that article for your ads in other deal newsletters, too.

Today’s guest blogger is book and software publishing company owner Susan Daffron (aka The Book Consultant). Susan spends most of her time writing, laying out books in InDesign, or taking her dogs out for romps in the forest. She also teaches people how to write and publish profitable client-attracting books and puts on the annual Self-Publishers Online Conference . The fourth event is May 8-10, 2012. Get a 10% discount on the registration fee by using the code BookBuzz12.

Create a book cover that sells online

By Susan Daffron

When it comes to marketing your book, much has been written about the importance of book cover design. Great covers sell books. An ugly or unreadable book cover design is a huge hurdle that even a fantastic book often can’t overcome. (If no one is willing to pick up the book, they’ll never find out the goodness that might lurk within!)

Good book covers have three things in common. They:

1. Capture attention.
2. Use high quality images and thoughtful typography.
3. Incorporate important design principles such as balance, readability, and judicious use of color.

Today, because so many books are sold online, this list isn’t enough anymore. You have to take other design considerations into account. Many book covers that would have performed well in a bookstore setting simply don’t work online.

These days, Amazon isn’t just the world’s biggest bookstore, it’s also quite possibly your biggest sales avenue. So you need to think about how your book cover will look on Amazon.com and other online sites

Today’s teeny tiny covers

You can see cover design issues in real time by doing a quick search on Amazon.com. For example, if you do a search for a classic book like Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, you see a lot of editions. When I did a search today, the first one on the list from SoHo Books has cover text that is almost unreadable. Conversely, the Signet Classic version has a simpler cover with higher contrast, so you can see the title.

Sure, students will search for Wuthering Heights because they have to read it in school. They may not even really look at the cover at all. Bronte has name recognition going for her. You probably don’t.

If you’re a nonfiction book author and someone does a search on the subject of your book, what do they see when your book comes up in the list of books on Amazon? Will someone pick your book out of the lineup? Unfortunately, countless beautifully designed covers simply don’t work at small sizes.

Covers today must have:

• Large and extremely readable titles
• Good contrast
• Striking images

(Of course, don’t forget, they still have to look nice too!)

Does it pass the squint test?

Covers need to pass what I call the “squint test.” When you have a designer create your cover, reduce the image down to 100 pixels wide. If you can’t squint and see the title, the author, or have some idea what the imagery represents, tell your designer to try again.

If you publish an e-book version of your book, you also have to think about the black and white thumbnail that appears on Kindle. These things weren’t issues until fairly recently and a lot of designers still aren’t taking them into account. How does your cover look as a 72-dpi grayscale thumbnail that’s only 100 pixels wide?

Marketing books is a lot of work. Make sure your book cover is going to help and not hinder your online marketing efforts.

What has been your biggest challenge with your book cover? Did you have trouble finding a designer, or were you dissatisfied with the thumbnail version? Share your experiences here — Susan will pop back to comment!