I'm Krista. Miss Trendy and hip, right?
(For those of you laughing hysterically -- I will get you back!)
I'm actually a little behind the times on this trend--like most other trends, but I digress.
In the Indie world, box sets of ebooks are a huge "thing" right now. Have you see them? They are these fun sets of oodles of books for one super low price of usually like 99 cents.
And my FIRST indie box set, a collection of NEW Christmas novellas titled Love's Gift, is available TODAY for preorder!! My book is the last one, A (kinda) Country Christmas!
I'd (sorta) LOVE for you to go check it out! It's only 99 cents and will also be available for FREE on Kindle Unlimited on its release date, October 19th, so if you're a subscriber of that, mark you calendar!
Since indie box sets are a newish thing, I thought I'd take a second to explain a little how it works.
TYPE OF SET
There are a ton of options when it comes to the set. You can do a LIMITED TIME set or a forever set. You can do a set with your own books, or one with fellow authors. You can box together new books or previously published books. You can do novels, novellas, or eshorts.
For the purpose of this post, we're talking about sets with fellow authors, because that's where the biggest benefit comes from (in my humble opinion.)
THE GOAL
The MAIN purpose of the box set is PROMOTION.
Yes, it'd be fabulous to make some money on the set. And many indie sets ARE making a decent chunk of change off them, even with splitting it many different ways. (In Love's Gift, there are 8 authors. For each 99 cent sale. The profit off that sale is about .35 cents. Split 8 ways.... that's a lot of books to sell!)
BUT!! We'll have EIGHT authors promoting with vengeance the same book. Eight authors with different platforms and reaches. That is 7 times the number of people, theoretically, that we could have reached on our own. (Obviously some have bigger platforms than other so that will vary.)
The exposure and platform building potential for this is quite big! A LOT of indie authors are reaping in the benefits of boxed sets, and many traditional authors are also joining the bandwagon as well!
THE MONEY STUFF
So how does it all work? Each set of authors will set it up a little differently. But basically, one author usually serves as the "publisher" of the book for the agreed upon timeframe. We use Amazon's KDP program to publish the book. I'm serving as the publisher for Love's Gift, so will be our accountant and will disburse funds as I receive them from Amazon. Expenses are split and/or paid out of profits. All authors are listed as authors in Amazon.
EDITING
Again, lots of leeway here. Our set decided to make each author in charge of having their own work edited, then before the set was finalized, each book was proofread by another member of the team to add another layer of quality assurance to our product!
We did the same with covers. Each author was responsible for their individual cover (because will also will be able to publish our works individually as well!) and then we worked on the overall cover design together! Many sets elect to hire an outside designer. Since there were quite a few cover-savvy people in our group, we did it ourselves to help keep costs down.
Want some other examples of some AMAZING indie author sets available?
Here are just a few!!!
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Krista
is a follower of Jesus, a wife, a mother, and
author of
A (kinda) Country Christmas -- Part of the Love's Gift Collection
She blogs about finding JOY in the journey of LIFE at http://www.kristaphillips.com. She is represented by Sarah Freese of Wordserve Literary.
I'm not sure I understand. The photos I'm seeing look like boxed sets of paperbacks, but your text seemed to be about sets of ebooks. Or are you doing both?
ReplyDeleteFaith, they are ebooks! The look of the cover is just to help showcase they different authors names well and make it clear that it is a collection! Not all collections do the cover that way -- but most do :-)
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