BOXED SET

A new trend in self-publishing is to create a boxed set.

The appeal is to offer added content at improved value:

• More books for the buck.
• Could include bonus content, too.

The hope is to gain more than you lose by offering the set at a reduced price:

• Sell more books. Lose the risk of customers buying just one book.
• Lure more readers. The boxed set value may attract new customers.
• Gift potential, too. Boxed sets can make for nice gifts. (You could even add a decorative holiday bow to the thumbnail for the holidays.)

There are risks:

• You might not reap the benefits that you’re hoping for.
• The sales ranks of the individual volumes may plummet if the boxed set takes off.
• If you already have many reviews and stable sales ranks with the individual volumes, realize that you’re basically starting over with the boxed set.
• The file size of the boxed set may be huge, adding download time for customers and a delivery charge for authors.

(It sure would help if Amazon would create a boxed set option for series. Amazon could create a discount option for customers who buy the entire series. This would alleviate the need to create a special boxed set edition. This way, the individual sales ranks wouldn’t tank at the expense of the boxed set. Customers may also find it convenient to have separate books instead of one mammoth file. Perhaps more authors and readers need to send requests to KDP support.)

FORMATTING

If you want to create a boxed set, you’ll have to format it.

In print, it won’t be easy to create a boxed set with an actual box. You probably won’t find a print-on-demand service that offers this option. You can order author copies of individual volumes, box them up yourself, and sell them at Amazon through Advantage. But then you need to design and order boxes, which cost money, and Advantage takes a significant commission from the sale. It may not be economical to try this.

Lightning Source offers (or at least they did—you might want to submit an inquiry) a boxed set option, but they simply shrinkwrap your books together—there isn’t an actual box.

An alternative is to combine all the volumes into one mammoth paperback. This won’t be feasible if you have an epic fantasy where each volume already has several hundred pages.

At CreateSpace, for example, you can have up to 828 pages on white paper (less in cream), but only in selected trim sizes. 7″ x 10″ or 7.5″ x 9.25″ accommodate up to 828 pages (or 740 pages if you choose cream). If you have a color interior, it’s even less (480 in most trim sizes).

You may want to increase the page size. For example, if your individual volumes are 5″ x 8″, you can reduce the overall page count for the omnibus by using a significantly larger trim size.

But if you choose the largest trim size, 8.5″ x 11″, you can only go up to 630 pages.

Here are some things you can play with to help reduce the overall page count:

• Smaller font size. (Or different font style.)
• Narrower margins.
• Increased trim size. (But note the maximum page count for the trim size.)
• Less leading (space between lines).
• Consolidate front and back matter, especially material that’s repeated.
• Reformat the page header or page numbers, and the space between these and the body text, to make more room for the body text.
• Remove any repeated images. Reduce the size of images.

Note: If you have manual hyphens or if you made manual adjustments to correct for widows and orphans, this will all need to be redone if you change the font, margins, trim size, leading, etc.

But you can take this too far. You don’t want to louse up the reading experience just to make your boxed set fit into a single mammoth printed book.

You can, however, experiment with these features and see if any combination will provide the right balance, fairly preserving the reading experience while also helping it fit.

Another thing you’ll have to do is renumber the pages for a single-volume boxed set. This gets more tedious if each volume has an index (in which case you must also decide if you want to consolidate your indices into a single index for the boxed set). Also, if you have page references (e.g. “See page 364”) you’ll need to update those. For most fiction, where an omnibus is quite common, this isn’t likely to be an issue.

Page count isn’t an issue for an e-book omnibus. But if you have many images, the maximum file size and delivery charges may come into play. Kindle’s maximum file size has been quite generously extended (650 MB).

Basically, for an e-book, you simply need to combine your books together into a single volume. There is really just one feature that you need to add: an active table of contents to take the reader directly to each volume. (This is in addition to the table of contents for each individual volume.)

Read Tuesday

Imagine a Black Friday type of event just for book lovers.

You don’t have to imagine it. It’s called Read Tuesday, and it’s free: www.readtuesday.com.

Please support the Read Tuesday Thunderclap. This will help spread awareness on the morning of Read Tuesday (December 9, 2014). It’s easy to help:

• Visit http://thndr.it/1CkO2Bg.
• Click Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr and sign in.
• Customize the message. (Optional.)
• Agree to the terms. All that will happen is that the Thunderclap post about Read Tuesday will go out the morning of December 9.
• (The warning message simply means that Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr need your permission to post the Thunderclap message on December 9. This is the only post that Thunderclap will make.)

Halloween Reading

Looking for some spooky books to read this Halloween month?

https://chrismcmullen.wordpress.com/scary-books

Chris McMullen

Copyright © 2014 Chris McMullen, Author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers

• Volume 1 on formatting and publishing
• Volume 2 on marketability and marketing
• Boxed set (of 4 books) now available for Kindle pre-order

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