How to Do Box Sets at Smashwords for Audience Building, Charity and Profit

(My thanks to author Lorinda J Taylor for drawing my attention to the following great information):

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If you haven’t yet planned a box set, now is the time to start planning for one. This post will show you how.

The two most common types of box set are single-author and multi-author.

For a single-author box set, an author might combine all the books in a series, or might combine the series starters of multiple series, or might simply combine all their standalone titles into a single collection. Smashwords author Anne Marie Novark, for example, created a single-author First in a Series Box Set featuring four of her full-length romance series starters for the value-price of only $2.99. Smart.

For a multi-author box set, multiple authors, usually in the same genre or category, collaborate to publish multiple full-length books or complete short stories in a value-priced bundle.

Several Smashwords authors have joined together to publish limited-time charity box sets. One recent Smashwords box set, A Sweet Life, was orchestrated by author Brenda Novak and featured fourteen New York Times bestsellers. In one month, the box set earned nearly $30,000 for diabetes research from sales across the Smashwords network, and more from other channels. Amazing.

Another more recent fundraiser example is Star Crossed, orchestrated by author Amy Miles, where thirteen bestselling YA Smashwords fantasy authors – including Amy Miles, Amy A. Bartol, Chanda Hahn, Ella James, Jocelyn Stover, Quinn Loftis, Rebecca Ethington, Shelly Crane, and Wendy Owens – are raising money for a St. Louis-based autism charity. Star Crossed releases August 18 and is available now for preorder at iBooks and will be available soon at Barnes & Noble and Kobo.

Box sets are usually value-priced, meaning the box set costs the reader less than purchasing all the books individually.

The ebook format is uniquely suited to box sets in a way that print is not. The Star Crossed box set of full-length fantasy novels comprises 1.2 million words, a length that in print might span an entire length of a bookshelf. In ebook form, it’s a single convenient and lightweight download.

A Closer Look at Multi-Author Box Sets

Multi-author box sets represent an especially great sales, marketing and audience-building opportunity for authors. For the remainder of this post, I’ll focus on multi-author box sets (many of the tips apply to single-author box sets as well).

The magic of a multi-author box set is that each author promotes the box set to their respective fan base. It’s a great opportunity for fans of one author to discover similarly great authors in the same genre or category. The audience reach is amplified dramatically via the aggregated promotional effort of all participating authors. If each participating author has thousands of readers subscribed to their private mailing lists, and thousands of fans following them on Twitter and Facebook, you can quickly begin to appreciate the power of amplified collaborative marketing.

See how to set up a multi-author box set at Smashwords including the following (and access the links in the article) click HERE: