Boxed E-Book Sets: Easy to Set up – Big Potential!

Guest post by Ian Graham, thriller writer 

After a month-long march complete with heralding trumpets and marching pikemen carrying signs of sales, the calendar finally rests on Black Friday and the holiday shopping season has arrived. The internet is replete with advertisements for incredible bargains, and Amazon’s Kindle Store is no exception. Every season, entrepreneurial authors looking to lift their visibility and boost book sales come up with new and interesting ways to attract reader attention, and this year, more than any other, seems to be the year of the boxed set.

All over the Kindle-verse, sets featuring multiple books packaged together are popping up. Some sets feature two or more titles from a single author, while others feature titles by different authors, but with a common theme such as romance, crime, horror, or politics. Last month, Allan Leverone, Steven Konkoly, and I decided to have a go at our own boxed set, and the Black Ops Bundle, Volume 1 was born of our efforts. Jodie contacted me about sharing our book-bundling venture with CFC readers & writers.

As is true with any book project, the behind-the-scenes work is just as important as the final product. Here are some quick points to think about if you're considering taking this avenue yourself and a bit about what we’ve learned along the way.

1) How many authors will be involved?

Whether you already have a group of author friends you’re going to work with or you’re planning on approaching other authors, this should probably be one of the first things to be decided. When we first began talking about our boxed set, we decided that a small number of authors would be best. There are boxed sets available that have as many as nine authors featured, but the minimal amount of space allotted to each author on the cover design doesn't do much for any one individual in terms of visibility, and may, in fact, do a disservice to that author’s brand. Additionally, as with anything, the more people involved, the more opinions there will be on every step of the process, potentially making the planning and design phases very complicated. So, less is more.   

2) How will you price your boxed set?

Prices for boxed sets do not seem to go much higher than five or six dollars, with the emphasis on value. Many sets are priced much lower, several as low as .99. The more authors you have involved, the smaller each slice of the pie will become. Splitting royalties nine or ten different ways hardly seems worthwhile for any one individual, even if sales climb into the thousands. Of course, the reverse side of this is if you have multiple titles available and plan to feature older works by each author. In this case, perhaps the chance at gaining additional readership by being placed in a set with other authors is more important than profit. 

For the Black Ops Bundle, we decided to go with a middle price point of $3.99. This means a reader can purchase three well-reviewed, full-length novels for a little over a dollar each, which is an incredible value. Additionally, at this lower price, someone who has read one of the books featured in the set and liked it may not think too much about re-purchasing it for the other two books. In an effort to trip the all-important Amazon algorithms, we are planning several promotions throughout the month of December that will temporarily lower the price in the hopes of catching a larger profit from the increased visibility after the promotion ends. 

3) Who will handle the publishing of the set and take on the paperwork burden?

If you’re planning on only featuring books from one author, then this point doesn't really affect you, but if a multiple-author boxed set is what you have your eye on, this is vitally important. Combining products by multiple individuals means dealing with multiple individual businesses, each with their own tax liabilities. Unfortunately, Amazon does not have a feature that allows for multiple payees, so one person will have to publish the boxed set through their vendor account and take on the burden of paying the other authors involved. This means that the income from the boxed set, for tax purposes, will be placed on the publisher and whatever business entity they have set up.

If all authors involved live in the United States, this isn’t a particularly difficult issue. Once the publisher is decided upon, each author should submit an IRS Form W-9 to that person so they can be easily, and properly, identified when it comes time to file taxes. To avoid paying taxes on all of the income associated with the boxed set, the publisher will need to file a Form 1099 on each individual author, which will list the amount of money paid to that author and shift that amount from the publisher's income column to the expense column, and will make the individual author responsible for paying any taxes associated with that amount of money.

If you're not in the United States, or if you're dealing with authors located in more than one country, I would recommend seeking the advice of each country's taxing authority or a qualified professional accountant.

Authors, I hope you have found this post informative and helpful. Please take a moment to leave a comment and let me know.
Readers, I hope you'll check out the Black Ops Bundle, Volume 1, featuring three well-reviewed, full-length political thrillers.

Slán Abhaile!

Ian Graham is the author of one novel and two short story collections in the Black Shuck political thriller series featuring former IRA volunteer turned American patriot, Declan McIver. The first full-length novel in the series, VEIL OF CIVILITY, has received praise from professional reviewers in both North America and the United Kingdom, and was chosen as e-thriller.com’s Thriller of the Month for September 2013. To learn more about the Black Shuck thriller series or to connect with Ian, visit www.iangrahamthrillers.com.   

Research and Realism

I'm busy traveling today, so my two-time client and all-round great guy, thriller and horror writer Allan Leverone, is filling in here at CFC for me today. Take it away, Al!
- Jodie Renner, freelance editor and craft-of-fiction writer

RESEARCH & REALISM, by Allan Leverone

As a genre author, my goal is to immerse the reader in the story. I want you turning the pages late into the night, knowing you should put the book down and go to bed but unable to force yourself to do so. I want you so involved in my fictional world that if the phone rings, you don’t even want to take your nose out of the book for three seconds to check the caller ID.

That’s my goal. And without putting words in anyone else’s mouth (or on anyone else’s keyboard), I think it’s probably a pretty safe bet that’s the goal of everyone who writes fiction.

In other words, I want to achieve a measure of realism you will accept as a reader. Since I’m only expert in a small number of subjects (people who know me might suggest that number is zero), a certain percentage of my time as an author must be spent in research.

I hate research.

Let me clarify: I like learning new things but don’t enjoy doing research for research’s sake. When I’m writing, I would much rather be writing than researching. I want to learn enough about a subject to ensure that you, as a reader, are not forced out of the story by a lack of realism in the writing.

My new thriller, Parallax View, is set late in the Cold War, in 1987, and action takes place inside the Kremlin, as well as in East and West Germany and the United States. The plot revolves around a secret communique, written by Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, to be delivered to U.S. President Ronald Reagan by beautiful and clever CIA clandestine ops specialist Tracie Tanner. A shadowy cabal is determined to ensure that communique never reaches the White House, and the chase is on.

As I mentioned before, there aren’t many subjects on which I could be considered an expert. What few subjects there are do not include KGB operations. Or CIA operations, for that matter. I’ve never been to the Kremlin. Never met Mikhail Gorbachev, although most of a couple of chapters in PARALLAX VIEW is spent inside his head.

To prepare for writing the book, I could have immersed myself in research; the subjects were certainly fascinating enough. But doing so could have meant taking years to write this one novel, rather than months, with only a minimal net gain in realism, if that. The stark reality of being a genre author early in the 21st century is that taking years to write a single book is not economically feasible.

So what’s the solution?

God bless the Internet. Instead of studying scholarly tomes on the history and construction of the Kremlin, instead of spending thousands of dollars I can’t spare to fly to Moscow (although I would love to do so some day), I was able to go online and inside of an hour’s time spent on the right websites, gain sufficient knowledge to allow me to write scenes with (hopefully) enough realism to keep the reader immersed in Tracie Tanner’s and Mikhail Gorbachev’s world, rather than our own.

The same thing goes for Soviet sniper gear. Soviet cigarettes, televisions, monitoring equipment. All these things required research, which I was able to do online in significantly less time than it would have taken twenty or thirty years ago. And my editor, Jodie Renner, collaborated by keeping an eye out for any possible discrepancies for the time period of the novel.

Another example: Ramstein Air Base in West Germany. Never been there. If you served in the United States military during the mid-1980s and your tour of duty took you through Ramstein, you may not recognize the base from its appearance in PARALLAX VIEW.

But here’s the point: you’re reading fiction. Ramstein Air Base is going to look like what I need it to look like to advance the story. My goal as a writer is to draw you into the fictional world through steadily increasing tension, and through characters who live and breathe and become real to you. If you’re looking for a detailed historical account of the Cold War, you should probably look elsewhere. If you’re interested in a detailed description of U.S. military bases in Europe during the Reagan years, you should probably look elsewhere.

But through the magic of the Internet, any writer can become well-enough versed in almost any subject to enable him or her to write compelling fiction. Because, after all, the cliché says authors should “write what you know.” With the web at your fingertips, you can now “know” almost anything.

That’s my opinion. What’s yours? Is it cutting corners to do all of your research online? Copping out? Are only ex-Soviet Red Army snipers capable of writing about Russian sniper activity?

Allan Leverone is the author of the Amazon Top-25 bestselling thriller, THE LONELY MILE, as well as four other novels, including the brand-new PARALLAX VIEW. He's an air traffic controller in the real world and lives with his family in Londonderry, New Hampshire. Connect on Facebook, Twitter @AllanLeverone, and at http://www.allanleverone.com/.

Click on these titles to go to Allan's novels on Amazon: Parallax View, Revenant, Paskagankee, The Lonely Mile, and Final Vector.

It’s All About the Writing

by Jodie Renner, freelance editor
There's a lot of very good info/advice out there on self-publishing and promoting your book, including several excellent blog posts here on CFC. But first, make sure your book is ready for the critics: the readers and reviewers. I see too many aspiring authors whipping off a book, then rushing to send it to agents or self-publish it on Amazon, and then promoting it like crazy on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and wherever else, when what they really needed to do was spend more time and effort producing a quality story first. This race to publish prematurely can be incredibly damaging to your career and your reputation as a writer.

Want to sell more books? Write them well! Don’t shoot yourself in the foot and jeopardize — or completely ruin — your reputation as a novelist by rushing to self-pub or send off a first — or even second — draft. Develop your craft by taking courses or workshops, joining a critique group, and reading how-to books and articles on effective fiction-writing techniques. Then apply what you’ve learned to ratchet up your story. Go over your whole manuscript again, fine-tuning, smoothing out any clunky writing or overly wordy spots, finding just the right word, and amping up the characterization, tension and intrigue.

Then send it to a few trusted "beta" readers for their opinions, and incorporate any ideas that really resonate with you. Finally, use a freelance editor to find those plot flaws and inconsistencies, spots where it's lagging, and any amateurish techniques still lurking in the draft and to go over it with a fine-toothed comb, looking for grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors. (Or these two stages may be carried out by two different people, a content editor and a final copyeditor/proofreader.)

Kristen Lamb doesn’t mince words on this point in her recent blog post, “The Modern Author–A New Breed of Writer for the Digital Age of Publishing”: 

“We can’t put a shiny bow on a pile of literary dog poop and call it a rose. No amount of marketing is going to sell garbage. We have to learn to write good books. Notice I use the plural — books. We can't slave over one book forever making it perfect. I said we need to write good books, not perfect books.

"We also can’t toss junk out there and think promotion will make it a hit. Good books will always sell way more than crappy books. Not rocket science. We should always be learning as much as we can about our craft, our trade, our art. This is why I blog on craft and point you guys to the best teachers in the industry.”
http://warriorwriters.wordpress.com/author/warriorwriters/

“Okay,” you say, “but I can’t afford an editor.”

Is it worth it to hire a freelance editor for your novel before sending it to agents or publishing it? I asked several successfully published writer clients and friends their take on this. Here are their answers.

Andrew Kaufman, talented bestselling thriller writer and fellow founder of Crime Fiction Collective, has this to say on the subject:

“This is an extremely important point and one I can’t stress enough. It doesn’t matter how good a writer you think you are. After numerous rewrites of a manuscript (which is just as important), you are too familiar with your work and have lost all objectivity.

“An editor with a fresh and critical eye will bring things to your attention you never knew existed, both developmentally and in the line/copy editing. These are the people who will help bring a novel to the next level. I consider their work to be an invaluable part of the process.

“And for those who say they can’t afford to hire one — I say you can't afford not to. If you’re serious about selling your book, then this is a step you simply must take.”
~ Andrew E. Kaufman, Sept. 2011, author of While the Savage Sleeps and The Lion, The Lamb, The Hunted. www.AndrewEKaufman.com 

And Andrew had this to add recently: “Another thing that comes to mind is that, with the extraordinary success of my most recent novel, The Lion, the Lamb, the Hunted, I’m getting more emails from authors asking what my secret is. I tell them there is no secret, that the single most important key to success is having a well-written, highly polished novel. Without that, all the promotion in the world won’t make a bit of difference. And you simply can’t get that by yourself. You need a professional. I’m not too proud to admit that, and you shouldn’t be,
either.” - Andrew E. Kaufman, March 7, 2012



I asked Allan Leverone, published thriller writer, what he thought about this topic. 

“As authors, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of our work, and it’s even easier to rush that work out before it’s ready. But in this day and age, when anyone with a computer and the time to string 80,000 words together can slap a price tag on his “book” and begin promoting, it’s even more critical to ensure your work is the highest quality it can possibly be. That means writing, rewriting, self-editing. And THEN working with a capable editor, one who is well-versed in your particular genre.

“And if you're reading this at the Crime Fiction Collective, you won't have to go far to find one. I was fortunate to work with editor Jodie Renner on my bestselling thriller, The Lonely Mile, and the result was a book far more suspenseful and page-turning than even I had thought possible. You worked hard on your book. Give it the best possible chance for success.”

~ AllanLeverone, Mar. 7, 2012, author of The Lonely Mile, StoneHouse Ink
“A taut crime drama full of twists and conspiracy” www.allanleverone.com

One of my thriller-writer clients, Ian Walkley of Australia, tells me he wrote eight drafts of his novel No Remorse, before realizing he needed some objective input from professional editors. “Like many debut writers, I’d been to writing courses and read books about writing, but I was worried that a professional editor would cost me heaps and, to be honest, thought the editor might tell me my work was crap or make me rewrite the story.” 

At a writer’s conference, Ian met a professional editor whom he engaged to undertake a structural edit — advising on the structure of the book. “It was a good experience, and not as costly as I’d anticipated. The plot and scene structure were certainly improved to add suspense and pace. As a result of that, I hunted around for a copy editor.”

“I found several editors, including Jodie Renner, on Facebook, and I had them demonstrate their editing style with ten pages or so of my book. I contracted Jodie because she was thorough and I felt comfortable with her changes. I absolutely enjoyed the experience working with Jodie, who suggested numerous plot and character changes that improved the book. I certainly have a much better published novel because I used an editor.”  

~ Ian Walkley, March 2012, author of action-thriller,

 No Remorse. www.IanWalkley.com.

Even editors need editing!

A few years ago, I edited a novel for a professional editor, Eve Paludan, and here’s what she said back then:

“I am a professional editor of scholarly work at a university but I hired Jodie Renner to edit my romantic suspense novel manuscript of 108,000 words. Just like a surgeon wouldn’t perform surgery on himself (or on his family), even a professional editor needs a second pair of sharp eyes to discern, deconstruct, suggest changes and help polish the language.

 “Your mother shouldn’t edit your work and neither should your best friend. Nor will spellchecking save your manuscript. So who should you hire to edit your work? I suggest choosing someone who doesn’t already love you, has stellar qualifications, and possesses a sharp eye and a true affection for your genre.

“Books about writing are helpful, and so are classes, but neither reveals what is wrong with your story, page by page, even line by line. A live professional editor like Jodie Renner has just the right one-on-one editorial style. […]

“It’s thrilling to experience the evolution of my novel manuscript and see both its strengths recognized and its weaknesses revealed, through Jodie’s eyes. Writing is a solitary endeavor but editing, for the eventual goal of professional publication, is a team effort between author and editor. This novel is the most important thing I’ve ever written. I trusted Jodie Renner with my huge manuscript and am happy to report, she’s worth every cent.”
– Eve Paludan, February 2010, author of The Man Who Fell from the Sky, (Angel Detectives, Case #1)  http://evepaludanbooks.com 
 

Related article: "Don't Shoot Yourself in the Foot" - on taking care with your query letter.

And then of course we need to search out good formatters and cover designers, to give the book that final polish. See LJ Sellers' excellent post, Invest in Your Own E-Book, here at CFC. Also, see Publishing Yourself, by Helen Ginger, on Blood-Red Pencil blogspot.

Readers and writers - what's your experience with all this? Expensive? Worth it? Is cutting corners before publishing worth the risk? And how do you feel when you buy an e-book and find errors on the first page? We'd love to hear your opinion on these issues.

Jodie Renner, a freelance fiction editor specializing in thrillers and other fast-paced fiction, has published two books to date in her series, An Editor’s Guide to Writing Compelling Fiction: WRITING A KILLER THRILLER and STYLE THAT SIZZLES & PACING FOR POWER (Silver Medalist in the FAPA Book Awards, 2013). Both titles are available in e-book and paperback.

For more info, please visit Jodie’s author website or editor website, or find her on Facebook or Twitter.