Putting together a collection of part of a series

[LilyBLily]

I've been looking around the site and don't see what I thought we had discussed somewhere, which is the detail on how to gather up several previously published ebooks into a collection (box set) without reformatting everything.

I want to keep the cost of this set to just the collection cover, so I'm not buying Vellum and would prefer not to pay a formatter to reformat three books and a novella. Been thinking I could mash everything together from their existing ePub files myself and throw them onto the D2D ePub validator just to check. 

Reasons why this plan is doomed to failure? Better ideas?

[Post-Crisis D]

Might mess up links, TOC, etc., depending on how the current files are coded.

[Post-Crisis D]

That is, for example, if each book has a link/anchor to "chapter1", "chapter2", etc., you'd have multiple books with links to "chapter1" but clicking on the link to the first chapter would likely always take you to the first chapter of the first book.

[Lynn]

You definitely need to use a tool if you can instead of hand coding it. It'll be a pain. You'll have a lot of duplications that will have to be stripped and changed.

If you're going to do that, you might as well reformat it all in Word (or similar) and spit out a new epub with d2d, Calibre, or some other free conversion tool.

[RPatton]

That is, for example, if each book has a link/anchor to "chapter1", "chapter2", etc., you'd have multiple books with links to "chapter1" but clicking on the link to the first chapter would likely always take you to the first chapter of the first book.

And this is where best practices comes into play.

So, if you have a novel or novella, each chapter should have its own file and it shouldn't be one giant file.

Without actually looking at the epubs you can't say for sure. So, download Sigil and open the epub in Sigil. You should see either a few HTML files or HTML files for each corresponding chapter.

If you have separate files (and really, if you paid for formatting and they put it into a single file, that's just bad practice and I would complain), then the links will be fine because they are tied to the file name.

And while you're in Sigil, you can open up the other epubs and then add the HTML files to that first epub. It's quick and dirty, but Sigil is probably the best tool for taking existing epubs and smooshing them together.

[LilyBLily]

Thanks. I do have Sigil although I’ve never used it.

[TimothyEllis]

Easy enough to do in Word.

Open the first one, save it to a new file name for the bundle.
Remove the backmatter.
Remove the ToC.
Replace the titles with the Bundle names.
Add in a Heading1 for the first book name.
Go to the bottom, add in a Heading1 for the second book
Insert the second book from file.
Remove the front matter and ToC.
Remove the backmatter.
Add the Heading1 for the 3rd book.
Rince and repeat.
On the last book, leave the backmatter intact, but make sure it's up to date.
Recreate a new ToC.
Save and done.

For the paperback version, upload to Draft2Digital, set the book size and other specs you want, then download the desired output file.

Relatively painless. I did this for 4 prequel shorts when creating a paperback version of them. The paperback is better without the ToC imo anyway. Novels generally don't have them.

[LilyBLily]

Thank you for the details of the Word method. I was playing with Sigil and my ePubs earlier and ran into the problem of the backmatter in each book. Crude attempts to remove it led to an invalid ePub. (I do love the D2D validator.) It's too late in my day to try your method, but tomorrow I will.

[LilyBLily]

"Tomorrow" is a loose term for me. I finally got the box set published as of today.

[idontknowyet]

If you put all the files into one word doc, you can use kindle create to format it for free. It's simple and easy to follow and load onto amazon.

[LilyBLily]

The reason I don't put all the files into a Word doc is that I'm trying to preserve the formatting I paid good money for and the typo corrections that were made after the books first were formatted and released. My Word docs aren't final files once those corrections occur.

So I start with epub files, not Word docs. It seems to have worked okay in Calibre to have created a new file starting with multiple epubs and then adding the bonus new story and creating a new TOC.

[LilyBLily]

I'm happy to say that the soft launch I did--only one newsletter ad in FKBT--has resulted in a small profit and best of all, in people buying the later books in the series. 

I've written all sorts of notes for myself so I can do this again for the next three books in the series next year or around Christmas this year. It's only eight months away!

[j tanner]

I'm happy to say that the soft launch I did--only one newsletter ad in FKBT--has resulted in a small profit and best of all, in people buying the later books in the series. 

I've written all sorts of notes for myself so I can do this again for the next three books in the series next year or around Christmas this year. It's only eight months away!

That's not uncommon but you might want to think about Lindsay Buroker's advice NOT to do box sets after the first 3 books in each series for marketing purposes. She says it just costs you money. If you've hooked the reader, they will buy the rest at full price. If you offer them a cheaper option, they don't buy any more, they just buy the same amount for less.

[Cephus]

I'm happy to say that the soft launch I did--only one newsletter ad in FKBT--has resulted in a small profit and best of all, in people buying the later books in the series. 

I've written all sorts of notes for myself so I can do this again for the next three books in the series next year or around Christmas this year. It's only eight months away!

That's not uncommon but you might want to think about Lindsay Buroker's advice NOT to do box sets after the first 3 books in each series for marketing purposes. She says it just costs you money. If you've hooked the reader, they will buy the rest at full price. If you offer them a cheaper option, they don't buy any more, they just buy the same amount for less.

That's why you don't offer box sets until you've given people a chance to buy at full price. If I'm writing a long series, I might get to 6 books, then do a box set of the first three. Once I get farther, I might go back and offer a box set of the first six. That gets people into the series once the beginning book sales are starting to wane, but the new books are always full price.

[TimothyEllis]

That's why you don't offer box sets until you've given people a chance to buy at full price. If I'm writing a long series, I might get to 6 books, then do a box set of the first three. Once I get farther, I might go back and offer a box set of the first six. That gets people into the series once the beginning book sales are starting to wane, but the new books are always full price.

I don't see the point in box sets until the whole series has waned.

And if they never wane, you don't do box sets at all.

[LilyBLily]

The waning happened when Amazon changed how it treated my first in series. Even though I had a couple dozen negative search terms, it ignored them and sent people looking for kink to my sweet closed-door western romance. I had to stop advertising that title, and the series has suffered ever since. By doing the box set, I now can advertise again without using the title of Book 1, which unfortunately now sends the wrong message. Proof that how words are perceived changes over time. 

I will bear in mind the idea that only one compendium is advisable per series.

[Cephus]

That's why you don't offer box sets until you've given people a chance to buy at full price. If I'm writing a long series, I might get to 6 books, then do a box set of the first three. Once I get farther, I might go back and offer a box set of the first six. That gets people into the series once the beginning book sales are starting to wane, but the new books are always full price.

I don't see the point in box sets until the whole series has waned.

And if they never wane, you don't do box sets at all.

Sales for book 1 are naturally going to wane by the time you get to book 10 and newcomers to the series, a lot of them are going to walk away considering the cost of entry to catch up. By providing discounted early books in the series, it gets more people into it and provides higher sales for the full-price books that you're writing now.

[notthatamanda]

I have box sets only on Kobo. It allows me to get into some Kobo promos without dealing with changing the prices everywhere. That's brought a little less than 10% of my income on Kobo overall (I just looked at it).  Books 2 and 3 of my trilogies (first one permafree) are most of the money there.

Just another option if anyone is interested. Kobo does Box set sales. If readers generally buy all your books after trying them (that doesn't happen to me much) that may be a way to get some Kobo readers to notice you.

[TimothyEllis]

Sales for book 1 are naturally going to wane by the time you get to book 10 and newcomers to the series, a lot of them are going to walk away considering the cost of entry to catch up. By providing discounted early books in the series, it gets more people into it and provides higher sales for the full-price books that you're writing now.

I haven't found that to be the case.

There is always drop off as people move down the series, but each new book brings in new readers. This is where KU comes into it's own though, as the cost of binge reading the entire series so far is a lot less.

The trick with long series is having multiple entry points, and some pointers in every book back to the beginning.

Personally, I'm now in favour of a maximum of 9 books in a series, (after which the drop off intensifies), then start another one which is either a sequel, or a spin off. The latter are good because you can origin a new character, and point back to the first series at the same time. Another 9 books, and you spin off again.

That's the theory though. I'm doing trilogies at the moment for series 6 and 7. And the book I'm writing now has a solid tie back to series 2.