Boxed Sets - A Great Deal For Readers

One of the great things about ePublishing is the way you can easily generate boxed sets.  Boxed sets tend not to sell well when it comes to traditional paperbacks, but they are a terrific way of selling eBooks and eBook short stories.

I've recently put up two boxed sets.  There's an Inspector Zhang boxed set which contains four short stories featuring my Singaporian detective Inspector Zhang and his faithful assistant Sergeant Lee.

You can buy it in the UK  HERE

And in the US   HERE

And I've also put together a collection of three of my Asian Heat erotic short stories in one boxed set.

You can buy it in the UK  HERE

And in the US  HERE

So why do boxed sets work?  For the reader, they are a way of picking up a number of stories at a price lower than buying them individually.

But because of the way that Amazon pays royalties, a writer can make more money despite selling the books cheaper as a boxed set.

The reason is simple. If you price a book at below $2.99, Amazon pay you a royalty rate of 35 per cent. If you price the book at above $2.99, you receive 70 per cent of the selling price.

So take the Inspector Zhang boxed set for instance. The price of the individual stories is 99 cents.  If I sell four at that price, the reader pays $3.96 and I get about $1.30.

But I sell the boxed set for $2.99.  And I get $2.09.

So the reader pays less and the writer gets more. It's a win-win situation!

How easy are boxed sets to put together?

Very easy.  It's helpful to have a functioning index at the front.  And you need a cover that shows that it's a boxed set.

I use Brandi Doane for my boxed set cover designs. She's really good and charges $200 for a 3D cover. You can visit her website  HERE

It's worth remembering that Smashwords won't allow you to use 3D covers on their site so you'll need flat covers for Smashwords.  Brandi did those for me, too. Here's the one she did for the Asian Heat boxed sets.

So, if you're a self-published writer it's worth considering putting your work together in boxed sets.

I'm also hoping that my publisher, Hodder and Stoughton, will put together boxed sets of the books of mine that they publish. I'll keep you posted!

My New Erotic Short Story

I've just finished writing my new Jack Nightingale supernatural novel, Nightshade, which should be in the shops next April.  As always when I get to the end of a novel my creative juices are flowing so I immediately sat down and wrote a short story which I've just published as an eBook.  Called The Threesome it's about a man who longs for a threesome with his wife and another girl, and what happens to his life when he gets his wish.  I had fun writing it!

I often get asked about writers block - I think the trick is always to have several projects on the go, like short stories, so that if you dry up on your main work you can switch over to something else for a day or two.  I have at least three more short stories on the backburner, and on the rare occasions that I dry up I get stuck into them!

You can buy it HERE in the US.

And HERE in the UK.