More on Series - Clumping

In our modern day of publishing, most small publishers and independent writers first release their books in ebook format. Sell those for a year or two, then maybe put them out in paperback. If a book in a series is short, say the 50K words indicated as the sweet spot for middle-grade to low young adult, the printed books are slender. My three printed books in the Witches of Galdorheim series are each around 150 pages each. I have to sell them for $7.99, which is a really good price for a paperback these days.

But, I said to myself, "Self, if you clump all three books into a single volume, it will not only rival the length of a Harry Potter book, but you can sell it for less per book and still make a small profit."

Sometimes, I listen to myself, so I'm in the midst of stuffing Bad Spelling, Midnight Oil, and Scotch Broom into one volume. I also threw in Spellslinger, my standalone short story about Rune the boy warlock/vampire.

The whole thing is 446 pages, which makes for more than an inch of spine width. I can only hope the CreateSpace production facilities make a sturdy spine for a book that size. Lots of books of similar heft are produced by CreateSpace, thus I feel fairly confident the trilogy (plus one short) will not disintegrate in the buyer's hands. That would be a bad thing.

Here's my suggestion for series writers: Can you stuff your entire series into a single volume? Probably not so well if you're writing 100K word weighty tomes. But you could put an entire series into ebook format and it wouldn't weigh any more than one book. That's a nice feature of ebooks. Easy to tote around.

My ebook publisher, MuseItUp, could combine the three books of the series into a single volume or even offer the three individual books as an Author Bundle. Oh, look, MuseItUp IS OFFERING author bundles at a reduced price. Not my series yet, but maybe soon.

In the meantime, I'll be bringing my own bundle to print in a single book. I'm thinking to offer it for $15.95. That gets the buyer three books for the price of one. Such a deal!

I'll let you know when that happens. I'm still working on the picky details, but here's my current draft of the new book cover for the series. This is the cover preview from CreateSpace. I did the front and back covers and let CS add the spine. It's such a pain to get the spine verbiage in the right place, I'm glad they'll do it for me AND add the barcode when I'm ready to finalize.

If you'd like to buy the books individually in either ebook or print format, they're all available on Amazon. The ebooks are also available at my publisher's on-line store. My author page doesn't reflect all of the ebooks I have at MuseItUp, so I won't bother with my link.