My first experience contributing to a boxset! Part 2 | #amwriting #indieauthor #boxset #anthology

October 2020

Hi Readers,

I’m a contributing author in the Soul’s Day Boxset that releases later this month on 10/20/2020! This is part II in a series of articles about my first experience contributing to a boxset.

What are the pros and cons to multi-author boxsets?

Pros:

~ Companionship. Writing is a solo activity. There may be co-authors, editors and beta readers ready to write with you, edit your words or read the story you create. All of these people on your team can provide valuable feedback and encouragement. The majority of the time, however, writers spend countless hours writing alone. That loneliness is minimized when you are part of a multi-author boxset. While you are still drafting your story on your own, there is a group of other authors doing the same thing at the same time. Typically, there will be a Facebook group where all contributing authors can meet and share information. This online meeting place can be a source of companionship, feedback and encouragement while writing your story.

~ A group effort. Book Marketing as a group of six to twenty authors is very different from marketing your book by yourself. When everyone is expected to do it, it might not feel as new, strange or weird to self promote your upcoming book release often and in various ways. Early on, we shared all of our websites and social media links with each others. The bookish giveaways we organized encouraged more readers to follow us online. Our followers, online presences and reach grew each month. When one of us wrote a blog post or tweeted about our boxset, there were over 10 other authors able to like, comment and share the post to increase its visibility. This feels a lot better than writing a post that just sits there unacknowledged by others until it sinks fast on other people’s news feed.

Cons:

~ Unequal effort. Like with any group project, you run the risk of some people putting in more effort than others. Everyone is excited and energized in the beginning but some people might disappear along the way. I’m not sure which is worst, if someone fades away without officially dropping out or if someone shows up during release month ready to work a little to enjoy the fruits of other people’s labor.

~ Out of your comfort zone. You might be assigned marketing tasks that you don’t feel comfortable doing because you’ve never done them before. In my experience, all the contributing authors were taught all of the book marketing tasks and then asked which ones they would prefer doing. Everyone ended up with their first or second choice. I was introduced to some book marketing techniques that I never knew about which include better use of Bookbub, Goodreads, blog hops and book tours. As someone disenchanted with social media, the idea of posting about my upcoming book regularly on Facebook was not something that I was comfortable doing at first. Now, I’ve gotten pretty good at attention-grabbing social media posts.

What are some early planning phases?

Soul’s Day Boxset is a list-aiming boxset meaning we are trying to sell well over 5,000 copies of our book (ebook) across multiple bookstores (digital bookstores) in the hopes of landing on the USA Today Best Books Selling List. There are other best selling book lists like The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Barnes & Noble and Amazon and they all have different criteria. Because we are aiming to sell an incredible amount of books, we have strategically priced our boxset at $0.99 for the promotional period leading up to release day on 10/20/2020.

Please note that some boxsets are free and aim to draw new readers to up-and-coming authors while other boxsets are for profit and priced at $2.99 or more.

For six months, the other contributing authors and I have been executing our book marketing plan. Our strategy included creating a landing page, social media accounts, and giveaways for our boxset. As a group, we also reached out to book bloggers that enjoy horror, paranormal, supernatural, and fantasy books in order to coordinate cover reveals, blog posts, book tours and bookish giveaways celebrating our book and maintaining our book buzz.

As you can imagine, there are 101 other book marketing techniques that we’re executing as well including ARC giveaways and paid advertising.

Soul’s Day Boxset: Horror and Paranormal Halloween Anthology

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This concludes part II of My First Experience Contributing to a Boxset. You can look back at part I HERE. I hope you find this information insightful. Stay tuned for part III next week! My boxset is priced at only $0.99 for a limited time and releases on 10/20/2020.

Best Wishes,
Azaaa Davis