So you already have your single books out on the market and now you've heard about bundles. Learn how you can bundle your books so that you can make a killing with book bundles!
Today's article has three points and you're going to want to stick around for the third point. Because it is a secret as to a combination of three things that make bundles so profitable.
When you're first getting started and you're an author, you only really are just working on your very first book but then you finish it and it's exciting. You start selling that book and it's wonderful. Now, what's the next step?
Well, you write another book. Ideally, if you're following this blog or my Youtube channel daily, you will know that you need to write the next book on the same thing you wrote the first book on. If you're writing like Harry Potter, well you're going to write the next book in that story.
Because we're building readers and an audience in one niche or genre if you prefer. But it's focusing on one thing for which you're delivering value to people. That's why it's also important to choose something that you're interested in, that you can keep on producing over time.
That's something you need to consider. But when we come out with that second book, something magical happens. It is that we now have 2 books in the same genre for the same niche.
They can be combined together. You may have heard of book bundling, this idea of combining books that you've already written together to create new products. But you're wondering, what do I need to do in order to do that?
Am I allowed to do that since it contains the contents of the very first book that you put on the market? Well, that is what we are going to explore in today's article.
But before we get into the answers, you can just grab a copy of my free Self-Publishing Checklist. To make sure that you're not skipping any of the steps necessary to write books that are going to both draws an audience to get you through the process and also start making sales on those books.
From my own story, when I first got started, I heard about the bundling of books. I had originally seen I think it was Steve Scott. He was one of the first people I saw where he took three of his books and he put them together.
Then I noticed something which is that if you buy the bundle, you get a discount. Because then, you don't have to pay if you add together the costs of those three books. It's more than you would pay if you get it as a bundle and that starts screwing with my head.
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I realize, wait for a second, I should buy this book. But then when I started having multiple books out, I started playing around with bundles. What if you bundled these two books?
What we do is find a title that is in common. Now, I made some mistakes on this whole bundling thing. But too long in Norway outside the United States, my English starts to fall apart.
But as I started bundling them together, you'd find two things. For example, my book on Habits and my book on Sleeping which again I violated the rule of sticking in the same genre. Then we have Sleeping Habits, do you see how this game goes?
But whatever the case is, you simply are combining your books. In a way that is going to resonate with your readers. Then they look at it and they go "I definitely should possibly maybe get multiples if I already like this author".
Maybe the bundle is a better way so I started playing around. Then I began to understand that I do not do any new books until the old books are bundled and on sale. I used Jutoh to do it which is what I use for all of my formattings.
You can check out below the description of all of my Youtube videos and see my affiliate link for Jutoh. And if you need help getting going on that, I also have my Formatting Course. It will help bring you to get up to speed on using this amazing tool to put your books together into bundles.
Jutoh Is The Right Tool
Because you first have your books formatted correctly, it's easy just to pull those projects in together, and then we've got our bundle. I have a special module dedicated to that as well. To make sure that it's done super easy with Jutoh.
I've had too many viewers comment that "you talk about this but how exactly do we do it?". Well, I created a course that you'd be able to just check that out. You can then easily figure this out and get moving along with your formatting.
But the thing is the perceived value of the bundle and this is something I thought was very very interesting. That the bundles will bring in many times more money.
Because we see that the bundles don't cost you, you need to make sure that if you have two books together, that bundle is cheaper than the individual two books by themselves. We'll cover the secret tips on that but it'll be at least $1 for each additional bundle.
Then we raise the price for every six sales we make and we drop to the base price after 90 days if we don't get any sales. It is just that easy with regards to our bundles and our regular books but especially the bundles as well. So that's the main strategy.
I started noticing these bundles selling better than my individual books. And that made me realize that this was a lost opportunity but I want to get into it. I'm almost too eager to break into exactly why this matters.
Because there are a couple of things here that you may not have considered with regards to the bundles. Here comes, how do we make a killing with book bundles! The answer is we're going to build a pyramid.
Let's just say you have 4 books, now you might be thinking we already talked about Book 1 and Book 2 in your series or on your same topic. Let's say they were Diet books or Puppy Training or whatever it might be. We put those together and we form a bundle.
Then we have the next two that we come out with Books 3 and 4. We're going to bundle those together using Jutoh as I mentioned, then we now have two bundles. So if somebody had already started reading books and they love it, "oh I love your Book 1", then they might go and purchase Book 2 by itself because that would still be cheaper than the bundle.\
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Then they would purchase your bundle for Books 3 and 4. But here's where the magic comes in if you take those four books right and we bundle them together. Also, what does that mean? We have Books 1, 2, 3, and 4.
Then we have 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and then 1, 2, 3, 4. So that gives us a total of seven books in our bundle which is absolutely fantastic. Because that means you wrote four books and we have seven different books.
We're able to put it out there. What do we mean by books? Well, it's a combination of the other ones but this is a crazy powerful way to take your existing books and make even more money out of them. Maybe more than you would on the individual ones.
Then the key is setting the price right. You're going to set the price on each additional book. Now, if you've been watching my channel long enough, you know I give the base prices for your Amazon books.
You should be making $2 apiece on your Kindle books and your paperbacks, you should be making a $5 profit. So that is non-negotiable, that is the starting point we need to work at.
Then every time we add one more book, one more manuscript to the bundle, we're simply going to raise the selling price by $1. And all the prices in 99 cents. So if we have a book that's $11.99 as a base price when you bundle it, it's $12.99.
Secrets To Winning
But you have to make sure that if you bundle it but on the paperbacks, we want an additional $1 profit. I would say there was one little adjustment to this. That's with Kindle books since they don't raise the price that doesn't cost you anything more.
So for paperbacks, that would mean your profit should be $6, and then your profit should be $7. The reason is that as we bundle these books together, they're getting fatter. Our profit is going down with that so we have to cover the additional costs associated with that.
But that would be it, so the bundle would be six. Then the other thing like I mentioned before is every time you get six sales on that book within these 90 days, we're just going to raise the price by a dollar. We get six sales and we raise the price by a dollar.
We get another six sales and we raise the price by a dollar, we do not raise the price more than once a day. I have seen people do this and Amazon has taken half their royalties for the month. They made $40,000 in one month off of royalties.
They were just jumping the price on their books every day, multiple times a day. This will cause them to threaten your account. So do not do that but once a day is acceptable.
The other reason why this is a strategy sometimes used is that if you raise the prices, there's a delay between when they change the prices on Amazon and when the prices were raised on your end. They will pay you at a higher rate even though they're still showing it and selling them at a lower rate.
But this will get you in trouble if you do it more than once a day. Even though they could just stop it with their computers, Amazon does a lot of crazy stuff. You will never find me complaining about Amazon because if it weren't for Amazon, I never would have gotten started, and maybe you wouldn't either.
I am very appreciative. They control the rules, we follow their rules and we pay attention to what is getting people in trouble. But at the same time, we're not doing stupid stuff by not selling stuff and not trying to push sales, and not trying to increase prices.
We want to stay on track. You need to listen to me on this one, I'm trying to make it as simple as possible. Hopefully, this is understandable to you but let's get into what I consider.
One of my favorite themes and it's the third point, our secret point of the day. Here it comes, the secret is the key to winning is the maximum number of products, that's the first thing. As we mentioned, your four books are turned into seven different products in the maximum number of channels.
We're going to take those seven and we're going to run them through Amazon, Kindle, the print, and audiobook. We're going to run it through Ingram Spark, Smashwords, and Lulu for hardbacks. All of these in the maximum number of formats, we're going to have in reality, two paperback versions.
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Maybe for three eBook versions, Smashwords, Ingram Spark, and Kindle. One hardback on Lulu, and two paperbacks on KDP Print. And on your Ingram Spark Print, by the way, the cool thing that they have is that Kindle now, they don't need the Mobi format.
They prefer the EPUB which means you can use the same thing. You're going to be able to easily get through Jutoh assuming you're using a good piece of software to generate these EPUBs. As you're using this particular program, you're going to be able to use your EPUBs on your Amazon Kindle.
You're going to use it on Smashwords and Ingram Spark. The exact same file type, you don't need to change a thing. If you're listening to anything I'm saying, I'm telling you all the secrets. People charge thousands of dollars to do exactly this.
I'm just giving it away so I hope you appreciate it. But let's move on to the final thing, how to make a killing with book bundles! Have you started using bundles?
If you have not, write "No" below in the comments, and if you have, write "Yes" below in the comments. Check out my other articles and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.