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SFA 090 – Going Wide with Audiobooks, Reader Magnets, and Improving Boxed Set Sales

For this week’s show, Jo and Lindsay talk a bit about Lindsay’s recent epic fantasy launch, Jo’s plans for his upcoming launch, and then jump into a big pile of listener questions from the Six Figure Authors Facebook group.

Here are the specific questions that they answer:

  • Andy: I love all your thoughts on reader magnets. If someone plans on writing three books and rapid releasing them, does it make sense to offer up the first entire book for free as a reader magnet to build a newsletter pre launch, to lead people into the second and third books?
  • J. Elizabeth: I would love to hear about any experience with going wide on audio. I’m about to publish book 3 in my fantasy series and have pretty much decided to use Voices Share Plus from Findaway Voices instead of ACX. That way, my narrator gets a nice upfront payment, and I don’t have to worry about exclusivity. It’s weird doing it mid-series, I know, but I figured I have 4 and 6 years to wait out the ACX exclusivity, and I don’t want to add to that for the series by putting another one in that category. I guess I was wondering if Chirp deals are hard to get or worth it if only the third (and later fourth and maybe fifth) audio books are wide.
  • K. Vale: I’d love to hear about boxed sets. I’m getting book 6 of a 9 book series out, and I released the first three books boxed set…. to sort of crickets. When it gets a Kobo promotion, it sells, and it had a little Google Play success, but I’m wondering if I’m doing something wrong. Since the series will be about nine books, I thought I’d do three 3-book boxed sets. But since going wide, book 1 is free, book 2 is discounted to $2.99, and book 3 has the normal price of $4.99. So $7.98 if you ‘buy’ all three normally, and I put the boxed set price at $6.99. Here’s what I’m thinking of trying, so you can tell me if I’m wrong =] Mostly, I want to know how you handle wide and KU boxed sets. 1. Reduce the price to $5.99. Sure, that’s just a dollar more than book 3’s price, but things are already wonky with this first boxed set. 2. Change it to a 4 (or 5?) book boxed set and make the price $9.99. That way, it’s now a savings of about $3 over buying the first four books and I make more overall. I could even add in the short story collection to the first boxed set so it feels like two 5-book boxed sets when the series is finished (1-4 + short stories, then 5-9). And if I do this, do I update the old boxed set or do I delist it and make a new entry? 3. Cry What do you think?
  • Rick D: Can you do a perma-free book 1 on Amazon if you’re Amazon exclusive? AND Laxmi: Permafree first in series, for a series in Kindle Unlimited, any chance to delve into the positives/negatives of this in a future episode?
  • Machelle: There was some recent drama among a couple of romance authors showing a case of one author plagiarizing another author. In the time you all have been published have you had some personal experience with or been aware of legitimate plagiarizing and what should new authors be aware of in this regard? [see: Jo’s blog post on his experience with someone plagiarizing his series]
  • Lina: I may have missed an episode on your show on how to gain newsletter subscribers, but I’ve listened to several other people and I’m still not clear on how to garner interest. I have 10 published books and I’ve been really lax on doing this.

That’s it for this week. Thank you for listening, and thank you to Joshua Pearson for producing the show!

Six Figure Authors
Six Figure Authors
SFA 090 - Going Wide with Audiobooks, Reader Magnets, and Improving Boxed Set Sales
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